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Shutter Island Step by Step

Mar 1, 2010 12:00 PM

The next challenge was to integrate the lighthouse with the crashing ocean waves. New Deal Studios had built a base for the lighthouse that was a specific piece of rocky architecture, and CafeFX had to surround it with appropriately roiling seas. The water footage they had gotten in Maine wasn't turbulent enough to suggest sufficient jeopardy for DiCaprio's character, so Grossmann went in search of more treacherous seas.

"We scouted cliffs along the California coast and found an island of hostile and jagged rocks near Big Sur," he says. "It was about the right size for a lighthouse. At high tide, it was unconnected from the shoreline, but at low tide you could walk out on it. So we got really lucky—we found exactly what Marty had in mind. The cliffs from Maine would be the foreground, and the rocks from California would be the base for the lighthouse model."

Legato and Grossmann shot the California coastline on the same motion-picture stock Scorsese had used for principal photography. "That way, we'd have to spend a lot less time in compositing trying to get it all to match," Grossmann says. An exception to this rule was a bluescreen shoot done with actors playing security guards, which would also be composited into this shot. They were photographed with digital cameras because they would appear very small in the frame.

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To composite all these variable elements, CafeFX used Nuke (from The Foundry). "We had the rocky island from Big Sur but we still didn't know how big or small the lighthouse would ultimately appear on screen, so we needed the freedom to move things around quite a bit. Since we were compositing in Nuke, which has an in-depth 3D capability, one of the approaches we used was to create a [virtual] dome or a 360-degree environment," Grossmann says. "We could composite a montage of different live action plates so it created a total domed environment. We could put a camera in Nuke that matched a camera from the set, and wherever we pointed the camera you'd see a fully functioning live-looking version of that location.

"At Big Sur, we had put the camera up on a crane and shot large tiles of the entire area. We'd point the camera straight at the horizon and then roll 10 or 15 seconds of film for each quadrant. We'd pan and then re-set and shoot. So we could load all of these overlapping pieces of photography into Nuke and create a panorama of moving footage that was 180-degrees in any direction. If Marty decided to tilt up or reframe the camera, he had plenty of resolution in any direction."

In the end, Scorsese's Hitchcockian shot was a combination of many elements shot over many months. In addition to the foreground cliffs from Maine, the Big Sur rocks, the lighthouse model and bluescreen security guards, the shot included CG birds and ocean spray and skies shot by Grossmann in California. "I went out with a digital still camera and a special panographic head we'd made that allowed me to shoot large high-resolution skies in 360-degree domes," Grossmann says. "The sky was definitely separate from the rest of the plates. There was a ton of color correction involved in marrying all these elements together to make a water plate from Maine match one from California." The team at CafeFX made extensive use of Adobe Photoshop as they stitched these disparate elements into a whole.

Throughout it all, there was never any question that these elements would be as real-world as possible and not computer-generated. "Marty and Rob Legato are passionate about the old school," Grossmann says. "If we could capture something in camera, we did."

Credit Roll

Director: Martin Scorsese
Visual Effects Supervisor/Second Unit Director: Robert Legato
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Production Designer: Dante Ferretti
Miniatures: Matthew Gratzner, New Deal Studios

For CafeFX:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Ben Grossmann
Compositor: Can Chang
VFX Producer: Jonathan Stone
Composing Supervisor: Alex Henning
CG Supervisors: Adam Watkins, Luke McDonald
CG Artist: Minory Sasaki
FX Artist: Brandon Davis
Matchmoving: Emerick Tackett
Roto/Paint work: Mike Ek, Micah Gallagher

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