HP: The Hacker

London

The call

Off to London

In 2014, I got a call from Andy Hill of GB-Films to work on a new project. About halfway through the call, I learned two things, that I was about to supervise the highest paying job I had gotten to date, and that I was going to do it in London. I was so excited I almost soiled my pants on the spot.

The Shoot

Many, many shots

As the shoot began, I quickly learned two more things. I had over 50 fairly difficult shots to knock out, and that I loved the film crew in London. While In London I began prepping a crew of 8 CG artists back in San Francisco. All while getting in my share of pints....

Production/Edit

A fairly tough shot...

One of the shots we had to make was a shot in which we are looking through a screen at a hacker, the camera falls away, flips around, flies into a digital landscape and locks up with a building used in our location. My biz partner Geoff Hecht worked tirelessly to get this together. He created the layout, animated the camera, (based off of a matchmove I created at both ends of the shot) and set up many render layers so that I was able to to comp it all together. That shot would not have been possible with out him.

Production/Edit

More CGI with a sprinkle of Character work

We then began to concentrate on the hero of the show. Our character was to be a metaphor for the hack stopping software known as Digital Defender. It required a careful match animation of a digital double. I created animated layers of java script, and passed this on to Sam Hedberg. Once the shaders were ready, our Tech Animators Guillem Ruiz, and Gwendolyn Dane helped match the actors subtle movements. We had a 2 week turnaround and the limits of 2014 software, paired with our hacked together render farm did not make it easy on us. Once rendered, Keith Tonini and I went to work roto-ing away the extra bits the would not line up, and then comped it all up.

Last Day on set

Before I left London, I snuck away for about 8 hours, and wandered along the Thames, sampling a pint at every pub I happened to come across, snapping pics with my Sony, and eating fish and chips out of newspaper like a pro. I learned 3 things from that 8 hours. 1) I loved London. 2) Lorries are goddamn expensive. 3) Never sit on the upper deck of a double decker bus with 16 pints of beer in the belly. The client liked this so much, they commissioned a part 2...for their "Fortify" product