After my second contract at Image Engine ended in May 2015 I started looking for work straight away. Digital Domain offered me a contract but it wasn’t going to start until September and I couldn’t really afford to be out of work for that long, so I had to so no to them initially, but then MPC offered me a short contract just for the summer, which fitted in perfectly with my vacation plans and meant that I could accept the DD offer.
MPC needed help with The Finest Hours, a ship wreck rescue movie based on a true rescue mission from 1952. The project had been running for several months and needed help for the final push for delivery, which mean lots of late nights and weekend work. But there was a good group of people on the comp team which made the long hours much more enjoyable.
Because most of the action was set in a storm at sea there was a lot of work with water simulations renders and live action rain elements. There were also CG boats, keying and matte painting.
All of the CG elements were rendered with deep data. This was the first time I had really got to use deep renders and I learned a lot. The things you can do with deep renders really are amazing. After this show I wanted everything to be rendered with deep data.
MPC have a reputations for crazy hours so the late nights weren’t a surprise, but they weren’t fun either, so I was glad that I knew my contract was short and that I had something else lined up to move onto. But the MPC offices were definitely nicer that other places in town, and the fully stocked kitchen certainly helped make things a little better.
MPC certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice of place to work in Vancouver, but it definitely would have been at the bottom of my list of places to work either, so it was sad news when they closed the Vancouver office at the end of 2019.
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