The directorial team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris recently worked with longtime collaborators Brickyard VFX for all the visual effects work on their second feature film Ruby Sparks. In Ruby Sparks Calvin (Paul Dano) is a young novelist who achieved phenomenal success early in his career but is now struggling with his writing – as well as his romantic life. Finally he makes a breakthrough and creates a character named Ruby who inspires him. When Calvin finds Ruby (Zoe Kazan) in the flesh sitting on his couch about a week later he is completely flabbergasted that his words have turned into a living breathing person. Our job on Ruby Sparks was to enhance and polish the shots keeping it artful and beautiful without detracting from the storytelling says Brickyard's VFX executive producer Kirsten Andersen. All of our work needed to be photo-real and elegant fitting with the film's aesthetic. This is one of those projects where if we did our job right the viewer won’t even know we were there. Brickyard delivered 80 VFX shots for Ruby Sparks. Sequences that Brickyard contributed to include the film's opening scene a swimming pool scene shot underwater skywriting over the Los Angeles skyline and images of Ruby dreamily projected onto a ceiling. The opening scene features Ruby as an almost heavenly figure surrounded by light and seemingly walking on air. While the sequence was shot practically we did quite a bit of tweaking on the color and lighting working closely with the directors to polish the shot exactly as they intended it to be seen says VFX artist Chris Sonia. For the underwater sequence we color corrected and manipulated many layers of footage compositing and repositioning the swimming characters to achieve a very fluid and ethereal feel says VFX artist Geoff McAuliffe. Working with Jonathan and Valerie is always a treat said Andersen. It's always a compliment to get their phone call even after all these years to help them achieve their vision.
