tomo FX worked on ‘Vice’, Adam McKay’s biographical drama that takes a critical look at Dick Cheney’s rise to become one of the most important vice presidents in American history.

In a brief flashback we see a young Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) in flight gear outside an aircraft hangar where he served as a navy flight instructor. Otomo FX researched where Rumsfeld served during this time in his career and modeled the hangar after a real location in Anacostia, Washington, DC. We created a full photorealistic CG background replacement for the 8mm footage of Steve Carell.

A motion graphics sequence is used to show the copy being created by think tanks in order to influence the American public. The brief was simply to have lines of text above the typewriters in the shot. We procedurally animated text leaving the typewriters as individual letters and forming into words. Using Houdini we created an algorithm that broke up the paragraphs written by Adam McKay into individual letters that had trajectories from the typewriters. Weightings were given by word and sentences to give the word formation a sense of intention.

Otomo FX completed a large number of monitor burn-in shots adding the content to the screens of the TV and news watched throughout the film. In some of these shots it was necessary to create news backgrounds for various news anchors shot on greenscreen. We had to work with reference to graphically recreate a style contemporary to early 2000s news broadcasts.