Below is the written version of the video conversation above.
Sunny: Hello Daniel! How are you doing?
Daniel: Hi Sunny, all good thanks. Thanks for inviting me.
Sunny: Thank you for agreeing to do this. This is the first interview for the website so really appreciate it.
Daniel: That’s an honur. Glad to be the first.
Sunny: Thank you. Thank you.
Sunny: Let’s begin with what were the beginnings of Surpreeze? When and how did it begin. Was it a miniature shop first or a visual effects studio?
Daniel: Yeah so to begin with it was just me and and my business partner Silas Puls being two freelancers. He was doing production design and physical constructions and so on for film and TV. I was more into visual effects and the digital side of things and we worked together on various projects we shared an office to begin with and then we started a company together mainly working with commercials for a few years and then we started Surpreeze in 2016. And our focus was having like a foot in both worlds both in miniatures, you know the physical side of things and digital so we always had all the tools at our disposal when we were bidding on a project so yeah that’s that’s how it started.
Sunny: How do you shoot miniatures to make it look life size in the end what is the scale you need for the miniatures and the amount of detailing you need?
Daniel: So we build the miniatures as as large as possible obviously you’re trying to mimic life-size objects so you want to build them as as big as possible and especially when things are blowing up or being flushed with water and so on and there are several reasons but the main issue is obviously the physical tumbling and like just physics. You want it to be as close to the real thing as possible but also if you have water or if you have fire those elements obviously won’t scale uh as well as physical objects that you can paint and kind of fake. You can fake the scale on on physical objects but you can’t fake the scale of fire or water. So you like you can you can use those elements at certain scales but it needs to be large enough to kind of hold up in camera so you don’t, so you so you’re not put off and like okay that’s way smaller than it’s supposed to be or so those are the considerations if it’s only like a static thing like let’s say a town or a forest or static objects that’s not moving or static objects are not supposed to blow up or burn or being flushed with water then you can work in way smaller scales and it’s basically just up to the miniature builders to make it detailed enough so that when you film it it’s going to translate as a full-size scene. So and then the the last consideration is also how just how close you’re going if you if you need to go very close to an object then obviously you want the object to be bigger so that all the details hold up in camera if it’s just for like a wide shot like a whole city or a whole bridge or a whole something then you can you know the scale can be smaller so there are various considerations but i think the same the same goes with 3d as well when we build 3d obviously if we go closer to the 3d we need to add more detail and make sure that you have plenty of displacement maps and loads of geometry and so on to to make it hold up close to the camera so uh water and uh fire are difficult to shoot right because physics so would you avoid shooting them or would you shoot the creatures and then add fire the water then later it’s really up to every um like every task so every every time we get a sequence or a shot.
there is you know we start from scratch and and we make all those considerations i think when you leave things up to physics you basically have to obviously you can you can control it and you can do certain things to to make the fire or the water behave the way you want it to but at the end of the day you’re left with physics because physics is going to behave in a certain way and some you know some scenes or shots may require the fire or the water to behave in a certain way artistic way and move in a way that it wouldn’t do in real life and so in those cases we might go for a cg version just to make that process easier but no i in in like in in many cases if you wanted to make it look realistic why not do it for real you know but it’s it’s always like every time we do it it’s a case by case um consideration it’s never like we just we don’t jump to a tool because we think the tool is cool we we take into consideration all factors and then we go from there.
Sunny: How did you get involved in Baahubali 2: The Conclusion. Was that your first indian project?
Daniel: So visual effect supervisor RC Kamalakannan he reached out to us with a film called Puli. It’s south indian film from chennai I think and that was just..
Sunny: One question, how did he find you?
Daniel: Yeah so he he reached out to us via our website I think. We had some material out there and some breakdowns of some miniature stuff and then he approached us with this costume. There’s a lilliput village in the film like small people it’s a adventure film and you have these small lilliput people and one of one of the actors or one of the characters needed to have like this feather dress I think probably this size so basically a feather would cover most of of the the body of these small lilliput people and um most of the costumes were made out of different materials to look like small dresses and you know small clothing but in the case with this feather thing all the feathers would be way too small compared to what size it needed to be so he asked us if we could do that dress in miniature so we built just a small dress on a green screen mannequin and then we shot it on green screen and then those plates were then added on to all the plates with the actress just a fairly small job but that’s what introduced us to the south Indian film industry. And I think a few months later he came back to us with Baahubali 2 and basically the whole dam break sequence that we got to work on and that was a big a big job for us. and yeah and from there we’ve been working on several Indian films.
