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MillimeterStep by Step: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
May 25, 2009 12:00 AM, By Ellen Wolff
When 20th Century Fox debuted Night at the Museum in 2006, audiences flocked to see actor Ben Stiller cope with the comic chaos that ensues when museum exhibits spring to life. Now Stiller and director Shawn Levy have returned with Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and they've upped the ante. In one scene set in Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, Stiller confronts a giant octopus, which he douses with water in a most unusual way.
"The story point is that the octopus is harassing Ben because he's thirsty," says Raymond Chen, visual-effects supervisor at Rhythm & Hues in Los Angeles. "Ben picks up a seascape painting by Joseph Turner, and all the water in the painting rushes out and onto the octopus. Its tentacles start playing with the water, and the octopus transforms from a gray, sickly color to a healthy reddish-purple."
The plate photography for this scene was shot on an elaborate set of The Turner Gallery in the National Gallery of Art, with lots of wooden moldings and framed paintings that appear to be moving. Chen says that at the time of the shoot, the paintings in the gallery were just framed greenscreens. The animation inside the paintings would be added later by the Santa Maria, Calif.-based studio CafeFX. Rhythm & Hues would animate the water that flowed from the painting onto the octopus.
On set, Stiller actually holds an empty picture frame, according to Chen. "We had a water cannon on the floor behind Ben that would shoot water through the center of the empty frame and onto a painted Styrofoam buck that stood in for the octopus," he says. "We wanted to get some practical water onto the octopus along with the CG water that we would add later. So Ben had to time his swing of the empty picture frame to coincide with the water shooting from the cannon."
The painted stand-in for the octopus was based on a preliminary version of a CG octopus that Chen's team had modeled in Autodesk Maya, and it was quite limited. "The buck didn't have any legs at all," Chen says. "It just had a head and nose structure, which was the only area where the practical water was going to hit. Of course, part of the problem of using that element was that as production went on, we refined our models. By the time we ended up with our animation, it didn't necessarily match the buck very well. But it was great to see a reference of the way that water would splash onto something of that shape. We did end up using some of the practical water in the final composite, but because of the tight interaction we needed between the octopus and the water, most of the water would end up being CG."
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