We then had to take the footage and composite the actors into scenes we’d shot on-set months earlier with another actor. “I remotely supervised bluescreen shoots with two of The Unholy‘s actors one in Portugal and the other in LA. “That was a first,” says Robert Grasmere, Temprimental’s Creative Supervisor. “We had actors stuck on location, scenes to finish, and digital characters to create to complete some of those scenes.”Īt one point during The Unholy‘s COVID-disrupted production, it became necessary to shoot two actors in two different countries, then insert their performances into a single shot of existing footage. “ The Unholy shut down ten days prior to completing filming, which opened a whole Pandora’s Box,” says Bolognini.
Whereas Barb and Star had finished filming when lockdown struck, COVID forced The Unholy to stop shooting before production had finished, presenting many new post-production challenges. Sony Pictures’ The Unholy posed a different challenge.
As a result, we were able to move the ship along and continue production, even when team members were in a completely different room, or city or country!” “From then on, we performed a cineSync session every single day. Temprimental trained its editorial team on cineSync and devised a system whereby all necessary parties could join a cineSync session simultaneously. Furthermore, as the media under review was local to each machine, the footage was consistently high quality regardless of bandwidth. Sessions were reliably real-time, with everyone watching the same frame simultaneously. cineSync, however, featured none of these problems.
Although Temprimental explored other remote work software and screen sharing solutions, the technology proved to be too unstable, too lacking in annotation features, or it compressed footage that required the best visual quality if it were to be accurately reviewed.
COVID changed the studio’s approach, as Temprimental needed an alternative solution to screening room dailies. “If we didn’t already have the remote working model in place, I think we would have struggled immensely to complete Barb and Star,” says Bolognini.Īt the time, the Temprimental team rarely used cineSync for anything other than internal calls creatives were seldom involved in cineSync sessions. Temprimental was working on three films at the start of the COVID pandemic Sony Pictures’ horror The Unholy, Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, and Lionsgate’s comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, on which Temprimental had just been asked to deliver 500 shots-all while many other facilities were still searching for new ways to work remotely. And it certainly set us in good stead ahead of the global changes in 2020 that forced the industry to evolve.” Remote work gave us the flexibility to stretch the dollars, approach exciting projects, and even explore different markets.
Remote also enabled us to offer our clients the flexibility they desired from VFX we could come in at a certain budget level aligned with the type of films and TV work we wanted to take on. “We always liked the nimbleness of the remote model, which offered access to a global selection of artists and boutique houses with whom we could partner. “We weren’t ever going to be a brick and mortar facility with hundreds of seats,” begins Bolognini. Indeed, they hit the ground running.įor Executive Producer and company founder Raoul Bolognini, remote was the obvious choice for Temprimental from the start, even in 2015 when the concept was largely alien to the VFX business. So, as the rigors of 2020 set in and facilities fought to transition significant workflows from on-premise to remote, Temprimental needed to change very little. The ease of transition was due to Temprimental’s core business model: ever since the company’s inception in 2015, Temprimental’s artists, supervisors, producers, pipelined devs, and more all work from their homes or remote offices, sharing work and collaborating via technology like cineSync.