Full Mental Jacket completes HD virtual set for FX Original movie Meltdown.

Full Mental Jacket, which specializes in realtime visual effects for broadcast and film, has completed shots for FX Original movie Meltdown starring Bruce Greenwood. The movie premiered nationally June 6 2004 on FX Network.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

"An authentic-looking fake Fox News broadcast about breaking "events" includes a text crawl at the bottom of the screen. One hopes that there won't be panic if people tune in to "Meltdown" in the middle of one of these "broadcasts."

For a complete review on Hollywood Reporter site - click here

Meltdown is a fictional tale about a nuclear facility taken over by terrorists. Throughout the movie a news broadcaster updates the viewer on events taking place in the nuclear facility. This critical part of the storyline called for an authentic news environment which resembled contemporary 24hr news sets like that of FOX or CNN. For this important design task, executive producer Craig Anderson and director Jeremiah Chechik came to FULL MENTAL JACKET.

With only a week to complete the environments and deliver HD animated sequences, FULL MENTAL JACKET Creative Director Ronen Lasry chose to modify an existing virtual news set that was already part of the FMJ virtual set library rather than develop a new set from scratch. “This saved us both time and money. “ added Ronen Lasry, “since we were starting from an existing set, the design direction was mostly completed and approved from the start, all we really needed to do was add the specific elements to the set that were required for this show.”

FULL MENTAL JACKET designed, animated and rendered HD resolution sequences of the set with included a monitor wall of moving images onto which talent was later composited.

For the actual shoot an HD ultimatte was used to see the talent composited into the virtual set in real-time. This allowed the director to make adjustment to the lighting and the framing of the shots before final rendering/compositing took place.

Shooting took place at Production Group HD Studios in Hollywood, CA.