Post Logic Studios Completes Digital Intermediate and VFX Work for The Perfect Game

July 9, 2008

Source: Post Logic

Post Logic Studios, a division of Prime Focus Group, has completed DI and VFX services for HighRoad Entertainment's The Perfect Game. The inspirational feature will be released theatrically by Lionsgate Entertainment August 8, 2008. The Perfect Game was directed by William Dear and filmed by DP Bryan Greenberg from a script by W. William Winokur.

The Perfect Game centers on the 1957 Little League World Series Champions, a barefooted, rag-tag team of boys from poverty-stricken Monterrey, Mexico who defied extraordinary odds to become the first foreign team to win Little League World Series doing so in a perfect game, the only one in championship history. Based on a true story, The Perfect Game tells the tale of how their miracle changed not only their lives, but also an entire city's destiny.

The film's cast includes Clifton Collins Jr., Cheech Marin, Lou Gossett Jr., Emilie de Ravin, Patricia Manterola and Bruce McGill, along with Disney stars Jake Austin, Moises Arias, Jansen Panettiere and Ryan Ochoa.

Shot on 35mm 3-perf film, the movie underwent a digital intermediate and finishing on a Baselight 8 system, with colorist Doug Delaney working out of one of Post Logic's DI theaters. Delaney worked closely with the project's director and DP to create separate looks for the dry, dusty scenes located in Mexico and the more colorful, saturated scenes located north of the border.

"In a vacuum, it's relatively simple to come up with an idea and a look for how Mexico should look, or how the U.S. should look, and your ideas might look really cool by themselves, but the challenge is to make them work well together," Delaney said. "You want to come up with something interesting and unique, but not something over the top that is calling attention to itself."

Besides creating the separate looks for scenes in the two countries, Delaney also worked to ensure that visual effects were consistently integrated with live action footage. "There were over 200 VFX shots from three separate facilities, including Post Logic," Delaney explained. "Each facility tends to have its own stamp on things, and we had to make sure that all the material appeared to be seamless."

"It was great working with Bill and Bryan," Delaney concluded. "They've worked on projects together for years, and have really developed their own shorthand for talking about visual concepts. Bill really vocalizes his thoughts and wants to experiment with scenes. So it was critical for me and, by extension, the color corrector to respond and contribute to this back-and-forth process as quickly as the thoughts would come."

Post Logic Studios also provided visual effects on over 80 shots for the film, including green screen work, cleanup and restoration of stock footage, and crowd replication for the large stadium scenes during the playoff and World Series games in the latter half of the film. Post Logic's visual effects supervisor Bill Coffin identified the crowd replication scenes as particularly challenging because of the large amount of tracking and rotoscope work involved.

"The crowd scenes weren't shot on plates, so we had to develop our own continuity scheme," Coffin explained. "We built sub-plates to fit in with the real plates, and made them larger by cloning people into them. We would look at the dynamics of each section, and then track and rotoscope in the people required to fill the stands."

The Perfect Game was produced by HighRoad Entertainment, Prelude Pictures and Lone Runner Entertainment.

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