DUNKIRK

Crowd Supervisor at DNEG -- For Christopher Nolan's war epic Dunkirk, depicting the evacuation of allied soldiers in World War II, I supervised a team of talented crowd TD's in the creation of believable crowds, with complex animation, which were required to hold up at IMAX resolution. Given that the film was shot entirely on IMAX, this added a considerable level of complexity to all aspects of the CG work, due to the on-screen size of crowd agents. Ensuring agents and live action characters were seamlessly integrated, higher resolution geometry and textures, a large volume of animation, cloth simulation and agents interacting with ocean water and fire were required. As the Crowd Supervisor my focus was creating tools for Houdini and the internal pipeline using Python, to ensure that TD's could focus on the creativity. For the cloth work, we had recently invested in Numerion Software's Carbon in-house, which I used as the basis for developing a set of HDA's and python tools This eventually became DNEG's crowd cloth workflow pre-Vellum. As production was winding down, my team were tasked with handling all the hero cloth work in shots containing upwards of 30 characters. To make this process less manual/painful, I branched off the crowd cloth toolset I developed, and modified it to work with DNEG's hero cloth rigs, which allowed us to batch process hero cloth simulations in Houdini once animation was updated.