Hollywood-based facility, CIS Hollywood, purchased monet late 2005. At the time, Visual Effects Supervisors Bryan Hirota and Patrick Kavanaugh were in the middle of overseeing an aerial shot for Eight Below that needed the path of the dogs removed in the snow in front of them so it looked like untouched snow rather than the path that had been worn from take after take.
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"Sometimes these simple removal shots turn out to be a bit more epic than anyone thinks they will be. The camera pan and push in was too complicated to paint it out. The detail was too little and without enough contrast for conventional tracking. We tried replacing the patch with a 3d texture tracked in Boujou. That was close but even that wasn't dead on. So we used monet to align the difference between the Boujou tracked element and the plate. Without monet this shot would have take untold days and already had absorbed at least a week. With monet the shot was fixed within a couple of hours. After that we started using it on shot after shot. We got through two dozen shots we were originally awarded in less than half the estimated time we expected, " says Patrick Kavanaugh.
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"Before we knew it we were awarded more shots. What was a fairly small show kept growing as we finalised shot after shot in record time. Eventually this small project grew to over 150 shots. I am fully confident that the reason they kept awarding us shots was the speed we were able to do them in. Without monet Eight Below would have been a very short run. Since then CIS Hollywood have used it extensively in Poseidon, XMen 3: The Last Stand, and Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest.
"In Poseidon, monet was used to track in set extensions. In both XMen 3: The Last Stand and Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest monet was used for eye replacement. For both of these movies we did eye replacements in the proceeding movies but with monet the eye replacement time was at least 150% faster. In XMen 3: The Last Stand monet was used to track in Mystique's eyes. For Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest monet was used to replace the character Ragetti's eye with a wooden eyeball."