TEENAGE love film Fault in Our Stars is beating Tom Cruise in the box office and Visual FX supervisor Jake Braver says he could not have done it without a software tool developed in South Australia.
The software, cineSync, is a program developed by Cospective that allows users to view video in real time, in sync, anywhere in the world, and use drawing tools to point at elements in the frame, sketch new ideas and write text notes.
“I’ve been using cineSync as a tool for so many years…but it was really this last movie that it was like ‘I can’t picture getting the movie done without it’.”
This was important for the producers of Fault in Our Stars because they worked across four main locations and with many small vendors.
“I’ve been using cineSync as a tool for so many years,” said Braver. “But it was really this last movie that it was like ‘I can’t picture getting the movie done without it’.”
Fault in our Stars had a low budget of $US13m, and looks like a straight romantic film, yet it had 350 shots that required visual effects. These included creating hand-drawn text messages and emails on screen, replacing a real leg with a prosthetic one and taking out a real leg and replacing it with an amputated stump.
“It was interesting because (Fault in our Stars) was shot in Pennsylvania and Amsterdam and then editorial was in LA,” said Braver. “(The) visual effects office was in New York and then I had vendors spread out all over the place in New York, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.”
Cospective developed the software in 2006 for Adelaide-based visual effects company Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) who were working on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Superman Returns.
Since then cineSync has won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement and is now used everyday by the big studios. Yet Cospective CEO Rory McGregor has always believed cineSync was more than just a platform for big visual effects productions.
“(Fault in our Stars) was using it within a visual effects sphere,” he said. “But it shows that cineSync isn’t just a tool for blockbusters it is a tool that can be used by films large and small and that it is adaptable enough to be used in different
situations.”
Company Cospective
Ph: +61 8 8400 6475
info@cospective.com
226 Fullarton Road
Glenside, South Australia 5065, Australia