Massive Software Used to Create Visual Effects for Poseidon

CIS Hollywood Leverages Massive to Put Believable Digital Passengers and Crew Members on Board

Wednesday 17 May 2006

Massive Software announced that the company’s Massive artificial life–driven animation system has been used by CIS Hollywood to produce digital visual effects for the motion picture Poseidon (Warner Bros.). Massive’s Academy Award–winning technology helps filmmakers and VFX artists push the realm of possibility by allowing scenes and stunts to be achieved with autonomously responding virtual characters. Other recent uses of Massive include epic–level CG animation for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and King Kong.

Visual effects studio CIS Hollywood acquired one license of Massive to complete a number of Poseidon shots that required realistic digital characters. These included establishing shots and other sequences showing people in passageways, as well as shots of crew members, waiters and cooks in the ship’s galley and a large party scene.

"We are very happy with the Massive work on the film," said Visual Effects Supervisor Boyd Shermis. "Massive allowed an array of shots to be populated with realistic characters that had the responses we wanted. It’s helping filmmakers and VFX companies tackle new kinds of concepts and challenges in movie–making today."

In many cases, believable action was achieved by CIS just by dropping in Massive agents with no further animation required. This saved time and helped the company quickly turn around some difficult scenes.

Earlier this month at NAB 2006, Massive Software previewed a range of enhancements to Massive that include advancements to Massive Smart Stunts. Smart Stunts enables a wide variety of digital stunts (falling, dying, climbing rope) to be performed by Massive agents and influenced by both dynamics and motion capture data.

"Massive worked well for us to create scenes on Poseidon – we were impressed," commented Eric Pender, Massive Artist, CIS Hollywood. "The idea of having Smart Stunts in Massive is great."

Massive products include Massive Prime and Massive Jet. Massive Prime is the complete solution for interactively authoring, directing and rendering custom AI–enabled characters for animation and visual effects. Massive Jet features a streamlined, easy–to–use workflow to make AI–driven animation available to all animation and visual effects professionals. Massive agents speed up the workflow even further by allowing artists to choose from a variety of pre–built agents which are Ready–to–Run with AI–brains, skeletons, motion, geometry, cloth, textures, shaders and behavioral controls.

For more about Massive Prime™, Massive Jet™, Ready–to–Run Agents™ and applications for Massive in feature film please visit www.massivesoftware.com.

About Massive Software

Springing into existence to help artists solve real–world production needs on The Lord of the Rings films, Massive Software is the leading creator of artificial intelligence–based 3D animation systems. Massive was founded when Stephen Regelous programmed a unique piece of software for director Peter Jackson to make creation of complicated visual effects scenes involving hundreds of thousands of digital characters a practical reality. Massive garnered a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Today, Massive Software develops a family of standalone, commercially available products, with customers including The Mill, Centro Digital, Digital Domain, Framestore CFC, Rhythm & Hues and other leading digital production and effects studios.

For more information, please contact Massive North America (+1 310 837 7878), New Zealand (+64 9 3030 030), Europe (+44 20 7096 1605) or visit www.massivesoftware.com.