Red Dwarf : Red on Red & the vfx

The Red Dwarf: Back to Earth mini-series recently debuted on the UK Dave Channel to a record 2.6 million viewers, almost triple the channels previous highest ratings, placing it as the highest-rated commissioned show on a digital network ever. This week we speak to one of our own as John Montgomery interviews Mike Seymour on fxphd’s involvement with this classic and beloved Sci-fi comedy.

09Apr/dwarf/doug
Director Doug Naylor

“The team coped with a phenomenal workload, in an incredibly short space of time, producing truly stunning results. For the first time, in over twenty years of making Red Dwarf, I finally got to see places I’d only ever seen before in my imagination. “
– Doug Naylor, Director discussing the vfx on Red Dwarf.


Red Dwarf involvement with fxphd

fxg: What was the scope of the project and how did fxphd get involved? 

The project started as two shows, with another unplugged show and a fourth ‘making of’. During the pre-production phase this changed to three shows, and the making of. The thinking being that it was better to provide a longer more complete story than the short option where the episodes could play more completely as one longer story. During early pre-production Doug Naylor, the Director and writer, was exploring using the Red Cameras. Doug was asking around for who knew the Red Camera and our name kept coming up. Doug declared “Oh I know Mike” and he contacted me. Initially that was all we were going to do – just advise on the Red. I had known Doug for some time and I had pitched on the Red Dwarf film with Melbourne Film VFX supervisor Peter Webb a few years back. Doug and I had always got on really well so it was a joy to work with him. Ultimately I was also made 2nd Unit director which was great.

Then during our discussions Doug asked if we could do the visual effects. I explained about fxphd, our training and consulting company, and we quickly agreed on a deal. I would vfx supervise – the Red Dwarf budget was not huge, so we would extend it and the number of shots the show could do, by having a team from fxphd work on the project. We bid out the money we did have for visual effects selecting the excellent Fin Design in Sydney to provide the backbone of the G-Deck virtual set. In all, Fin delivered about 25 shots and we used elements of their work in another 70 shots. In total we did 262 shots. So for the 3 episodes we did an average of 87 shots a show. The fxphd team was distributed around the world from China to Eastern Europe, from India to Chicago. In all we had 19 crew plus Fin Design’s crew working on the project, but with just over 3.5 weeks to deliver all the shots from the end of principle photography until Evolutions in the UK took over for the Online and grade. Starting now in April we will be providing professional training using some of the Dwarf workflow and effects material at fxphd.com.

fxg: Who was the DOP?

Andy Martin was the DOP, he did a great job both in creating very specific lighting and colour palettes for the various scenes that played very cinematically for a comedy, but also technically in producing excellent greenscreen footage for the huge post and effects sequences. The three shows, while only 23 min. episodes each, had some 262 effects shots and many of these were greenscreen.

Red on Red Dwarf

09Apr/dwarf/red
Multiple Red One cameras were used on set and on location around the UK

fxg: Why did you select the Red Camera to shoot this project on?

We had investigated digital capture for a few years, Doug and I had even had key meetings a few years back with Sony in Vegas at the NAB conference over the 950s when they first came out. When it came time to produce new shows, the Red Camera was the best camera for the job. Highly cost efficient, very cinematic in what it allows for as far as lens choices, and really amazing 4K resolution allowing great things in post-production such as dynamic zooms. There is one shot where Chris Rimmer is being ‘marginalized’ and we managed to add a zoom and repositioning to the shot in Post, which crept Rimmer out of shot, underlining his lack of relevance. This blow up was vast and there is no way we could have done this on say the Genesis, F23,  or due to film grain, even most 35mm stocks.

For the longest time Doug has believed in digital capture and digital cinema, he is a really wired and informed director. 


fxg: How did the Red One work for the visual effects?

