Birdman is a unique film for both its story and its technical achievements, winning recognition from the big players as we enter the start of awards season.
We love this film and are delighted that our friends at Imagineer Systems had a part to play in making it. Rodeo FX are the creative team behind Birdman's VFX, with the majority of the film going through their pipeline, and mocha Pro being the tool they used to throughout.
Alejandro González Iñárritu had a vision to create a (seemingly) continuously shot film. It was an ambitious idea and forced the post-production process to adapt.
Faced with the challenge of intricate planar tracking and complex rotoscoping the team at Rodeo upgraded their workflow by introducing mochaPro - a tool that VFX Supervisor Ara Khanikian had worked with on both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 300.
70% of all shots that Rodeo worked on went through mochaPro, giving artists the precision they needed to achieve the continuous nature of the ‘Birdman longshot’. Unable to cut between shots they tried to gradually transition between clean images and complex fixes, such as erasing the reflection of the crew in a mirror.
It’s a really great story and for those of you unfamiliar with mochaPro, it's definitely worth reading Imagineer's take on it all.