Preconceived motions: previz arists carve out a niche on film and television sets.(Previsualization)

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The year 2007 would have been heaven on earth for Alfred Hitchcock. The great director--who once claimed to have shot every frame of his films before the camera rolled, and even hired artist Saul Bass to sketch every frame of Psycho's shower sequence--would have been a kid in a candy store with today's previz technology. Given the complexity of modern filmmaking, in which directors are forced to juggle live action, motion capture, and effects animation in a single shot. it is little wonder that previz is joining storyboarding as a routine station in the filmmaking pipeline. In fact, the development of all this past summer's major blockbusters, from Spider-Man, 3 and Live Free or Die Hard to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Rise of the Silver Surfer, began with previz artists.

This group of growing niche artists worked closely with the directors on a conceptual level, to figure out the blockings and timings of the major storytelling heats; and also on a technical level, to help foresee the limitations of the sets, determine the right lenses or the length of a dolly track, or find the best placement of greenscreens, lighting, and camera equipment for obtaining the best coverage.

And if you think previz is strictly a preproduction step, think again. Previz artists are now working on location, helping the director-cope with sudden and unforeseen changes with a live-action shoot, designing shots sometimes hours--even minutes--before the cameras roll, hence the term "durviz." And when directors need a fast preview of how an unfinished character animation or set extension will composite into a live-action plate, they can turn to a "postviz" artist.

As pfeviz, durviz, and postviz open up new frontiers in the industry, they are providing a creative outlet for a class of artist whose talents may not lie in creating the most realistic sub-surface scattering shaders or the most perfectly sculpted blend shapes, but rather in storytelling and cinematography. A previz artist has to be an uber generalist, according to Brian Pohl, a producer at Persistence of Vision, a leading previz vendor. The previz process, he says, exposes the artist to every aspect of the CG pipeline, allowing the person to sidestep into a specialist career in modeling, animation, or texturing. Moreover, previz is a "hybrid" career, wherein the artist always has one foot the CG and another in live action. In fact, these artists interface so closely with the director and on-set crew that previz serves as the perfect training ground and starting point for making one's own movies.

For insight into the development of previz and the creative and technical challenges facing these artists, we turned to three worldwide authorities on previsualization: Christopher Batty, lead artist at Pixel Liberation Front; Ron Frankel, president of Proof-inc; and Pohl, also COO and senior previz supervisor at Persistence of Vision. While all those houses utilize industry-standard packages such as Autodesk's Maya and Softimage's XSI, dedicated previz software tools are also beginning to emerge, among them Antics 3D and ILM's forthcoming Zviz.

ILM