MPC work with Director Alfonso Cuarón to recreate 1970s Mexico.
Roma follows along with Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a young domestic worker employed by a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma; Adela (Nancy García), Cleo’s co-worker; and Sofia (Marina de Tavira), a mother of four coping with the extended absence of her husband. The film is based on Alfonso Cuarón’s own childhood.
MPC VFX Supervisor David Griffiths led the team on Roma and helped bring Alfonso’s childhood in Mexico to the big screen.
MPC delivered 250 shots for the film and there was a huge variety of work across all of the sequences, with the main focus being on compositing tasks. Other work included animation, set extensions and restoring Mexico City to the original time period.
Alfonso visited MPC for many one on one reviews and helped to establish a great working relationship with the VFX Supervisors. He required a photorealistic workflow based on reference photography, artwork he provided and a match graded to the 4K plate workflow. The Director’s vision was to recreate 1970’s Mexico City and to both replace and replicate the original reference photography and style of the street scenes, characters and lighting set ups.
Due to the time period the film was set during, MPC’s team had to clean up any modern features in the original photography by removing or replacing them with period features, using specific pieces of artwork provided by the client or created in house. This included set and street extensions, blue screen comps, DMP replacement artworks, day for night composites and a whole range of inserts; ranging from entire cityscape backdrops, to simple street furniture.
A few of the day for night shots required a lot of plate re-grading, light manipulation, feature rebalancing and adding / removing features as well as adding DMP elements into the final shots.
The extensive street extensions included buildings, streets with added vehicles from either other plates or DMP, and CG created pieces. Full building street extensions with moving vehicles were created and MPC also animated lighting for multiple shots. This was usually incorporated into the original plate photography from green screen work or the Roto manipulation of foreground characters.
Prep and Roto did a large amount of work as there was a huge amount of prep cleanup to remove on set pieces that were part of the filmmaking process, such as crew members, rigs, reflections, props and characters.
As MPC’s work on Roma largely consisted of compositing work, almost every shot on the show was touched in some way by compositing and many of the shots had multiple types of compositing tasks required. From adding elements, earthquake movements and effects, fire, smoke and embers, adding and cleaning up of water elements, to building extension both as environment builds in 3D and 2.5D projections and finally the compositing of DMP elements, which the team did in many shots.
There were also many shots where multiple plates from different takes were combined and these required a lot of compositing heavy work, including seamlessly blending different lighting scenarios into one final look. Adding elements and replacing the sky in the original photography was another task of MPC’s. All of the original plates were shot at 4K, so some of the detailed work needed was very time consuming. Some sequences had a background vista and cityscape comped in with sky replacements and blending into the original plates and plane animations dotted throughout some shots.
The grading tasks were shared between MPC Film and the DI team at Technicolor.
