Project 2012

When I arrived in Los Angeles at the Sony studio to work on 2012 the office was not completely set up yet, we just had some tables. I was one of the first artist to join the production and I contributed to start building up our in-house unit. The production was enormous: 1315 Vfx Shots (half the length of the movie) and a 200 million dollars total budget. After reading the first pages of the script I was very excited to start my research on big earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, typhoons, fires, avalanches, ice storms, blizzards and environments for the texture and matte painting department. On the end my research material went to all the departments and even some vendors received examples.

Next big task for me was to deliver plans and blueprints such as the Antonov An 255 , to create an extensive and detailed texture library, which included a huge amount of texture shootings all around North America and Canada, and to build up the texture pipeline. I spent over 8 weeks in Los Angeles shooting all sort of things; buildings, ground, streets, airports, props and vehicles textures. Then I moved on to Las Vegas where the production sent me with my colleague Andrew for two weeks. We had to cover all of the main Casinos, including aerial helicopter shootings and shoot in the dessert HDR panoramas. We got over 30.000 pictures just from Las Vegas and thanks to the aerial shootings I lost my fear of heights .

For the Compositing Department I collected and organized from archives live action footage material; smoke, fire, water and atmospheric elements. I became in charge of the texture department where we had to create textures for digital assets and support our in-house matte painting department with 2,5d projections. Besides reviewing all the textures created in our in-house texture department I personally painted over 50 3d assets! You can check my 2012 texturing task list HERE

On request of the director and my VFX supervisors I also did sketches and concepts (over paints) on shots for our vendors. It was very exciting to change the look on vehicles like the arches or create additional details. This was my additional VFX Art Direction contribution to the project.

Gallery and Videos:

2012 GALLERY

2012 Los Angeles Limo / Before & After

2012 How they destroyed Vegas

2012 Making of the Earthquake

2012 How They Made The Tidal Waves

600mm