09Apr/dwarf/crane
The production shot 4K for most sequences 16:9

We ran the Red cameras at RC36, shooting only 180 degree shutters, at 320 but with Andy rating and treating the cameras like 200 Daylight film stock. For Post, I asked for everything to be shot daylight or daylight filter balanced. My company got one of the first RED cameras ever, number 22 back on the first day they were distributed to the public – so I have shot a lot on the RED. The sweet spot for greenscreen work is without a doubt 320 ASA, greenscreen and daylight balanced. This gamut of the cameras and the noise response curves are just best on this combination of settings. We shot 4K HD – that is to say double HD in a 16:9 aspect ratio for an HD 4:4:4 mastering finish.  The visual effects team worked with Scratch to do the VFX editing and distribute the DPX sequences for compositing and 3D. Normally, we would do the effects at 2K/HD unless there was a need for blow ups or very complex keying. We chose on set to run with the REDSpace colour spaces as it is more contrasty. Both REC709 and Red Space avoid clipping but the Red Space distribution inside that latitude is more pleasing to the eye on set and makes one a tad more conservative on protecting highlights. Of course, the colourspace is just metadata but still it is good to know that what you are seeing on the splits is what it will look like in post. And Andy had the cameras set up with wireless HD monitoring so we could be watching HD 720P on the split for all the complex effects work. 


09Apr/dwarf/lens
A wide range of lens were used including Anamorphic and even a Lens Baby PL mount

We had an Avid workflow. The footage was converted by our great DIT Deane Thrussell on set to AVID quicktimes, this was linked via a network to the Editor Nick Ames AVID setup – right at Shepperton. The media would relink and Nick could cut about half a day behind first unit. This was vital due to the short lead times. The original .r3ds were sent to Evolutions for the online and a second copy was sent to Sydney to my company, fxphd, which handled the visual effects.

In Sydney we had specialist visual effects house, FIN design, doing virtual sets and a team of fxphd members working on the project around the world from Chicago to Manchester, India to the Ukraine. This was all managed online and we used Sohonet to allow for high speed data transfers – securely and effectively. Sohonet was brilliant – I cannot imagine a serious global production not using Sohonet, especially a tapeless production such as the one we had, plus these guys are Studio level secure – so our masters were not ‘on the internet’ adding real security to the project.

Evolutions did the online using the Baselight with the new SDK Red option that allowed the original .r3d files to be accessed directly. To be honest this workflow is so efficient and so cost effective but it is the speed at which you can work. We did all three shows in a month including editing, major visual effects and online. One month is amazing, I have worked on TVC spots that took longer than that.


vfx the shots

fxg: What was behind the decision to use extensive CG for the ships and not miniatures?

The idea was to show Dwarf of the books rather than the early low budget TV shows. We wanted to show the Epic Red Dwarf ship, something far beyond what we could do in a studio. For budget and time reasons, CG is the only way forward.  We would have needed 6 weeks for just one major practical model build. I have done miniatures and I love them but there was just no time to make them, let alone the budget.  By doing a CG set of virtual sets we could open up the scope of the visuals and allow the ship to no longer look ‘studio’ based. We knew the look we were after this time was cinematic and not studio audience, and we really wanted to give the fans a sense of scale and production value we had not seen before.  We needed to make it funny and provide a platform for the actors to work on but that platform should make the project feel open and not constrained.
We had a great team on set that included Matt Leonard – who animated the Skutter and Matt Graham our vfx producer, this allowed us to do a lot and even overlap the start of vfx with principle photography. Plus as you know John this marked the first time Jeff Heusser, you and I managed to all work on the same project after some ten years of fxguide and fxphd ! Jeff did an amazing job in Chicago allowing for us to work 24 hours on split shifts globally.

09Apr/dwarf/sketch
Initial rough idea for G deck
09Apr/dwarf/firstrender
The first render from FIN Design for on set alignment via live compositing

09Apr/dwarf/wireframe
A rough comp of grenscreen for alignment

09Apr/dwarf/GDK
The final frame

You mentioned Fin Design in Sydney?

