Behind The Scenes: Life of Pi

While working on my chroma key project I decided to base this post off of the footage that I used from "Life of Pi." I found this really cool article that talks about some of the logistics used to create the studding effects in the Emmy winning movie. What I found interesting about the article is the role water played in the film. The ocean is featured in 3/5th of the film and posed several problems for the animation and production teams. For one the boat scenes were shot in a wave pool. This posed the issue of matching the practical waves to the animated ones. The animation team had to use motion tracking points on the edge of the pool as well as research gathered from the coast hard to make the animations look as lifelike as possible. Tracking was a major obstacle for the production team who used a crane to gather the bulk of the footage. Whenever there were overhead shots there were no motion points for the animation team to lock onto. To solve this problem two alternative cameras with matching time codes. All and all a cool article definitely worth checking out. 

The link to the article is here: Life of Pi: a tiger’s tale

Here is some behind the scenes visuals: