The second edition of the VFX and More (VAM) Summit organised by Animation Xpress India, witnessed an interesting presentation by The Mill: Creating the Extraordinary. The panel members included The Mill executive producer Indraneel Guha and the head of creative Ariele Podreider Lenzi.
Guha presented the history and growth journey of The Mill. He shared, “The Mill is a world-class creative studio renowned for its pioneering visual imagination and pixel-perfect craft. We are specialists in ideation partnering with agencies and brands to deliver across all the media. We are designers, artists, developers, directors, producers, coders, animators, doers, makers, runners all sharing the same ambition of creating memorable experiences.”
He further added, “We are a global studio with global footprints across three continents Asia, Europe, America. We are a global team of 600 and growing. We were the first UK VFX company to win Oscar and have gone on to be awarded 1000 times.”
The panelists shared the making of the Pepsi trailer The Call for the Pepsi Super bowl 56 which featured five hip-hop legends and Verizon‘s 5G ultra wideband advert which used intensive VFX to develop a fully photoreal game-like alternate universe. They also answered audience questions related to Virtual Production.
Sharing the working experience on Verizon‘s 5G advert, Lenzi added, “We worked on Verizon‘s 5G ultra wideband advert which used intensive VFX to develop a fully photoreal game-like alternate universe. Our teams collaborated from our offices in New York and Bangalore to create the several CG assets used and then render composite them all together into the finished film.”
The panelists shared various insights on how the VFX industry is evolving and how The Mill believes in creating high-quality content with a memorable experience.
In another interesting presentation at VAM Summit 2022, MPC: Beyond Imagination session, the MPC supervisor compositing Wineeth Wilson showcased the VFX breakdown of Disney’s Cruella series.
Sharing the working experience on the show, Wilson shared, “For the Cruella series, we had to deliver about 1150 shots, and we have delivered about 90 per cent of compositing shots from Bangalore. The positive sign of the show was that the VFX supervisor and director were in good sync and knew what has to be delivered on the show. This made the workflow much easier for us.”
He also shared how the post-production team researched to develop the movie from the scratch. Wilson added, “We had a rough idea about the scope of work and how the movie is going to look like and our post team had done a good research on environment, people, costumes and lifestyle at that time. This research helped us to have a strong foundation on getting a look for all the sequences in the movie.”
Wilson played the VFX breakdown video where he demonstrated every step of environment creation, creating digital assets, character design, lighting, compositing, and rendering.
Talking about the set creation and environment, he revealed, “We had a good amount of set and environment creations. We had eight digital dog characters, crowds, and supporting characters. We created digital props and when we received the live-action footages, we distributed them to respective departments. We met every deadline by working from home. The virtual workstations helped us to deliver our project at the right time.”
Both the sessions provided an opportunity for the audience to witness the behind scenes of VFX making. The Mill and MPC sure are creating wonders and delivering a memorable experience.