Visual Effects with Rob Bredow

In the fourth of a series of production diaries, Rob Bredow discusses his role as vfx supervisor of the wave wrangling in Sony Pictures Animation's 3D-animated feature, Surf's Up. His entry encompasses his intro to big wave surfing and his experience making Surf's Up.

by Rob Bredow

Rob Bredow: Uh, yea. It moved up?

J.P.B.: Yup, Sean thinks the swell is coming early. Jamie Stirling and Carlos Burle are already in the air from Hawaii. We're leaving tonight.

R.B.: I'll grab my camera and I'll be on my way.

A still from the title card of a "beach movie" staring Big Z. This shot was rendered in 3D and got a significant paint job in the matte painting department before being aged with scratches and the projector weave. All artwork © 2007 Sony Pictures Animation.

The next 48 hours were my first-hand introduction to the world of big wave surfing. I tagged along, invited by award winning cinematographer and producer J.P. Beeghly as his sound guy and grip on an expedition out to Cortes Bank with several professional surfers. Cortes Bank is a break 100 miles off the coast of California created by a giant underwater mountain that makes the water shallow enough to create breaking waves with 30-60 foot faces in the right conditions. Sean Collins, who runs surfline.com, is the master at predicting these waves and had just moved our timetable up by another 30 hours so we didn't miss this swell.

In the summer of 2003, I found myself sitting in a pitch meeting during the early days of Sony Pictures Animation. The first pitch was a detailed series of ten or more boards full of illustrations featuring a bear and a mule deer who we all know today as Boog and Elliot -- the stars of Open Season. The story was well underway and the movie already had the momentum of a picture going into production. Almost as an aside, the story artist wandered over to a single board which contained some of the first drawings illustrating the next movie in the production pipeline. At that point, the story team was still working out whether the story was West Side Story meets The Endless Summer or something else entirely but one thing was clear: we were making a movie with waves and surfing penguins. This was the movie that I wanted to be a part of.

After meeting up with everyone on the boat, the night was spent trying to sleep below deck as the boat made its way 100 miles out to sea in large swells. There was a reporter from New York who unfortunately didn't take any seasickness pills...he was literally green.

Tank forces Cody Maverick into the boneyards in this final frame from the film. Shots like these contained over a billion particles in every frame.

Sony Pictures Imageworks has a long history of working with water and I have been a part of most of these projects. From early small scale photorealistic water in Stuart Little (1999) to the full scale night time storm in Cast Away (2000), Sony Imageworks has been a part of making water serve the needs of filmmakers for years. However, Surf's Up was clearly going to raise the bar a few notches since it required over 20 minutes of tropical waves with surfing penguins. Where to start? We began by collecting reference from every surfing documentary we could find.

I remember waking up in the early morning because the boat stopped rocking as violently. I climbed up to the deck to see the pre-dawn sky and noticed that we were passing an island. The water was glassy which shielded the boat from the giant swells. A couple of minutes later, we left the shelter of the island, the boat began its familiar rocking and we continued toward Cortes Bank.

One film that stuck out to the directors of Surf's Up, Ash Brannon and Chris Buck, and me was Step Into Liquid. Because of its outstanding photography and authentic view of the surfing lifestyle, we had all fallen in love with the movie and the surf documentary genre in general. I looked up some of the people involved in the movie's creation and John-Paul (J.P.) Beeghly, the film's producer and cinematographer, came to Imageworks to give a lecture to our crew on shooting a surfing documentary.

J.P. and the camera assistant spent the morning assembling the camera on a special stabilizing rig on the back of the deck and getting ready to shoot. The surfers prepped their boards and we did a pre-surf interview with them about their expectations of surfing the legendary Cortes Bank, a break only a few surfers have ever braved. They were hoping for the biggest waves of the year. I remember the moment the captain of the boat pointed out the window to whitewater breaking on the horizon: Our first glimpse of the break in the middle of the ocean.

A still from the movie featuring Cody Maverick and Geek "duck-diving" an overhead size wave. This shot featured underwater "cloud" elements rendered with Spiderman 3's volume renderer, Svea.

We took away several important things from J.P.'s lecture and the movies we had been studying to help us with our goal of making waves that were detailed enough that the audience would leave the theater feeling as though they had actually been out there riding inside the tube themselves. We knew we needed to handle slow motion in a natural way throughout every department since most spectacular waves shots are photographed at 240 FPS. We needed the camera to be able to go above and below the surface. We needed to create a wide variety of waves and we needed to figure out how to push 20 minutes of wave shots through multiple departments. It was going to require a substantial team of wave experts.

Our boat was drifting slowly with engines running off the left shoulder of the break about 150 to 200 yards away from the whitewater. Even at that distance the waves looked huge. By 11 am. the surfers were being loaded onto the jet skis that would be pulling them into the break. With long lenses we could watch the surfers drop onto the 40-foot faces of these waves and disappear behind the swell before we could see them again getting picked up by the jet skis. A couple of times a surfer would get caught in the churn and it was difficult for the skis to get in to save them between the closely-timed sets. It was pretty amazing.

A shot from a surfing montage in the film which is shown while Geek reminisces about "getting tubed."

Fortunately, Surf's Up was the type of project that attracted some of the best talent in the industry. Our CG Supervisor in charge of all the effects animation in the film was Daniel Kramer who came from a strong effects background and led throughout the movie both writing tools and driving the look of the water. Matt Hausman handled many of the hardest water elements in the movie Castaway first-hand and returned as one of the FX animation supervisors on this film. Debbie Carlson joined the team having worked just completed some of the most challenging sequences in The Polar Express and implemented much of the water surface and wave shading issues for the film. We also found our wave animation lead early in the project's life, John Clark, who brought years of actual surfing experience to the crew and in the end animated many of the waves for the film himself.

We finished the day eating fresh fish that the crew had caught and reviewing the tape that we shot. The most popular tape to watch repeatedly was the helmet-cam footage of one of the wipeouts where Carlos was forced down over and over again as the sets poured in over him. He hit with such impact, it ripped apart his backpack that held the waterproof recorder but somehow he and the equipment both survived. Everyone had amazing stories to tell.

A still from the movie showing Big Z and Tank facing off in a competition 10 years ago. The renders were aged to look like footage shot in the 1970s including grain, color correction and vignetting from a bad transfer.

In the end, we made an animated documentary starring surfing penguins, and waves. The waves were keyframed and controlled just like the rest of the characters in the film, and they played a staring role. Whether it was the 50 foot breaks in the sequence were Cody gets pummeled by the giant Pengu break (modeled after the Mavericks break off the shore of California), or the overhead pipeline waves that Cody and Geek surf on the south shore, the movie has the authentic feel of a surfing documentary.

Rob Bredow, visual effects supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, recently completed work on Surf's Up, the second all-CG feature length animated film from Sony Pictures Animation. In 2004 he completed work on Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express, supervising the hair, cloth and effect animation team as well as a number of sequences in the film. While at Imageworks, Bredow has been involved in creating many of the complex visual effects featured in Stuart Little 2, Cast Away, and Academy Award-nominated Stuart Little. Bredow's other credits include visual effects supervisor on the feature film Megiddo and director of R&D at VisionArt, where he developed visual effects for the films Godzilla and Independence Day, among others. Bredow is an acknowledged expert in the field of effects animation, shading and rendering and has presented his work through various publications and conferences around the world.