A Tapeless Workflow in Icelandby Stephanie Argy

When Icelandic athlete and entertainer Magnus Scheving setout to create the children’s series LazyTown, he knew he wantedthe show to have a whimsical feel all its own. “I wanted people tosay, ‘I’ve never seen this look before, what is this?’ I wanted to dosomething absolutely different, and I wanted to use live actionwith puppets and 3-D backgrounds.”

Scheving gathered a team of artists and technicians from allover the world, and they devised an innovative tapelessworkflow that not only combined all the elements Schevingwanted, but also did almost everything in real time on set. Thisbrought production and post much closer together, somethingthat the show’s director of photography, Tómas Örn Tómasson,found very exciting. “It was really teamwork,” says thecinematographer. “It was nice for me to realize that shooting inthis technical environment was almost like shooting on a normalset.”

Scheving has traveled around the world to promote healthand fitness, and he says many parents have asked him how toinspire their children to develop good exercise and nutritionhabits. In response, he wrote a book, Go, Go Lazy Town, whichspawned a mini-industry in Iceland that includes live theatricalperformances, a non-profit radio station, and a model

“economy” in which children collect LazyTown bills to buyhealthy services and products.

The television show LazyTown began to appear on Nick Jr.,Nickelodeon’s programming block aimed at preschoolers, inAugust 2004. Filled with physical comedy and athletic stunts, theshow stars Scheving as Sportacus, a superhero whose mission isto make physical activity and healthy lifestyles appealing toyoung children.

In developing the series, Scheving turned to Hypercube, acompany that facilitates the interaction between manufacturersand users of advanced technology. Hypercube’s Mark Read, whoeventually served as LazyTown’s executive producer, visual-effects supervisor, producer and technical director, devised afull-resolution (1920x1080 4:4:4) virtual-cinematography facilityfor the show, setting up a workflow that allowed most aspects ofan episode to be realized at once. In 82 days, the company built astudio in Gardabær, Iceland, that could house every phase ofproduction, from screenwriting and storyboarding through postand delivery, and assembled an international crew of 163.

LazyTown combines real actors and puppets with virtualenvironments. “We’ve created a live-action cartoon,” says ClaudiaMeglin, the show’s post supervisor. “It’s hard for evenproduction insiders to judge where the border is between thereal world and the virtual world.” Roughly 20 percent of theshots were done on real sets, but the rest were shot againstgreenscreen with minimal set dressing and few props so thatfanciful CG backgrounds could be added in. But rather thancompositing the shots later on, a Emmy winning video engineerand Ultimatte operator Richard Welnowski used Ultimatte HDdigital to pull a key on set and insert the appropriatebackground, so that while Tómasson was shooting againstgreenscreen, he was actually seeing the shot the way it wouldfinally look. “We were driven by the short production schedule,and this allowed us to finish most of the scenes on set,” saysMeglin. Each episode had about 60 to 70 virtual sets and was shotin less than six days.

Once Tómasson chose a camera position for a shot with avirtual background, his crew lined up the Panther dolly on that

spot. Tómasson’s grips, Ægir Gudmundsson and JonasGudmundsson, used a Sharpie to draw a grid on the stage floor tospeed up the positioning of the dolly and to more easily measureits motion. “The first position of a scene became a referencepoint for the 3-D background, and if we moved the dolly, it wasmeasured from that point,” explains Tómasson. “The directorand I picked the right background for the scene, virtual cameraoperator Bill Dorais put it up, and then Richard Welnowskipulled his key and we were ready to shoot. This might soundcomplicated, but it all happened within two minutes after Ifound the right frame. Because of our system, I had noboundaries, and I was free to move the camera where I wanted— and very quickly.”

The show’s virtual backgrounds were created in the 3-Dapplication Maya and then formatted in Motion Builder, whichmatched the real sets seamlessly with the virtual environments.Meglin explains that Motion Builder was created for motioncapture but has been adapted for use in virtual studios. “It’smostly used for previsualization, but we proved it can be usedfor final output.”

Tómasson shot the show with a Thomson Viper FilmStream,shooting 24p at 1920x1080 in 4:4:4 RGB 10-bit color space. Meglinsays that one compelling reason to work digitally in Iceland isthat the country has no film lab. “When you ship material out,you risk losing connection to it,” she says. Moreover, the onlytape involved in the production was the final master. The imageswere recorded as DPX files, with embedded metadata, and allaudio was stored as WAV files. Sound and picture weremaintained in a centralized Storage Area Network with adatabase that associated the assets with their related metadatathroughout the production and post processes.

