american cinematographer, september 2005

A Tapeless Workflow in Iceland
by Stephanie Argy
When Icelandic athlete and entertainer Magnus Scheving set
out to create the children’s series LazyTown, he knew he wanted
the show to have a whimsical feel all its own. “I wanted people to
say, ‘I’ve never seen this look before, what is this?’ I wanted to do
something absolutely different, and I wanted to use live action
with puppets and 3-D backgrounds.”
Scheving gathered a team of artists and technicians from all
over the world, and they devised an innovative tapeless
workflow that not only combined all the elements Scheving
wanted, but also did almost everything in real time on set. This
brought production and post much closer together, something
that the show’s director of photography, Tómas Örn Tómasson,
found very exciting. “It was really teamwork,” says the
cinematographer. “It was nice for me to realize that shooting in
this technical environment was almost like shooting on a normal
set.”
Scheving has traveled around the world to promote health
and fitness, and he says many parents have asked him how to
inspire their children to develop good exercise and nutrition
habits. In response, he wrote a book, Go, Go Lazy Town, which
spawned a mini-industry in Iceland that includes live theatrical
performances, a non-profit radio station, and a model
“economy” in which children collect LazyTown bills to buy
healthy services and products.
The television show LazyTown began to appear on Nick Jr.,
Nickelodeon’s programming block aimed at preschoolers, in
August 2004. Filled with physical comedy and athletic stunts, the
show stars Scheving as Sportacus, a superhero whose mission is
to make physical activity and healthy lifestyles appealing to
young children.
In developing the series, Scheving turned to Hypercube, a
company that facilitates the interaction between manufacturers
and users of advanced technology. Hypercube’s Mark Read, who
eventually served as LazyTown’s executive producer, visualeffects supervisor, producer and technical director, devised a
full-resolution (1920x1080 4:4:4) virtual-cinematography facility
for the show, setting up a workflow that allowed most aspects of
an episode to be realized at once. In 82 days, the company built a
studio in Gardabær, Iceland, that could house every phase of
production, from screenwriting and storyboarding through post
and delivery, and assembled an international crew of 163.
LazyTown combines real actors and puppets with virtual
environments. “We’ve created a live-action cartoon,” says Claudia
Meglin, the show’s post supervisor. “It’s hard for even
production insiders to judge where the border is between the
real world and the virtual world.” Roughly 20 percent of the
shots were done on real sets, but the rest were shot against
greenscreen with minimal set dressing and few props so that
fanciful CG backgrounds could be added in. But rather than
compositing the shots later on, a Emmy winning video engineer
and Ultimatte operator Richard Welnowski used Ultimatte HD
digital to pull a key on set and insert the appropriate
background, so that while Tómasson was shooting against
greenscreen, he was actually seeing the shot the way it would
finally look. “We were driven by the short production schedule,
and this allowed us to finish most of the scenes on set,” says
Meglin. Each episode had about 60 to 70 virtual sets and was shot
in less than six days.
Once Tómasson chose a camera position for a shot with a
virtual background, his crew lined up the Panther dolly on that
spot. Tómasson’s grips, Ægir Gudmundsson and Jonas
Gudmundsson, used a Sharpie to draw a grid on the stage floor to
speed up the positioning of the dolly and to more easily measure
its motion. “The first position of a scene became a reference
point for the 3-D background, and if we moved the dolly, it was
measured from that point,” explains Tómasson. “The director
and I picked the right background for the scene, virtual camera
operator Bill Dorais put it up, and then Richard Welnowski
pulled his key and we were ready to shoot. This might sound
complicated, but it all happened within two minutes after I
found the right frame. Because of our system, I had no
boundaries, and I was free to move the camera where I wanted
— and very quickly.”
The show’s virtual backgrounds were created in the 3-D
application Maya and then formatted in Motion Builder, which
matched the real sets seamlessly with the virtual environments.
Meglin explains that Motion Builder was created for motion
capture but has been adapted for use in virtual studios. “It’s
mostly used for previsualization, but we proved it can be used
for final output.”
Tómasson shot the show with a Thomson Viper FilmStream,
shooting 24p at 1920x1080 in 4:4:4 RGB 10-bit color space. Meglin
says that one compelling reason to work digitally in Iceland is
that the country has no film lab. “When you ship material out,
you risk losing connection to it,” she says. Moreover, the only
tape involved in the production was the final master. The images
were recorded as DPX files, with embedded metadata, and all
audio was stored as WAV files. Sound and picture were
maintained in a centralized Storage Area Network with a
database that associated the assets with their related metadata
throughout the production and post processes.
