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- By George Bruder & Marlon Montgomery

nVIDIA is back with yet another extravagant bonanza of the CG industry based lecture series-2 putting their footprints in Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi respectively, this time with renowned pipeline technicians George Bruder and Marlon Montgomery, with their portfolios marked upon with CG features including Shrek and Madagascar. The seminar was a very organised presentation on the essentials of a good production studio, the workflow involved and the procedures.

Laura S. Dohrmann, the world wide marketing manager of Digital film division of nVIDIA introduced the two presenters and the grand show began. George Bruder started off with a small clip of PLUSH LIFE, a short film under production, that has been rendered using GELATO, nVIDIA's new rendering solution. It was a good one evidently showing off its fur rendering skills.

The essential steps for the production of a CG product, be it a single artists effort or a team or a huge studio, is the same; just that the process gets scaled accordingly, says Bruder. He, then took us through the processes involved in Pre-production, Production Support and Production Management. He described the processes like Pre Production (traditional art) and digital Pre Production (computer aided art) and walked us through a 9 minute independent short film "EMILIA", by Derek Flood ( www.sharktacos.com). The different stages from basic scribbles through rough storyboards to a 2d animatic to the final rendered 3d animation was explained with the help of a video with Derek's narration. The importance of storyboarding to understand and test timing, colors and camera angles was clearly explained.

He also spoke of developments during production which might not have been planned in advance. An example was the skin settings used for Fiona in Shrek. Her skin was tested and set for a particular lighting environment. Later, when it came to different lighting environments, the skin would look out of place! So finally a special light rig was developed which would help them to set the skin values to perfectly match any lighting scenario. To explain the aspects of studio production, he screened "Moongirl" by Laika Studios, directed by feature film director Henry Selik. He explained the different stages of production and the various methods they used in the project. The emphasis was basically on lighting and he spoke about the importance of lighting continuity.