The recording and transmission of information about shotsand scenes normally involves a lot of work for numerous people,but in this case, the metadata streamlined the process. Theediting department, which used Avid Adrenalines, received thefootage pre-logged, and other departments could access datafrom set such as lens focal length, tilt and camera height. If therewas camera movement, that was also recorded, and it could beapplied later in a CG environment.

In addition to the metadata, the alpha channels Welnowskicreated when he did his on-set keying were also maintained sothat they were available throughout the pipeline. This made itsimple to color-correct foregrounds and backgroundsindependently, and it also meant that the backgrounds couldeasily be replaced later in post if the needs of the story changed.

According to Meglin, filmmaking in Iceland is generallydone on location, and the local crew had little experience withshooting greenscreen. “At the beginning of production, webudgeted more for clean-up, but because the crew could see theresults of their work, live on the studio floor, they learned veryfast. After two or three months, the keys that came from set wereperfect, and we didn’t have many fixes to do.”

Tómasson made his own discoveries about the greenscreenprocess. “There is a myth that one should overexposegreenscreen by 2/3 to 1 stop, and underexpose bluescreen by 1/3to 2/3 of a stop,“ he says. “I think the confusion is createdbecause people mix spot reading with incident reading. It can be

misleading to use spot reading when finding the exposure forscreens from which you want to pull a key. When shooting on ascreen, no matter what color, it is crucial to measure theshooting exposure with an incident meter. You should use spotmeter to see if the screen is evenly lit, then take a normalincident reading to find the base. “

Tómasson shot the hard sets with an aperture of f1.8 to f21/3, but he found himself shooting at f4 to f5.6 for thegreenscreen setups, and he generally used a gain of -3. “Thesettings of the camera were really neutral, so we could dowhatever we wanted afterward,” he says. “If anything, we made ita little more contrasty, a little more saturated, but not toomuch.”

“Because so much of the show was shot against greenscreen,it was important to use very sharp lenses, so we used ZeissDigiPrimes,” said Tómasson. “We had the whole set of theDigiPrimes but most often I used the 10mm, 14mm and 40mmHe tried to help the compositor by shooting primarily at a 90-degree shutter angle to make sharper edges, which he also feltwas more appropriate to the fast-paced, action-oriented style ofthe show.

Tómasson framed for a 16x9 aspect ratio for theinternational market, but he protected for 4x3 because that’show the show is being broadcast in the States. Because he couldsee everything that would be added to the image, he could adjusthis composition if he felt that his original position wasinteracting with the virtual background in an undesirable way.“The most difficult task for me on Lazytown was to come up witha usable and beautiful frame where I had a human beings,interacting with a half-body puppets, and keep continuity in theheight between them through out the show,” he notes.

The LazyTown puppets were designed by Academy Awardwinner Neal Scanlan (Babe). One challenge created by shooting inHD was that just as the camera sees the slightest flaws in humancomplexions, it also picked up the deterioration of the puppets’latex skin; as a result, their skin had to be replaced every threeweeks. Moreover, to make the actors fit better into shots with the

puppets, the makeup artist had to adjust the actors’ skin tones tomore closely match those of the puppets.

Thanks to the real-time on-set comps, Tómasson was able tosee how his lighting would combine with that of the virtualworld, and his technique evolved over the course of the show’s35 episodes. “In the beginning, we were a little cautious, a littlebit flat, not too contrasty,” he says. “I didn’t want to clip thesignal because that would have been bad for compositing. Sincewe did not shoot the show in a filmstream mode the latitude issimilar to standard-definition digital video; if we clippedsomething, it was gone, so the exposure had to be exactly right.As I got the feel of it, we were able to add more contrast withoutblowing details.” In general, he lit a little softer than he mighthave for a film negative, or the Viper’s FilmStream Mode. His keysources tended to be large and soft, such as 12K HMI through aheavy 20’x20’ silk or 6K HMI through a heavy 12’x12’ silk.

LazyTown is scheduled to air in 22 international marketsover the next year, and the filmmakers have been asked to create18 more episodes, as well as develop a LazyTown feature. “Weconsider the series a great rehearsal for the next step,” saysScheving.