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Project Profile: Page (1) of 2 - 05/22/08

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InFusing CSI: Miami

By Eddie Robison

When CSI: Miami VFX Supervisor Larry Detwiler phoned to ask if I was interested in doing their "money shot" for episode 618 of the hit T.V. drama, I jumped at the chance without ever considering the potential difficulty. After 17 years of doing Television and Film visual effects I had taken a Senior Artist position at Inhance Digital. Inhance s mainstay has been producing corporate animation and post that is a little known, but highly profitable sector of the effects industry. Inhance has recently been branching out into the entertainment side of the business after moving to the heart of Hollywood from San Jose, CA just over a year and a half ago. Such a high profile shot on one of T.V.'s number one shows could not be passed up, even with the tight turn around.

The shot would consist of an HD plate with two cars driving toward a locked off camera in broad daylight with the cars almost filling the frame.  The less fortunate car on the right would drive into a sinkhole triggered by the car s weight and violently smash down through the roadway. After the writers strike, shows like CSI have been scrambling to catch up with three or four episodes in production at a time so, in this case, plans to shoot additional practical elements were foregone at the last minute. This left me a single plate with both cars in it to work with. Here begins my part in bringing this shot home.

The plate was shot with both cars moving slowly, the one on the left driving past camera left and an unlucky Pontiac GTO stopping right where the CG sinkhole was to open up. Since there was no clean plate filmed, I first had to combine the first and last frame to make a clean frame, painting out the GTO entirely. A road sign on the right was also painted out in Photoshop and I removed the grain there as well. This "clean frame" and the moving plate were then brought into eyeon's Fusion. Fusion is my compositing package of choice and the only package suitable for this job due to many factors that I will discuss here. 
      
I stabilized the plate to remove the subtle gate weave and merged my clean frame over using Fusion's tracker with an animated mask to completely remove the doomed GTO. The car on the left, a silver BMW, had an obvious reflection of the red GTO on its door that had to go as well. To accomplish this, I simply tracked a soft edged mask around the reflection and used this to desaturate the reds and a gaussian blur to soften the detail. I also added film grain back to both that portion using the same mask, and to the portion of the clean frame that is now covering the GTO. I then doubled the speed of the plate to bring the BMW on the left up to an exciting pace. Now I had a prefect plate I could work with and I saved my new version as a half resolution JPEG frame sequence to my local drive for easier use in my 3D package. 

Turbo Squid has a multitude of models including the Pontiac GTO that I needed, so that was a no brainer. I did do extensive clean up and retexturing of the model as well as rigging up a pretty convincing 3D driver to flail around behind the wheel as it went crashing into the "Pit" (as I came to refer to it).

On this kind of time frame there's no way to do any real modeling so I turned to the source so many artists have before me. Turbo Squid has a multitude of models including the Pontiac GTO that I needed, so that was a no brainer. I did do extensive clean up and retexturing of the model as well as rigging up a pretty convincing 3D driver to flail around behind the wheel as it went crashing into the "Pit" (as I came to refer to it).

I added to this both hand animated chunks of rubble as well as other dynamic simulations for the impact of the car.

For the "pit" I first modeled a piece of the roadway in Newtek s Lightwave 9.3 and I busted up a rough hole in it by hand, extruding each piece as I went. This object was textured using a few reference frames of the sinkhole (provided to me by Larry) they created on set with a practical GTO nose down in it.