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| | Jellyfish wins Royal Television Society Award FOR “Fight for Life”
Jellyfish Pictures create “ground breaking graphics” for BBC / DCTP / DISCOVERY for BBC1 series.
The Royal Television society has awarded the award for best digital
effects to Jellyfish Pictures for “Fight For Life” at the awards
ceremony at the Savoy in London on 29th November 2007.
The judges thought
“With impressive execution and seamless integration, the success of the
programme relied on the believability of the digital effects. A truly
intense visual experience.”
When faced with life threatening illness and injury humans all share one overwhelming instinct: the Fight for Life.
In this six-part series for BBC One the dramatic story of how the human
body triumphs in crisis needed to be told from the inside as well as
the outside. Real life stories from patients in A&E and operating
theatres will be fused with incredible computer generated imagery (CGI)
revealing - for very the first time - the fight from the inside.
With 250 shots across six episodes this will be a major visual effects
series. CGI recreations include how a heart attack would look from the
inside, a baby struggling for life in the womb, and a journey even
deeper into the body to see how the human immune system fights against
deadly invaders.
Fight for Life celebrates the human body’s amazing ability to join forces with modern medicine in its fight for life.
Jellyfish Pictures were asked to meet the challenging task of telling
the story inside the body with ground breaking CGi work. They were
selected for the innovative way they made the inside of the body look
absolutely real, from babies struggling in the womb to nerve and cell
activity deep down at microscopic level. This all had to work with the
fast paced real life stories being told.
The brief was to make it seem as if somehow an endoscopic camera was
actually deep inside recording what the body was going through in its
Fight for Life.
There were three aspects to the required work: Firstly photo real body
interior shots of organs, bones and babies; secondly microscopic shots
showing the intimate workings of our smallest cells and the mechanisms
that maintain and regenerate life; and thirdly X-ray “trauma vision”
style shots showing in a unique and transparent way how our body deals
with trauma, how it recovers and how medicine helps it to recover.
Jellyfish visual effects supervisor and director Philip Dobree created
a team made up of in house specialists and an international selection
of lighting TDs, animators, modellers and compositors that were all
specialists in their field. By using the very best artists and
technicians Jellyfish have been able to make a unique vision of the
inside workings of the human body. Jellyfish were striving to bring
film levels of rendering, lighting and visceral animation to broadcast
TV. Marco Iozzi led the lighting and rendering team. Using experience
gained from working on many visual effects films the team were able to
bring a new level of quality to a broadcast production.
A combination of leading software and technology was used to produce
250 shots for the series of six episodes. A combination of techniques
and approaches were tried and tested in order to come up with the very
best methods for achieving their goal. Hi speed video was used to
capture elements of condensation, particles, splats, smears, and
bubbles to help the compositors add extra real elements into their
shots. Simulation software was used to re-create liquid effects, and
multiple render passes and elements meant that the compositors had
maximum flexibility in creating the desired look without the need to go
back and re-render.
Software used was Softimage XSI, Apple Shake, Adobe After Effects, PF track, Real Flow, Adobe Photoshop.
The rendering was done in Mental Ray using up to 20 passes that were
composited in Shake typically these included: lighting (RGB), multiple
beauty, colour, Final Gathering, ambient occlusion, reflection, sub
surface scattering, specular, depth of field, vector and incidence.
Complete models were created of the whole human body and all the
internal organs, circulation, muscles, skeleton, nerves, skin, brain
etc. This was then adapted and rigged across for all body ages, sexes
and types from pregnant women to babies in the womb. The X-ray “trauma
vision” look shows all the internal workings of the body in wide shots
and therefore it needed all these body types.
The Jellyfish Pictures team:
Supervisor: Philip Dobree
Marco Iozzi (lead lighting and rendering TD), Matt Chandler (lead
lighting and texturing – microscopic world), Jayson King (lead
animator), Antonio Mossucca (modelling, lighting, rendering),
Sam Howell, Katrina De Graaff, Gemma Thomson, Conal Wenn, Didier
Muanza, Mark Docherty, Howard Bell, Matt Johnstone, David Feullaitre,
(animation)
Sam Meisels, Ben Perrott, Dave Griffiths, Arthur Broome, Dom Halford (compositing)
A BBC / DCTP/ Discovery Channel co-production
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