Aussie VFX outfit Rising Sun Pictures has been nominated for Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal Feature at the 15th Annual VES Awards.
The Visual Effects Society Awards will be handed out on February 7 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles.
Alana Newell and compositors Jess Burnheim, Andy Peel and Matthew Shaw are nominated for their work on the 'Quicksilver Rescue' sequence in Fox's X-Men: Apocalypse.
In the sequence, Quicksilver (Evan Peters) uses his hyper-speed ability to rescue mutants (and a bulldog) from an exploding building.
According to Newell, the scene was built using a combination of practical stunts, motion control cinematography, slow motion, CG environments, effects simulations and re-timed footage.
“Our compositors worked with the layout and effects teams to calibrate the timing and composition of the explosions," she said.
"Debris and re-timed plates were laid out to plot how they would work with the live action footage. Passes were rendered in deep, which was especially useful in dealing with characters that move in and out spaces that are filled with fire, debris, volumetric and other characters.”
Stabilization was a significant challenge, with compositors having to rotoscope individual body parts for control and stabilization in order to make actors appear frozen in time. Subtle motion was then applied to each character to give the impression that they were being affected, slowly, by the pressure wake of the explosion.
The trick, according to Newell, was balancing each shot's multiple elements.
“There were a large number of source frames due to plates that were shot at high frame rates and multiple motion control passes. The team had to ensure that composites were efficient and flexible enough to quickly respond to client timing and layout changes.”
Iloura is also nominated for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode for its work on Game of Thrones' 'Battle of the Bastards' ep (detailed by IF here).
Nominated for the episode (and surely firm favourites) are Jon Bauer, Steve Kullback, Glenn Melenhorst, Matthew Rouleau and Sam Conway. They're up against FX teams from shows such as Stranger Things, Black Mirror and Westworld.
Full list of nominees:
https://www.visualeffectssociety.com/post/15th-annual-ves-awards-nominees