Balls of Fury isn’t the first time Toronto-based Mr. X Inc. was called upon to add the balls to a sports movie. They added the golf balls the 2005 Disney film The Greatest Game Ever Played. We talk with Mr. X president and visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi and digital effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub.

Balls of Fury, the new comedy from Rogue Pictures, exposes the outlaw world of extreme Ping-Pong. The Mr. X Balls of Fury team consisted of 7 animators, 6 lighters, 11 compositors, and 4 administrators to keep everything on track. We talk with Mr. X president and visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi and digital effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub.

“The whole story is based on these characters playing champion level Ping-Pong”, says Mr. X president and visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi. “It’s a very fast, extreme sport with spectacular coordination.” Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant also created Night at the Museum and Reno 911!. “Ben and Tom put some video cameras on themselves and played”, says Berardi. “It was surprising how slow it looked relative to Olympic play where they’re really smashing it. We talked about Forest Gump scene that used a CG ball. Before Balls of Fury went to camera we did a test with a CG ball in the shot and liked it. All the Ping-Pong is digital. Based on our tests we had a high level of confidence we could do it.”

“We've done eight movies with Focus Features or Rogue Pictures, including Assault on Precinct 13, Evening, Ang Lee's upcoming Lust, Caution, and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises”, says Mr. X digital effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub. “We first received the Balls of Fury script in October 2005. We broke it down and did a preliminary budget and began to immerse ourselves in the world of competitive Ping-Pong.” Months before starting shooting, Mr. X began R&D and testing to composite a photo-realistic CG ball into a live-action scene.

When the movie began shooting, a way to keep the actors in sync with the natural rhythm of the ball was needed. “They were just miming the action with no real balls to swing at”, says Weintraub. “We used a metronome, set to the speed that the directors wanted the performance to be at, and then they swung away, using the click as a guide.” Several shots had more than one player, and occasionally they would get out of sync from the metronome. To achieve a realistic ball animation, in post they would split-screen the footage, delaying or advancing one of the players by a few frames to get the performance to work.

“The primary challenge on the project was getting the animation just right”, says Weintraub. “Ben and Tom had some very specific ideas about exactly what the balls were supposed to be doing at every given moment. We watched lots of reference footage of professional table tennis matches and really got to learn the subtle nuances of the flight of a Ping-Pong ball, how it bounces, and how it spins. In a lot of ways it really was like a character animation job, where we would tweak the details of the performance until it was perfect.” Because Ping-Pong balls are so light, the angle of incidence is not the determining factor. It can have top-spin, back-spin, side-spin, skidding…. Pros hit the ball to make it curve around.




The balls were modeled, textured, and animated in Maya and rendered in Renderman. Mr. X had just switched to NUKE for compositing. “We’re big fans of the software”, says Baradi. “It’s three times faster and has 3D built in. You can matchmove in pfTrack or Boujou.” The renderfarm was 80 CPUs running Windows plus another 50 Windows workstations that doubled as rendering when artists left for the day. There are also a few Linux servers. Of the 220 visual effects shots, 185 of them featured digital Ping-Pong balls. The rest was a combination of miniature or pyro explosion enhancement, crowd tiling, wire removal, and other assorted effects.

The film was shot with the Panavision Genesis camera, which had been proven on Superman Returns. “In terms of digital workflow, the Panavision Genesis camera is great”, says Weintaub. “It provides a log image, has highlight detail similar to the Cineon format, the sensor is the same size as 35mm film, and best of all...no dustbusting!” One difference from using scanned Cineon images, the Genesis creates log images in its own colorspace, but LUTs are readily available to deal with the footage. The film was shot during May and June of 2006. Post-production started immediately after wrap and continued until January 2007.

“Initially, the day-to-day workflow consisted mainly of animators designing and proposing takes of balls bouncing back and forth in their shots”, says Weintaub. “We set up the pipeline early on so that immediately after animating a take, the animators could easily get a comped version of the shot rendered automatically to evaluate the work. Sometimes, for blocking, there needed to be an extra step to roto the foreground people or objects back over the balls.” After the blocking was approved, the shots were lit and rendered, with multiple passes for different shading layers…ambient, diffuse, spec, reflection, subsurface, occlusion, and so forth.

So how do you create a completely photo-realistic Ping-Pong ball? “The joke around the studio was that you would just click Create-Primitive-Sphere and then modeling would be done”, says Weintaub. “In reality, all the tiny details of the ball had to be analyzed and replicated, from the every-so-slightly rough texture, to the way the seam of the ball is welded together during the manufacturing process, to all the different ways that light bounces around inside it.” Mr. X had written a custom subsurface scattering (SSS) shader that was reused from a previous job simulating human skin.




“When direct light enters the ball through its translucent shell, the light bounces around inside and eventually emits from the ball in all directions, causing a very subtle self-illumination effect”, says Weintaub. “And, the off-white of the ball tends to really pick up the colour of any bright objects that come near it, especially the bright red Ping-Pong paddles.” Mr. X simulated this radiance effect by rendering separate lighting passes from the direction of the paddles that were animated up and down in the comp to dial in the perfect believable amount. Table shadows and reflections were another area where paying attention to subtle detail sold the shots to make them photo-realistic. Separate lights, reflections and shadows were all combined together in the composite.

As is typical, editorial had their own set up independent of visual effects, with the editor and assistants handling the editing of the film. Mr. X posted Quicktimes of their shots to an online shots database, and editorial downloaded the latest versions to cut them together in Final Cut Pro. “Once we got the initial creative download from the directors, we had a bit of free reign to have fun with the shots and make them our own” says Weintaub. “We worked within the physical parameters we established from watching all the Ping-Pong reference footage. In some cases there were very specific notes from them about exactly where the balls should be landing, but other than that, it was just about making it look real and believable, but also keeping it fun.” Comps were reviewed in Mr. X’s internal dailies session. Once submitted to editorial, notes came back quickly, often as e-mails with single frames where the director had scribbled a path direction on the frame to illustrate where the ball should be going.

Mr. X, known for working on horror and action films, enjoyed creating visual effects for a comedy, especially one where the effects are integral to the story of the film. Mr. X works on small to medium-sized films of $10M-$50M, where the typical cost for visual effects is about 10% of a movie’s budget. “Any time you can do it under 10% you’re doing well”, says Baradi. “On Balls of Fury we did 1-take, 2-take, final…not five, six, seven takes on each shot. That saves money.”

“My proudest moment is people not realizing what we’d done”, says Berardi. “People see the Balls of Fury footage and say, ‘Wow! I didn’t know the actors could play that well’.” Berardi says that’s how it should be. Mr. X is known for photo-realistic CGI, digital matte painting, and visual effects compositing.

Other films they’ve worked on opening in theatres this month include Shoot 'Em Up, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Resident Evil: Extinction, and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Mr. X is completing The Dark is Rising, starting post on Whiteout and The Rocker, and starting to prep and shoot Death Race and The Repossession Mambo.

Robin Rowe writes articles, books and screenplays. He hosts weekly Hollywood events at ScreenplayLab (www.ScreenplayLab.com). When he can find time, he’s the project leader for the open source paint program CinePaint (www.CinePaint.org). He can be contacted at robin.rowe@movieeditor.com.