Yes FIN was great, they were tasked with work on on of the major virtual set environments. We had known the guys there for some time and in fact I used to work with Stuart White, their lead CG artist. He is really talented. For a number of reasons we needed to have a local vfx house working with me in Sydney, and I had always been really impressed with the eye of Richard Lambert the Creative Director of FIN, he is not only a great Flame artist, he knows how to polish a shot to sell it, but while it was perhaps Stuart and Richard that attracted us, we also got to work with Matte painter and concept artist Mike James, who not only used to be an fxphd member but is just a completely brilliant guy for producing these brilliantly detailed matte paintings, often working over the top of 3D renders. Fin currently uses 3 renderers in production – Pixar’s Renderman, Mentalray and 3Delight, matching the rendering options on a per-effect basis, matching the demands of the shot to the individual renderer.

09Apr/dwarf/green_kat_arrive
262 shots were delivered
09Apr/dwarf/katarrives
The final frame including the new hologram effect

What sort of shots did the fxphd artists do and where were they located?

They did a huge variety of shots, 3D, comping, graphics, ship design… everything really and from everywhere… from 3D tracking lead by Yannick Meillier to shake compositing green screen such as Simon Blackledge and Thorsten Wolf, 3D matte paintings by Richard Levene and Johan Sundkvist. These guys were in London and Gothenburg Sweden working together as a team ! We had some crazy vfx portal work done in Kenneth Bonde in Denmark which we all loved, but there was killer monitor replacement work done in India by Rohan Rego, gun flashes done in Amsterdam by Marjn Eken, some very funny graphic sequences done in Malmo, Sweden by Andrew Hedetoft, great 3D virtual sets done in the Ukraine by Igor Ryabchuk.

We had people comping and working on shots from, say Jose Herrera in Costa Rica to Eric Mainzer working on shots in Balwinsville NY! Daniel Rajcic was in Shanghai doing cool old school tricks with split screens and 3D vases. It was insane as I repeat it now – but it all worked out really well. Mind you we had a brilliant team managing the whole thing, – just unsung heroes : Matt Graham and Jim Shen in Sydney worked day and night getting footage to everyone and we had another production assistant in Chicago – Rachel Uwa who worked very hard to standardise the process and make sure everyone had consistent outputs.

09Apr/dwarf/carbug
Carbug and a model of its name sake starbug on the set of Coronation Street
09Apr/dwarf/LMP
Carbug driving in the London Matte painting shot one of many shots covered in this terms fxphd courses

How did you find working with the actors on such an effects heavy project?

I was incredibly impressed with the cast. They were open, generous and a heap of fun to work with. Honestly, they might have been the most relaxed and friendly group of senior professional actors I have ever worked with. Beyond professionally they were down to earth and up for anything we came up with. One night I sat in a freezing studio watching Craig Charles bash his on head against a wall wrapped with a rubber squid tentacle for hours without complaining once, you just could not have asked for nicer guys. But for how they found it … I will leave it to Robert Llewellyn (Kryten)) to have the final word, other than to say rarely has a project been more of a team effort and while I was the face of the effects team to the Dwarf guys, we had some 25 people working on the visual effects, 25 people who missed most of the month of March to met the deadline – but met it we did.

09Apr/dwarf/Kryten
Actor Robert Llewellyn

“When Mike Seymour turned up on the Red Dwarf set we all said, ‘Who’s the Aussie guy and what’s he doing?’ except Craig Charles who said ‘Who’s the bloke from New Zealand?’
Within minutes of the first shot being etched onto the Red cameras massive hard drives, we knew why he was there. … He made the confusion of working in front of green screen a breeze, he explained quickly what was needed and why, and due to the wonders of his laptop could give us a rough preview of what the end result would be.
– Having now seen the end result, we are nothing less than amazed.”

– Robert Llewellyn (Kryten), Actor discussing
Mike Seymour and the vfx on Red Dwarf.