SUCCESS STORY
Visual Effects for HBO Series: "The Plot Against America"
Customer Challenge
“The Plot Against America” is based on the 2004 novel of the same name, written by Philip Roth, taking place during the World War II in New Jersey. Most of the work required by LVLY involved keeping everything correct in terms of reflecting that time period. The VFX Artists removed non-period items from the live action shots, such as traffic signals, air conditioners and non-period people, signage and cars in the background. They also took on a couple of large day-for-night sequences.
Project Goals
For a company used to creating commercials and short form content, the notion of 100s of shots at scale was a new challenge. The team at LVLY decided to leverage Autodesk Flame and Shotgun in order to be able to complete that volume of work. During the project span of 5 months, they needed to maintain the quality of work for a team of up to eight people across their offices in New York and LA, as well as a few outside vendors, while continuing to offer the level of service they are known for.
Solution
Autodesk Flame was an integral part of the project; from the bidding process and VFX all the way to delivery. This Series was also the first large project in which LVLY used Autodesk Shotgun, which helped to manage their production load from a central connection in the cloud. CineSys provided LVLY with a Flame rental system, helped support and scale the infrastructure for use of Flame, as well as Storage Area Network (SAN) support for the large volume of media files in the project.
Business Outcome
It was a successful outcome, which proves that it can be done again. The project helped LVLY expand and solidify its pipeline, which has also benefited its commercial work. More than anything, it proved that they have implemented a system that can accommodate larger long-form projects. The project was a success thanks to the amazing and creative work by the team at LVLY using Flame, Shotgun and Python scripting, supported by CineSys and Autodesk.
Conclusion
"CineSys has been our reseller for many years and they were great in helping us manage our technical resources. The Autodesk community was also essential to the process. Autodesk Flame Feedback is very useful in that they listen to the Artists and include the requests in future updates. With this being such a long term project, we could make feature requests and get new updates with some of them implemented." - Andy Milkis, Director of Visual Effects & Technology, LVLY
Project Summary
Delivery Date
2020-03-12
Project Duration
150 days
Autodesk Solutions
- Flame
Services Provided
Customer Industry
- Media & Entertainment