Latin America. Twin Pines, a digital post-production company based in Madrid, has been in charge of making the visual effects (VFX) of La Fortuna, the new Movistar+ series directed by Alejandro Amenábar.
This international production, in which Twin Pines has had the opportunity to work, has been a great challenge for the studio. The series has around a thousand digitally retouched shots and has required a year of work to recreate scenes from the underwater world, an epic naval battle and a car trip on North American roads, among other sequences.
After a first collaboration between Twin Pines and Amenábar in their work While the war lasts, for which Twin Pines obtained a nomination for the Goya Awards for Best Special Effects, director and studio have come into contact again, this time to develop the television adaptation of The Treasure of the Black Swan. Bringing to the screen this comic by Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral presented a great complexity due to the different scenarios that frame this exciting journey through time.
"Undoubtedly, the most complete sequences have been the submarines, generated entirely by computer or what we call Full CG," say Juanma Nogales and Ana Rubio, those responsible for Twin Pines. "Normally we integrate our effects into the look designed on set, but in these sequences there was no footage, so everything was created from scratch: art, environment, lighting and physical simulations. All based on the storyboard and the requirements of the director," they add.
As one of the main narrative elements in La Fortuna, the underwater world had to be, in addition to realistic, cinematic. To do this, Twin Pines generated in 3D a series of elements such as sand, plants, corals, stones, vessels or cannons, whose deterioration was also carried out by computer to achieve a realistic effect. In addition, two looks were generated: one for the shots from outside the ROV and another for the subjective of the ROV, which would appear on all the screens of the American ship and the Spanish ship.
For its part, the great naval battle that takes place during the series was one of the biggest technical challenges for Twin Pines. This is a key sequence in which VFXs have been protagonists: explosions, cannon shots, shots, sinkings and a combination between real and 3D generated ships are part of the most laborious FX work. We worked all the elements in 3D based on the previews we made with Alejandro and dedicated until the last second to improve these plans by creating dozens of versions of each part and working in different phases. It has been the largest deployment of media we have made so far, nogales and Rubio point out.
This sequence has involved hours of simulations, rendering machines, motion capture technology, scanners of ships, places and characters, as well as chromas on cranes and animatics. The naval battle was with the first thing we started, the last thing we delivered and the most satisfying sequence for Twin Pines as a VFX studio.
The simulation of a complete sequence of car trip on an American road has been another of the great challenges of La Fortuna. For the exteriors, recordings of Spanish roads have been used and for the interiors, a recording with chroma on set. The 3D composition work has included the generation of signage and different elements of the landscape such as bridges, buildings, speed bumps and cars circulating in both directions.
Due to the complexity of the project, especially in the case of the historical scenarios, it was planned to start in the summer of 2019 with the previous works of scanning the real ships that would be used in the filming. Then, the sequences were previewed with the scanned material and a study of possible camera locations next to Amenábar.
The result translates into around a thousand VFX shots throughout the series for which the most advanced software in the industry has been used: Nuke for composition; Houdini for simulations; Maya or Clarisse for 3D scenes and Arnold as the render engine. In addition, the working method of Twin Pines includes the development of specific tools by its engineering team with the aim of optimizing its results and adapting to the needs of each client.
This project came at one of the best moments for Twin Pines, after the expansion of its headquarters, a significant improvement in its technological infrastructure and the signing of outstanding artists, in addition to having recently obtained the Goya for its special effects work in Akelarre by Pablo Agüero. From the point of view of the VFX it has been a real luxury to be able to give life to the complicated scenes that La Fortuna needed. We have completed challenges at the level of the largest studios in the world in a project of great international relevance, conclude Rubio and Nogales.
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