Sunny: Talk to me more about what you did on Baahubali 2.
Daniel: yeah so we worked on the sequence from the moment where the dam breaks basically the whole flushing of the soldiers down the hillside and that was all done in miniature more or less at least. There were some composites and some inserts made in different ways but the big shots they are all miniature and so we constructed three pieces of that hillside, all three were about 25 meters long and up to 10 meters tall so we had to stack shipping containers on top of each other to build the miniature tall enough and then we had this, we made this dump tank. A water dump tank out of 20-foot
Daniel: yeah so we worked on the sequence from the moment where the dam breaks basically the whole flushing of the soldiers down the hillside and that was all done in miniature more or less at least. There were some composites and some inserts made in different ways but the big shots they are all miniature and so we constructed three pieces of that hillside, all three were about 25 meters long and up to 10 meters tall so we had to stack shipping containers on top of each other to build the miniature tall enough and then we had this, we made this dump tank. A water dump tank out of 20-foot shipping container so we could basically open that up all at once with the mechanism and flush the whole miniature in one go. It was kind of um it’s always, you’re always sweating when you’re doing this kind of things but because it’s it’s more or less a one-taker. Obviously you can reset and you know redress and do it again in some cases but in most cases it’s really a one-taker so we had many cameras. Six cameras shooting at the same time when we were doing the miniature shoot. Then we went to india, to hyderabad after the miniature shoot because the miniature was built and shot in denmark and then we went to hyderabad to shoot plates with soldiers being kind of flushed away we did that with the production down there so that was also very interesting.
Sunny: Let’s come to RRR. So what is the brief given to you by the director or the supervisor did they come to you with this particular sequence in mind. How did that talk go?
Daniel: Yeah so Srinivas Mohan, the overall visual effects supervisor, he came to us in 2018 december I think 2018 and at that point he wanted us to build some miniature train cars and and do these fire and explosion effects in miniature. S o we started building those and then we spoke along the way and then he asked us if we could do the the cg portion as well and we love to complete the shots that we start so if we do miniatures we love to do the compositing and the 3d and cg work as well so we were lucky enough to do the whole sequence. So we built all train cars, total eight of them and then we sent them off to hyderabad, india. We went there a few months later and and shot the miniature there and then from there we made all the cg work and compositing and thenbringing it all together after that.
Sunny: How did you visualize this did you do the previs, someone else?
Daniel: Yeah when we were approached with the sequence we got the already made previs and that was done by Makuta vfx yeah so and it’s actually pretty close to the final result. Obviously there are going to be some creative changes and some shots are taken out some shots are put in but it’s it’s actually pretty close to to the initial previs uh that was made by Makuta.
Sunny: So talk to me about doing multiple passes on miniatures. Would that apply here?
Daniel: In the case of RRR, we couldn’t do any multi-pass shooting. The only time you can do multi-pass is when you have static miniatures so it’s great for, we did a christmas commercial once where we had buildings with lights inside the houses and street lights and all. You know different kinds of lights and obviously the if you have if you’re mimicking like a moonlight or a sunlight or something and you also need lights in windows though the exposure on those two different types of lamps are very different so a big lamp that would then be let’s say moonlight is going to be much stronger and much more powerful than small leds so those two exposures they’re going to have a hard time beating like the leds are just gonna drown in in the light from from the big moonlight right so in order to make that mix a little bit easier we can do multiple basically shoot the shot several times. So one time for just these small leds, one time for just the moonlight and then we can fill the room with the haze and do a haze pass we get the atmosphere in the room and then we can do you know we can do several passes for all sorts of different lights and then we can combine it like we would with a 3d render basically and that’s awesome for static models but as soon as you’re doing explosions or objects that’s moving and tumbling around and all sorts of physical action you can’t repeat the exact same movement because that’s kind of the basis of doing multiples is that everything is exactly as it was in the last pass so you can basically put the layers on top of each other and it’s going to align exactly where the previous path was. But when you have a train car that’s tumbling around you can’t make that tumble the exact same way it needs to be pixel perfect so and that’s never gonna happen so that needs to be a one taker basically and then if you want to do it again you have to reset then rebuild some other miniature and then you can do it again.
to be continued... Check back later for the full transcript.