“NUKE was first brought to my attention by a friend who was working as a lead comp at Weta Digital several years ago,” explains Jones. “It wasn’t a Foundry product then, but I could see was already a powerful compositing system, with huge potential. So I decided to keep an eye on it.
“When The Foundry acquired NUKE, and then started to lure people of the calibre of Ron Brinkman, it began to look like a really serious player. This gave me a lot of confidence, as Nuke was in the hands of a world-class team with a great history in VFX software.”
Jones has enjoyed a successful career in editing and VFX for over a decade. His previous work on programmes such as Supernatural, Swarm, Weird Nature, Animal Games produced by John Downer Productions for the BBC’s renowned Natural History Unit and Pride for BBC Drama, earned him two broad shelves’-worth of awards from such prestigious organizations as the Royal Television Society.
In the spring of 2008, Jones found himself on the end of a phone call from Craig Higgins, VFX supervisor on behalf of the BBC, asking if he would take the role of lead comp for The Sarah Jane Adventures, a children’s series from the makers of Doctor Who, destined for children’s primetime viewing.
“I immediately recommended NUKE. It had just been released on V5 and was looking really strong,” he says. “The Foundry had done a great job in making it far more user-friendly, especially for people already familiar with node-based compositing. We hit the ground running.”
The VFX unit for The Sarah Jane Adventures was established at BBC Broadcasting House in Cardiff. Multiple Nuke and CG animation licenses were set up in a Linux-based pipeline to create and deliver a range of atmospheric, environmental and transition effects, not to mention a vast number of explosions, evaporations and lasers.
During a five-month period Jones, and a team of VFX artists including Mike Shirra, Peter Bailey and Lee Hallett, led by Craig Higgins, used NUKE to deliver around 50 minutes-worth of on-screen effects for ten of the 12 x 30 minute episodes. They had, on average, two weeks to complete their work on each episode.
“We quickly got into a rhythm of working, designing effects on the fly and knocking them out very quickly,” says Jones. “Quite often the brief in the script was nothing more than ‘a light is released as he disappears’. Not only did we have to come up with good-looking effects, we also had to do them fast. Nuke proved a powerhouse on both counts.”
One adventure sees the characters in the programme continually stepping through “time fissures”. In one such scene, Sarah Jane and Luke emerge into a post-apocalyptic London, which has been practically raised to the ground. The original live action, of the actors emerging from a demolished concrete building, was shot in a disused quarry in Wales. It was then up to the devices of Jones and his colleagues to create chaos and decimation of the capital city.
Treated images of London landmarks, such as Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral and Big Ben, as well as a sky from a holiday photo in Cornwall, were imported as TIFFs into NUKE from a range of paint and CG systems. These layers were then composited with the original live action background plate, along with smoke effects which had been extracted from separate footage using NUKE’s difference matte function.
Finessing touches included the addition of a soft ripple to the surface of the River Thames, various glows using Tinder and Sapphire plug-ins, and an overall colour grade to match the separate elements together. Jones also added a subtle parallax shift to the elements in the composite to enhance the drama of the scene still further.
“We chose Linux for this project as a few of us can script on Unix, and could write tools for the project management on Linux,” says Jones. “Nuke proved to be very stable on this platform. It can run it on several processors, and you can queue shots up to render, and get on the next job in hand. It was a very efficient way to work.”
Jones is a fan of NUKE’s retiming tools. “They’re brilliant. NUKE is the only software I know of that provides standard tools for slowing down or speeding up sections of the effect. You can build up a whole effect freeze it, and do stuff to other branches of your processing tree without having to render off or rejig keyframes, it calculates it automatically. And you use this a lot, for taking off frames and cleaning up plates, Normally you have to pre-render them but not with NUKE. They’re a life saver.”
Jones also believes that NUKE’s 3D tools make it a highly attractive proposition to would-be purchasers – especially with tools like particle effects coming into future versions.
“They have allowed me to consider shots that would have had to go through a different pipeline, and to complete them quickly within the one tool,” he says. “NUKE 3D tools proved useful during The Sarah Jane Adventures on sky replacement shots and have already been used effectively on shots for the feature VFX work I have been doing.”
More recently, Jones has helped to establish Twenty4DVFX, a VFX shop in Bristol founded by executive producer Jack Bowyer, which aims to attract work from the feature production market, again with NUKE at the centre of the action.
One of the first projects through the doors is zombie western Gallowwalker, starring Wesley Snipes as a cursed gunman whose victims come back from the dead.
Along with a host of rig and wire removal tasks, Jones has also used NUKE to create and finesse a disturbing shot of a zombie’s head in a preserving jar. The shot combines separate 2- and 4-perf live action plates of an actor’s head in water, the preserving jar, and the background, along with chromatic aberrations, reflections mattes, painting, warping and regraining all created with various nodes and gizmos within NUKE. The in-built arsenal of tools has also allowed Jones to check exposure and gamma for grading purposes, and to then watch results via the Viewer with a swipe of the pen.
“The point is that NUKE is really interactive for artists. You don’t have to dig around in drop-down menus, to get what you need,” he remarks. “The tools are all there on the desktop, and it’s features like this that are taking effects to a whole new level of sophistication and productivity.
“Having used NUKE on TV and film projects, I would say it’s definitely on course to be the next main VFX package It’s capable of wiping the floor with most other similar packages, because of its cost and flexibility. And it can only get better.”