santoroland

: Geostorm

Oct 29, 2017

Geostorm satellite shot from film.

Geostorm was an odd little gig. I think, officially, it was my first role as compositing supervisor at Framestore. I mean, on the books, with the title and seat in the production office and all that jazz. Trouble was, I had booked a sabbatical before being placed in the new position. I had planned and was preparing to switch my life up a bit and hike the Appalachian Trail.

So, with six months to departure, I worked with Christian Kaestner to help setup the show. Started learning some basic production design. What took a lot of my time was helping Christian revamp the quicktime generation process for the studio to be more in line with our current global multisite workflows. As a side project I connected with the earth environment lead Didier Muenza(https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2136731/) to construct a nuke->Terragen->fLight workflow. We wanted to improve of the earth rendering workflow from that was used on Gravity. Because, while that setup produced amazing images, it was a difficult and slow process for the artists to generate all the materials/assets before even an initial render could be generated. This projected turned out to be fairly intense. We spent several months working on building a nuke setup/dmp workflow that would create some pretty earths (relatively quickly compared to full Arnold renders) for temps and layout. These earths could then get layout approvals through temp screenings, and then all the assets could be broken our for full cloud and atmosphere generation and earth maps to be final painted over per shot, and rendered through Arnold.

After six months was up, I handed the reigns over to Jeremie Lodomez who did all the heavy lifting and team leadership for the actual shot production. I think the studio finished about 300 shots for the film between London and Montreal (was this a Montreal only production?!). It was an impressive bit of work they created.

Last odd thing about the film, was how long it was in post production. I worked on the film for six months BEFORE going on sabbatical, and it was in a gray production zone for the next 1.5years after I returned! From my point of view, this film was in the studio for about two years from start to finish!! Few! But most of the delay between reshoots rather than the work taking two actual years to complete.

Also I got to lookdev the space laser!!!! Which might have been one of the most fun tasks in my career. Come on. Space Lasers! Can’t even read that without smiling a bit;)

Because of the large number of shots in the film, and my negligible contribution to the final images, I’ve only gathered a small selection of what I think are beautiful CG imagery from the movie. Please enjoy the work of so many talented folks at Framestore!



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