For Haeundae, South Korea’s first large scale disaster film, Polygon Entertainment assembled a team of filmmaking and visual effects specialists to realise massive tsnumai waves and daring water rescues. Polygon founder and CEO Hans Uhlig and visual effects producer Jeff Olson talk to fxguide about the challenges of setting up a new studio that offers an entire filmmaking experience.
fxg: Can you tell me how Polygon was established?
Uhlig: I started my visual effects career in Germany, and came to ILM and then The Orphanage, eventually becoming a CG supervisor. In 2007 I decided to create a company called Polygon Entertainment. We started with two people and now have 45. What we set out to do was establish a film production company – not just a visual effects studio – that could also accommodate live action shooting, sequence production, greenscreen and location work. We moved into ILM’s old premises in San Rafael which already had the right sound stages, model shop and production offices.
fxg: How did Polygon come to be working on Haeundae?
Uhlig: I was lucky to get involved with the South Korean film industry. For our first project, Chaw, we provided an animatronic boar – a real physical prop – and a CG boar to match it. Then for Haeundae, the director (Je-gyun Yun) wanted to make a spectacular disaster movie with high quality visual effects. We were able to come up with a way of offering Hollywood-style sequence production here and visual effects extremely efficiently.
fxg: Can you talk about what was shot on set in San Rafael for the film?
Olson: Two of the big sequences in the movie were shot on Kerner Studio’s lot which is adjacent to our offices. They were conceived and directed by Hans as the second unit director. One was a night scene in the ocean where they were rescuing people from a fishing boat. We had a 60-foot diameter water tank with dump tanks and wave makers. We designed it so they would only need a dozen visual effects to tell the story in a 50 or 60 shot sequence. Then there were flooded hotel room and hallway sequences shot on the backlot with the water tanks. It was quite economical for the production to get that sequence done in that way.
fxg: What was involved in creating the CG water?
Uhlig: To start with, we created Polygon Visual Effects, a sister company to Polygon Entertainment. I had worked on The Perfect Storm and Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow, so I have a fair amount of experience with CG water. I hired a former programmer from ILM – Erik Krumrey. He was part of the development team at Arete and then was developing the water pipeline at ILM. I hired him to write our own plugin for Maya. It has fantastic fluid dynamics and controls that let you pretty much create any water found in nature in the computer and control all the aspects of it. Then Ken Wesley, also a former ILM artist, developed our shader. The water tool had to be more than just a mesh deformer. It had to have translucency and deal with the Fresnel effect. It had to have to have the ability to create foam, a particle system for the spray and a shader to render the ocean surface so that it looked realistic with displacement and everything else. So we created the pipeline and water methodology in-house, and then outsourced some of the visual effects work to a company called MoFac in South Korea, but still oversaw how the shots were put together.
fxg: How did the outsourcing work?
Uhlig: We had two artists who literally did a slap-comp on the shot, pushed it to about 70 or 80 per cent and then it was sent to Korea for finaling.
Olson: They were also very good matte painters, so we found a common area to collaborate in with their strengths and our techniques. We guided the progress of the show with daily consultations using Skype video conference calls. Our compositors here could create a ‘target’ or template shot and lay out how they thought the shot could be best achieved, which was then sent on to our partners over in Korea.
fxg: Jeff, you worked at ILM for a long time. What kind of experiences were you able to bring to the production of Haeundae?
Olson: It’s always been the role of the visual effects producer to gather the team and have them lay out their ideas as early as possible, basically saying, ‘Here’s what they want – here’s what they can afford.’ I’d worked on Master and Commander and Perfect Storm and more recently on Poseidon, so I’ve had a lot of familiarity with water and big water simulations. The filmmakers wanted a lot and we didn’t necessarily have a lot of money to put into it. So it came down to picking the shots that paid off the most, and realising certain techniques so that you could recycle the same simulations where you could. So from a different camera angle you could get a different shot entirely, but you wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time and money doing the sim. We always try to be the most efficient but at the same time bring the best quality available to the right shot.
fxg: What were some of the key challenges of working on a South Korean production?
Uhlig: Working with Korean companies, the biggest challenges are communication, cultural differences and the industry in general. One example is the union set up in the US. We work our 8 hours and then it goes into overtime. There have to be breaks and all those things. Everybody has a specific role on set and you cannot cross the roles. I found that in Korea it felt very fresh and young as an industry. Everybody does everything. Sometimes we shot for more than 24 hours non-stop. I think their record on Chaw, for example, was 36 hours of shooting with the actors. They never stop but they do great work. Somehow it just all happens.
fxg: Finally, how do you see Polygon moving into the future?
Olson: Hans’ vision has always been to be able to offer film production services ranging from individual shots, to entire segments, to creating entire films. I think it’s great because it harks back to the old days of ILM where you would be taking on the whole visual and special effects elements for a film, shooting the actors nearby and have all the creative and fun craftspeople around you.