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Scope of Work

Lighting, compositing and final completion of several key and non-key shots. Special setup and completion of many one-off shots.

Tasks of note

Worked on several pre-race and race shots on the Indy 500 track. A shot of particular complexity had a panoramic camera move from one side of the track to the other introducing two star drivers. It had thousands of crowd characters in the stands and hundreds of them walking around the drivers on the racetrack. Since there was no key art for the shot, I had the freedom to design the lighting and look of the scene.

Challenges

The racing shots had to all have very high motion blur. This could cause several rendering artifacts related to shadow density, transparency (reduced alpha), and frame edge pops in stereo, among others. Sometimes these had to be resolved with manual cheats through tracking during compositing.

The crowd setup was very complex with differing levels of detail based on distance from camera. At the highest level of detail, they were at full geometry resolution and at the lowest, they were represented using 2D cards. Layering them in the right order could be sometimes challenging when characters moved between regions.

Fun Fact

I had the honor of lighting the only female driver in the race - "Shelby Stone". While recording crowd voices for the film, I cheered for her.

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