Fathead, a film that aims to show off what can be achieved using today’s virtual production, in-camera VFX and collaborative, cloud-based workflows, has won an award at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival.
“When one of the last free children of Junkyard Paradise has her brother stolen away from her, no Ragamuffin army or vicious beasts will stop her from getting him back.”
The film, which was directed by c. Craig Patterson and produced by Erik Weaver of the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California is set in a dystopian junkyard, which made it an ideal vehicle for testing the capabilities of immersive environments created using game engine technology. It was one of 38 short films included in The American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and was announced winner in the Student Short Film category.
It was shot at the new Amazon Stage 15 in Culver City and was co-produced by AWS, Amazon Studios and a raft of collaborative partners including Arch Platform Technologies, ARRI, Blackmagic, Epic Games, Perforce, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros.
“Everything on this production was done in the cloud, minus the shoot on set. We did some very innovative work, ingesting ARRI Alexa RAW to Amazon S3 buckets on the AWS cloud in real time, which had never been done before and I don’t think has been done since.
It was actually writing to Amazon faster than it was writing to our local backup drive on stage”
Erik Weaver, Producer, ‘Fathead’
For a full list of the main people involved in making Fathead, see this Linkedin post from Erik.
Sources: eccentric and NAB Amplify