VisionArt

VisionArt Design & Animation was a motion picture and television visual effects company, founded in the 1980s by David Rose and Todd Hess. Though originally a small Orange County company working primarily on cable TV advertisements and flying logos, VisionArt moved to Santa Monica in 1992, winning its first major effects work with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The studio originated in Santa Ana, California, later moved to Santa Monica, California, where it spawned Santa Monica Studios, Santa Monica Pictures, and its VFX development arm, FutureLight. VisionArt closed in 2000, selling its assets to Digital Art Media.

VisionArt Design & Animation was a motion picture and television visual effects company, founded in the 1980s by David Rose and Todd Hess. Though originally a small Orange County company working primarily on cable TV advertisements and flying logos, VisionArt moved to Santa Monica in 1992, winning its first major effects work with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The studio originated in Santa Ana, California, later moved to Santa Monica, California, where it spawned Santa Monica Studios, Santa Monica Pictures, and its VFX development arm, FutureLight. VisionArt closed in 2000, selling its assets to Digital Art Media. VisionArt's sister company FutureLight, headed by Rob Bredow (who later became the head of Industrial Light & Magic), created the first real-time tetherless optical motion capture (mocap) system in the industry. FutureLight's mocap was used by VisionArt to allow director Roland Emerich to conceptualize the hero CG character for 1998's Godzilla. It was also used in conjunction with Sparky for a number of key "Baby 'Zilla" shots, including up to 885 babies. According to Post Magazine, by 1998 "Sparky" had advanced to the point where some were calling it early artificial intelligence (a term VisionArt's technical leadership rejected), "With those kinds of numbers, key frame animation was impossible, so VisionArt's Rob Bredow, Brian Hall and Pete Shinners developed sophisticated flocking software that the babies a kind of artificial intelligence. With their flocking software, the babies had a set of animations to choose from, knew their environment, and knew parameters for moving." This process also involved the ability for Sparky agents to blend together disparate motion capture animation sets to create fluid autonomous movement, avoiding both obstacles within their environment and collisions with each other: "It's complicated, because they have a lot of body parts for their animation and the only way some animations can happen is if they blend two animations, like stepping forward and to the side." The visual effects for Godzilla were particularly notable in that it was the first major feature film to employ CG animation integrated into a large volume of handheld camera footage, accounting for roughly 80% of the film's 400 visual effects shots. VisionArt employed a Zeiss Rec Elta RL-S reflectorless laser survey head (SN 702706-0000.720 217012) to obtain precise on-set 3-D measurements for the large scale street scenes such as those filmed in Manhattan, then coupled that data with "Tracky," a custom developed 2D to 3D camera tracking software by FutureLight which allowed CG characters and debris to be seamlessly integrated into the erratic hand-held camera shots. VisionArt completed 135 of the film's visual effects shots in-house, nearly one-third of the total, and provided the camera tracking to Centropolis Effects, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digiscope and Pixel Liberation Front, which created the remainder of the shots.

"Transparent" visual effects

In addition to being known for science fiction work like Independence Day, Star Trek, and Godzilla, VisionArt specialized in "transparent" effects: removing, replacing, or modifying a wide range of objects in a scene to help tell the story, fix a mistake, or recreate worlds that no longer exist or never did.

Closure

VisionArt closed their doors in 2000, selling most of their assets to Digital Art Media. Many of the key staff moved to Sony Pictures Imageworks, Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain, and other VFX facilities.

References

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1359622716 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.