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MillimeterShutter Island Step by Step
Mar 1, 2010 12:00 PM
In Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's new thriller for Paramount Pictures, the Oscar-winning director demonstrates a film fan's love for Hitchkockian shots that yield chilling revelations. One exemplary shot follows Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Teddy, as he scrambles from a forbidding insane asylum towards a lighthouse on a rocky island shore.
"There's a slow, creeping camera that moves up over the edge of a cliff," says Ben Grossmann, who supervised the effects created at Southern California-based CafeFX. "You can see the lighthouse, but its base is hidden by the cliff in the foreground. Then as the camera creeps over the edge, it reveals—in almost a Hitchcock Vertigo way—that the tide is too high and the path to the lighthouse is cut off by violent waves crashing on the rocks below. The shot revealed that Teddy couldn't walk to where he needs to go. We called it 'the point of dismay.'"
"Marty described all his creative directions to us in terms of story points," Grossmann says. "That left us free to determine what elements we should shoot to hit the emotions he wanted."
However, when Visual Effects Supervisor/Second Unit Director Rob Legato and Grossmann were shooting the visual effects background plates, the lighthouse had yet to be designed by Scorsese's longtime production designer Dante Ferretti. "We didn't know exactly what that was going to look like," Grossmann says. "But we had found a steep shoreline in Acadia National Park in Maine that had the kind of jeopardy Marty wanted to see. We spent several days shooting plates with a giant construction crane and a spider cam."
Once back in California, CafeFX began temping a virtual version of the shot for editor Thelma Schoonmaker to use. "We just tracked a little miniature rock island into the shot and let them edit from that," Grossmann says. "We needed to make a digital version of the miniature lighthouse so we'd have more control to match the principal photography that was shot on the cliff in Maine." CafeFX used Autodesk 3ds Max to create the CG and Andersson Technologies SynthEyes for tracking.
Once the basic composition of the shot was determined, CafeFX worked with model makers at New Deal Studios in Marina del Rey, Calif., which had crafted a miniature lighthouse that was more than 10ft. tall. "We measured our original camera move from Maine and then replicated that move as close as we could," Grossmann says. "In case there were any natural characteristics in the photography that we needed to replicate digitally, we would have a reference for them. We could judge the amount of parallax and the way the light moved over the lighthouse—all of those details."
None of the camerawork was motion control, Grossmann says. "Because then we would have been totally locked to a camera move," he says. "Marty and Thelma didn't have a tendency to feel constrained by the camera moves that were actually shot, and we knew that this would be a shot where we might need to do a tilt-down or a re-frame or a punch-in.
"Whenever you have a shot that isn't 75 percent 'there' in-camera but is comprised of several pieces, you know that no one piece represents more than 25 percent of the final shot. In this situation, Marty had the freedom to move the camera wherever he wanted, so it wouldn't have made sense for us to lock in a motion-control move. We shot the miniature with high-res digital cameras and with motion picture film stock to capture the same tonality as the rest of the shot. We had to have the ability to rotate the lighthouse and scale it and make it match whatever camera moves we wanted to do. In this particular case, we shot the miniature and then put the image onto the geometry of our digital model."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
