Get Smart is a Hilarious Movie where the visual effects are there to help the gags
It is the first comedy that I have worked on I hope it wont be the last, its great watching footage over and over that just makes you smile
Our contribution to this film was on two ajoining sequences : The Air Plane Toilet sequence and the Barn Sequence
In the air plane toilet sequence, Max Smart, played by Steve Carell, is trying to shoot the binds tying his hands and feet together with a tiny cross bow, each time he shoots a dart it leaves behind a trail of thread.
The crossbow was practical, the darts and the thread were produced as CGI. Most of it was straightforward, which is useful as there were a quite a few shots to do in a short amount of time. The process went, camera setup, dart tracking, thread simulation and lighting and handover to comp. This was handles using XSI and Mental Ray and required a new farm submission plugin.
In the barn sequence Max drops through the roof of a barn in Russia where he knocks a pig through a massive hole in the floor the pig is then thrown out of the hole by the huge farmer at Max sending him and the pig through the barn wall onto a pile of hay.
The pig is CGI and required a small amount of pipeline development for the fur for a single shot, which was cross package between Maya and XSI. The lookdev for the pig was fairly short and lighting these shots was helped out by a strong composting build from shader output that had been used on previous shows.
It was the first time I was given a chance to supervise a show and the team were excellent in getting the job done well on time. Including a few trainees who stepped up to the challenge
