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MillimeterLaw Abiding Citizen Step by Step
Oct 28, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Images courtesy Entity FX
There's no doubt about how sophisticated the bad guy is in Overture Films' Law Abiding Citizen: He's able to unleash a guided missile against his victims. Within the quiet setting of a cemetery, a missile locks onto a moving SUV and destroys the vehicle in a massive explosion. Director F. Gary Gray and Visual Effects Supervisor Raymond Gieringer opted for a practical explosion of the SUV, but creating the missile and choreographing its movement was a task for the digital artists at Entity FX in Santa Monica, Calif.
"This wasn't a fertilizer bomb or an RPG. This missile is a couple of generations past that," says Entity's Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Mat Beck. "We were given the idea that the missile should act like one that had a two-stage launch: the ejection launch and then the main motor firing. It had an active targeting system, so this was a bad guy with some serious chops. Even though it's just a missile, the shot plays differently emotionally whether it takes a straight line or whether it curves because it's a guided system. Just that change in direction reveals intent."
The plate photography that Entity was given included a moving camera, so the shot had to be tracked. For tracking, Entity primarily uses 2d3 boujou, and Beck points out that a key question with tracking is whether you're trying to track a surface or a volume. "In this case, it was an object moving through a 3D volume, so we didn't necessarily have to track every single point on a surface," he says. "Tracking on a camera moving in Z-space is a little bit more challenging, but you do have to nail it so the stuff doesn't slide around."
Before the CG missile could be integrated into the shot, Entity had to clean up the plate photography. "It was such a wide shot, there were production people and equipment visible that had to be removed," Beck says. "If you pull back wide enough, you always see the whole 'video village' circus." Entity used Adobe After Effects and Autodesk Inferno for the 2D work.
The missile launcher itself was a practical prop, and it was rigged to generate practical smoke. "There was a very nice-looking plume of smoke coming out of the back end of the launcher, but of course nothing from the missile. So we had to do some CG smoke to match that, as well as a fully CG flame," Beck says. "Part of the challenge was that we wanted to see the missile launch with energy. Some missiles only give a little 'blurp' of fire, but the main motor doesn't fire until the missile has flown at low speed away from the launcher, and then it reignites, just to keep from frying the operator."
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