Branit|VFX a young studio based the Midwest of the USA. After spending about 10 years working in Hollywood, Bruce Banit decided to move back to his hometown and start a CGI company there. They now work on feature television shows like Lost, Pushing Daisies, and Brothers and Sisters. We ask Bruce a few questions about his last short movie : World Builder.
IT’S ART: What made you decide to produce “World Builder?”
Bruce Banit : I wanted to do another short soon after we did “405,” but the demands of day to day work never gave me time. I had this idea very early on and after moving back to Kansas, I found I had time to at least get it shot on green screen.
IA: Where did the idea come from?
BB : I had always heard this story about these people that existed in a time just before us. They were like construction workers who got our reality ready for us to experience and they were always on a deadline. I thought that the new 3D digital tools were a really good analogy for that.
IA: Can you tell us about the creative process and how you developed the story during the production?
BB : The story started as a guy building a world for some other guy, just a client, or an everyman. He would build some mundane street and the client would show up and simply walk through for 10-20 seconds and that was it. A voice would then say, "Thank you everyone, that's a wrap! See you tomorrow." At some point the idea of the woman and the love story came to me, and that is when it started to become something worth spending the time on.
IA: Making such an intensive VFX short was, I guess, a big challenge. Can you speak about the major difficulties you’ve experienced and tell us about your pipeline?
BB : The real task was envisioning it first, before it was shot. I needed to know what sides of the street we would see the most and how it would be cut so I would know what to shoot on set. It all takes place on one street. So although very detailed, it was really only about 15 buildings. Getting the look of the null world took some time too. I didn't want to recreate exactly something that had been done before like in the Matrix or THX-1189.
IA: What tools did you use, software, hardware?
BB :It was shot with a Vericam HD camera on a green screen stage. I did previs in Lightwave before the shoot to block the edit out. This was edited in Adobe Premiere. The final 3D was also done in Lightwave. All the shots were composited using Eyeon's Digital Fusion.
IA: Can we have some specs about the amount of work concerning the modeling, rendering?
BB : The overall scenes are not too heavy. Since I essentially started this project in 2004, the pipeline was committed to back then.