The recording and transmission of information about shots
and scenes normally involves a lot of work for numerous people,
but in this case, the metadata streamlined the process. The
editing department, which used Avid Adrenalines, received the
footage pre-logged, and other departments could access data
from set such as lens focal length, tilt and camera height. If there
was camera movement, that was also recorded, and it could be
applied later in a CG environment.
In addition to the metadata, the alpha channels Welnowski
created when he did his on-set keying were also maintained so
that they were available throughout the pipeline. This made it
simple to color-correct foregrounds and backgrounds
independently, and it also meant that the backgrounds could
easily be replaced later in post if the needs of the story changed.
According to Meglin, filmmaking in Iceland is generally
done on location, and the local crew had little experience with
shooting greenscreen. “At the beginning of production, we
budgeted more for clean-up, but because the crew could see the
results of their work, live on the studio floor, they learned very
fast. After two or three months, the keys that came from set were
perfect, and we didn’t have many fixes to do.”
Tómasson made his own discoveries about the greenscreen
process. “There is a myth that one should overexpose
greenscreen by 2/3 to 1 stop, and underexpose bluescreen by 1/3
to 2/3 of a stop,“ he says. “I think the confusion is created
because people mix spot reading with incident reading. It can be
misleading to use spot reading when finding the exposure for
screens from which you want to pull a key. When shooting on a
screen, no matter what color, it is crucial to measure the
shooting exposure with an incident meter. You should use spot
meter to see if the screen is evenly lit, then take a normal
incident reading to find the base. “
Tómasson shot the hard sets with an aperture of f1.8 to f2
1/3, but he found himself shooting at f4 to f5.6 for the
greenscreen setups, and he generally used a gain of -3. “The
settings of the camera were really neutral, so we could do
whatever we wanted afterward,” he says. “If anything, we made it
a little more contrasty, a little more saturated, but not too
much.”
“Because so much of the show was shot against greenscreen,
it was important to use very sharp lenses, so we used Zeiss
DigiPrimes,” said Tómasson. “We had the whole set of the
DigiPrimes but most often I used the 10mm, 14mm and 40mm
He tried to help the compositor by shooting primarily at a 90degree shutter angle to make sharper edges, which he also felt
was more appropriate to the fast-paced, action-oriented style of
the show.
Tómasson framed for a 16x9 aspect ratio for the
international market, but he protected for 4x3 because that’s
how the show is being broadcast in the States. Because he could
see everything that would be added to the image, he could adjust
his composition if he felt that his original position was
interacting with the virtual background in an undesirable way.
“The most difficult task for me on Lazytown was to come up with
a usable and beautiful frame where I had a human beings,
interacting with a half-body puppets, and keep continuity in the
height between them through out the show,” he notes.
The LazyTown puppets were designed by Academy Award
winner Neal Scanlan (Babe). One challenge created by shooting in
HD was that just as the camera sees the slightest flaws in human
complexions, it also picked up the deterioration of the puppets’
latex skin; as a result, their skin had to be replaced every three
weeks. Moreover, to make the actors fit better into shots with the
puppets, the makeup artist had to adjust the actors’ skin tones to
more closely match those of the puppets.
Thanks to the real-time on-set comps, Tómasson was able to
see how his lighting would combine with that of the virtual
world, and his technique evolved over the course of the show’s
35 episodes. “In the beginning, we were a little cautious, a little
bit flat, not too contrasty,” he says. “I didn’t want to clip the
signal because that would have been bad for compositing. Since
we did not shoot the show in a filmstream mode the latitude is
similar to standard-definition digital video; if we clipped
something, it was gone, so the exposure had to be exactly right.
As I got the feel of it, we were able to add more contrast without
blowing details.” In general, he lit a little softer than he might
have for a film negative, or the Viper’s FilmStream Mode. His key
sources tended to be large and soft, such as 12K HMI through a
heavy 20’x20’ silk or 6K HMI through a heavy 12’x12’ silk.
LazyTown is scheduled to air in 22 international markets
over the next year, and the filmmakers have been asked to create
18 more episodes, as well as develop a LazyTown feature. “We
consider the series a great rehearsal for the next step,” says
Scheving.