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Creation Step by Step

Jan 29, 2010 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

When we see a bird begin pecking at the maggots through the eye hole of the skull, it's an actual bird photographed in close-up against a bluescreen. "We basically had a bird come through a painted hole," Amiel says. "Then Paul comped that into the skull environment and matched it with the seething mass of maggots that we'd already shot." Since there was no pan up from the maggots to the bird, which Amiel wanted, Graff created that camera move with After Effects.

To show the bird flying upward from the skull and into a hedgerow, Crazy Horse combined a variety of source materials. A practical hedgerow set was photographed with a silk behind it, and Stromberg created matte-painted extensions. Those were combined in After Effects with bluescreen photography of a bird in flight. Bird wranglers were required to handle the live-action footage. "We needed to have the nest in the hedgerow fall over and have the fledgling fall out," Paul Graff says. "When they filmed the fledgling falling from the nest, someone on set had a super-soft pillow to catch it."

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"The bird fluttering against the hedgerow was a triumph of compositing and jiggery-pokery," Amiel says. "There were a number of times when the visual-effects team rescued us by creating elements that we didn't really have."

Interestingly, Amiel says, the demise of the fallen fledgling that ends the sequence—a time-lapse shot done by Nick Pitt—didn't need much post treatment except for color correction and a camera zoom added in After Effects.

"The photoreal photography from Farm Studio was so beautiful that it was a very demanding challenge for our visual effects to match that level," Paul Graff says. "We could only accomplish that by using as many real elements as possible."

Crazy Horse used Neat Image and Neat Video software to filter out any noise and grain in the footage, and did the requisite camera tracking using Andersson Technologies SynthEyes software. The assembly of the VFX shots was done in Apple Final Cut Pro.

Looking back on the creation of this pivotal sequence in Creation, Amiel says, "With visual effects, you consistently find yourself up against the edge of what you know. These days, anything you dream with sufficient vividness can be done. Dreaming it was not the problem—achieving it was!"

Credit Roll

Director: Jon Amiel
DP: Jess Hall
Time-lapse DP: Nick Pitt for Farm Studio
Editor: Melanie Oliver

For Crazy Horse Effects:
VFX Supervisor/Compositing: Paul Graff
VFX Designer/Matte Painter: Robert Stromberg
VFX Producer/Editor: Christina Graff
Compositor: Matt Collorafice

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