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MillimeterStep by Step: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Models, miniatures, and matte paintings were the main stock-in-trade of Industrial Light & Magic back when director Steven Spielberg and writer-producer George Lucas launched the Indiana Jones franchise with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the 27 years since then, 3D CGI, camera tracking, and digital compositing are among the techniques that have transformed visual effects in general and the art of matte painting in particular. So when ILM tackled the effects for the new Paramount/Lucasfilm release Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Digital Matte Artist Brett Northcutt was able to take 2D paintings, digital still photographs, 3D elements, and live-action footage and merge them into a seamless whole.
“A good example of the bag of tricks that we use in matte painting is a wide establishing shot of Akator, a key location in the film where there are Mayan-style pyramids,” Northcutt says. “These kinds of shots are always difficult because there’s always a tendency to want to have a shot that essentially shows you a map of the surroundings. But the challenge is to direct the eye to the point where you really want the audience to focus.”
In this matte painting, there is one pyramid in the foreground, another in the far distance framed against cliffs, and a mid-ground assortment of stone ruins. The distant pyramid is where the viewer should be focused, because it is from there that the film’s central characters will emerge. “The camera is moving forward and drifting past the pyramid on the left,” Northcutt says. “We start to see the characters as specks at an entranceway on the top of the far pyramid. By the end of the shot, they’ve run down the top stairway of that pyramid.”
Northcutt likens this image to a helicopter establishing shot, which traditionally would have been shown from a stationary POV. “But now when we have a high-angle shot like this, the director and the visual-effects supervisor want to try as much to make it look like it was filmed for real. If it were a lock-off, where would you shoot it from—would you hover over the land?”
“In the very beginning, Steven Spielberg established the shot choreography of the film with animatics done by Dan Gregoire. The animatic for this shot was basically just a rough pyramid shape for the background and one for the foreground—probably what most people would consider game quality,” Northcutt says. “It had a simple, linear camera that moved from A to B. We followed the animatic verbatim, though Jason Snell in our layout department created a more realistic camera move that was a little bit smoother. We tried to simulate the fact that maybe it was shot from a helicopter with a little bit of a drift. Jason also converted the scene so that we could start building it in our proprietary software.”
ILM’s proprietary software environment is called Zeno, which includes the proprietary projection-mapping software Zenviro. This enabled Northcutt to projection-map onto the matte painting footage of the actors, who had been photographed on a partial pyramid set. The actors had been shot with a static camera from about 30ft. away—which was not as far away as this matte painting required, so Northcutt shrank that footage way down. He took the reduced plate photography and projection-mapped it into the appropriate section of the pyramid painting, and then ran it through the camera move for the shot.
The painting of this pyramid was created by Northcutt in Adobe Photoshop, but as a foundation he used Autodesk 3ds Max to model a three-dimensional pyramid. “While I’m essentially creating 2D artwork in Photoshop for the final image, I started by building the pyramid in the distance with some pretty detailed geometry. I frankly wanted to build the pyramid in 3D because I wanted to be able to light it and see where all the shadows would fall. The cliffs behind it are pretty simple blobs of geometry—sort of like a diorama where the further away you get, the less detail there is.”
To determine the appearance of this pyramid, Northcutt used as reference the partial set on which the actors had been filmed. “That really helped us have a foundation of reality to work off of, especially to see how the lighting worked. When there’s nothing, it becomes very difficult to develop a quality of realism,” he says.
Northcutt had detailed references for the foreground pyramid, since that was actually built as a massive miniature by Kerner Company (ILM’s former model shop). “It was maybe four or five feet tall, and it was built because it was in multiple shots,” he says. “Matte artist Paul Houston and I took pictures of the pyramid from multiple angles to get textures, like all the vines that cover it. So I didn’t have to paint those. The foreground pyramid is a combination of the miniature from the Kerner Company and also some full-scale set reference photography that the actors were photographed on. So I was able to line up a lot of imagery to texture the painting.”
The midground between the two pyramids, which is scattered with stone ruins, was completely invented. “The ground is basically just a flat card,” Northcutt says. “I built it from hundreds of digital stills. ILM has an elements library that’s pretty expansive, but we also shot a lot of new elements. I shot the ground plane at a nearby ranch. It’s easiest to start with photography and real lighting rather than trying to change the reality when you start modeling and lighting things in 3D.”
But Northcutt did have to build the stone ruins with 3D geometry. “That was mostly because of the camera move. There’s a very subtle amount of parallax that’s noticeable when you see those ruins—you see them moving against the ground plane. I might have used some ‘rubble’ pictures, too,” he says. “It’s funny what gets matte artists excited these days as far as reference photography. Like, ‘Wow, look at this dirt!!’”
The decision was made to have shadows moving across the foreground pyramid in order to add movement to the scene and also to direct the viewer’s eye towards the sunlit distant pyramid where the actors would emerge. “I did something fun with that,” Northcutt says. “I projected moving-smoke elements onto geometry for the foreground. I created a black-and-white matte and then I created a key-lit ‘sunlit’ version and also an ambient version, using that moving-smoke matte. So with that, I was able to create the illusion of a cloud shadow passing over it. Over the course of the shot it actually goes from sunlight into shadow and it worked out well. As far as general shot design, it really helped because you see it at the beginning of the shot, but then as it goes into shadow and it starts to blend with the darker color in the background, your eye starts to move towards the far pyramid.”
The ability to add movement to a matte painting is essential to making it appear filmic. “We try to add as much movement as possible. It’s still baby steps getting away from the static matte paintings of the past, where if you were lucky you could add a blowing flag or a little smoke here or there to give it a bit of life. We’re slowly getting into more and more of that, with blowing trees and smoke and a lot more interactive environmental elements.”
For this painting, Northcutt says, “I used footage of real smoke from our elements library. What was kind of neat was that I took some footage and time-stretched it out so that I had 1,000 frames to work with. Then I mapped it onto a card in 3D space and then just moved it around and slip-synced which part of the footage was used. It looked pretty realistic. Then by moving it in different layers through 3D space, I was able to create a volume to make it look like a real cloud. It really helped give a sense of depth to the shot.”
Rendering of digital elements was done in Zeno with Pixar’s Renderman, and to integrate all of these elements, Northcutt used Adobe After Effects and Apple Shake. He used After Effects to create the animated projection map that included the actors, as well as lots of background mist and general atmosphere. “That basically served as the background,” he says. “Then in Shake, I composited in the foreground pyramid with the cloud shadows and then added the midground clouds.”
The final result was the product of countless elements. “I had close to 100 layers in [Adobe] Photoshop just for the projection maps. Then on top of that, there were several mist elements and lens flares and all the textures from the pyramid that were all cobbled together,” Northcutt says.
The Indiana Jones movies have always incorporated matte paintings to suggest environments with great scale and scope – the final shot of an endless warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark remains one of the most iconic matte paintings ever done. But today, matte artists like Brett Northcutt have a much broader array of tools available to make matte ‘paintings’ seem anything but painted. “My philosophy is to re-evaluate your techniques with every shot, because if you just stick with the same bag of tricks, you’re never going to evolve the craft.”
Credit Roll:
Director: Steven Spielberg
DP: Janusz Kaminski
Visual Effects Supervisor: Pablo Herman
Matte Painting Supervisor: Richard Bluff
Digital Matte Artists: Brett Northcutt, Paul Houston
Layout: Jason Snell
Previsualization Supervisor: Dan Gregoire
