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Lucien Harriot is visual-effects director at New York-based design house Mechanism Digital—a cutting-edge East Coast facility producing effects and motion-graphics solutions for a client list that includes HBO’s Entourage, Casio, Duracell, Prudential, The Discovery Channel, MSNBC, and Tide. Harriot discusses the transforming of digital technologies for today’s content creators with Craig Erpelding. For more on Harriot, visit Mechanism Digital’s Reel-Exchange profile.

CE: With the rapid advance of technology, paired with the broadening of creative concepts that Mechanism produces, what tools to you find most supportive to execute such out-of-the-box ideas?

LH: We enjoy using new technologies in ways they were not originally intended. For example, 3D matchmoving is the process of analyzing live-action footage, extract a moving camera's position, and integrating additional elements seamlessly by matching their spatial position/motion to 2D live-action footage for compositing. Several software options have been around for a few years (probably 10 or more), but the recent advancements have made these tools much more robust and reliable. The packages we most often use are Boujou 2.3.1.from 2d3 and SynthEyes version 2007.5.1019 from Andersson Technologies on our workstations running AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 processors at 2.82GHz with 4GB of RAM running Windows XP Pro x64. Different software packages can be more or less successful at tracking different types of shots so it’s good to have a couple of options and choose the best "solve" on a per shot basis.

Now to the fun stuff. The process has become such an important part of our workflow, we often use camera-matching tools for projects which don't utilize any live-action footage. Completely CG shots we create for networks and spots can look too steady or digital without any camera "life," and 3D animated cameras tend to move rather mechanically as opposed to the natural human view, which is always moving subtly to some extent. One of our secret ingredients is to add a touch of real camera motion to static graphics with the aid of a handheld DV camera. We use a consumer camcorder and transfer only the motion over for some "real feel." The natural motion has a surprising impact on the aesthetic of the final product. You can get a nice parallax effect when there are several layers of depth in a scene. This is particularly effective in 3D scenes created in Autodesk Maya or 2.5 multiplane effects using Adobe After Effects CS3. This process was utilized in a recent promo for Juno on Cinemax.

CE:Is there a visual concept you wished you could create, but technology has yet to provide the path?

LH: Another related technology to matchmoving is extracting 3D models from the many points used to calculate the camera position. Theoretically, once we know the location of these points in space, we can create 3D geometry of the objects using the same (or more) track points. This technology exists, but is in its infancy compared to what we imagine the future could bring. Imagine walking around with a video camera and capturing everything in your room in realtime. Virtually painting the world into your computer then being able to fly through the 3D models as you would in a video game. Currently, laser scanning captures the highest-quality information to produce 3D geometry, but scanning can be very expensive, cumbersome, and costly to post-process the huge amounts of data (days of labor and processing for a simple scene).

After years of struggling with scanner data, in 2001, Mechanism partnered with a few very smart people and co-founded Brainstorm Technology (www.brainstormllc.com) to develop a better solution to bringing the real world into 3D. We started by creating tools to manage scanner data but quickly realized we should be working with 2D footage as scanners were not common and the quality of digital imagery is increasing at an amazing pace. Brainstorm is currently developing a plug-in for Google SketchUp which will cost a few hundred bucks as a user-assisted tool for creating geometry from images while we continue our R&D and get closer to realizing the ultimate goal of being able to capture 3D with textures quickly from video which will not only revolutionize the 3D animation and gaming industry but even allow consumers to walk through their vacation years later by processing their video and photos into 3D scenes.

CE: As a digital content creator, what difficulties, if any, do you see over the next year?

LH: I hear some companies complaining the economy's downturn has resulted in reduced industry budgets for 3D effects, but we haven’t felt it yet. In general, we haven't found that budgets are getting less as much as the audience and client's expectations are more demanding without the budgets growing. Granted, hardware is getting faster and software is getting smarter, but it still takes a well-trained, well-paid artist/technician to make it look good—but the necessary number of labor hours to make the audience believe has probably increased. I believe as a smaller studio of only 20 artists and low overhead, we have been able to work efficiently and put more dollars on the screen than some of the other big houses. Funny, I think we are getting a little busier since the stock market dip. Looking at the big picture, I think the economic crisis is going to stifle technology a bit as the software and hardware manufacturers will probably cut back on their R&D budgets which means we'll have fewer toys to play within the next year or two. Let’s hope the economy comes back quickly so we can play with new technology—especially in ways it wasn't intended to be used.

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