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MillimeterDr. Manhattan Project
Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Tech secrets from Watchmen.
To create the Dr. Manhattan character for Watchmen, Director Zack Snyder and Visual Effects Supervisor John “D.J.” Des Jardin opted to build actor Billy Crudup a motion-capture suit that incorporated a densely packed mesh of blue LEDs in order to provide an interactive light source on set consistent with the character’s nature. They then used Crudup’s live-action performance as reference for a largely hand-crafted CG character, which was built at Sony Pictures Imageworks.
All photos TM & © DC Comics, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Whenever embarking upon the creation of a “spectacular smorgasbord of visual craziness” in a major feature film — as Director Zack Snyder describes the visual effects in his new movie, Watchmen — it's usually a good idea to make sure you can actually accomplish what you envision. This was the prickly question facing Snyder and his collaborators when they first began developing a plan for making the superhero-themed, graphic-novel-inspired movie.
The film, slated at press time to debut in March, is based on a legendary comic series created by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons (who served as a consultant on the project) that portrayed the adventures of a group of costumed vigilantes in an alternate version of the United States in the 1980s as the nation hurtles perilously close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. To pay homage to Gibbons' iconic imagery, Watchmen features almost 1,000 shots involving digital effects, which were crafted at four visual-effects facilities (Culver City, Calif.'s Sony Pictures Imageworks; The Moving Picture Company's Vancouver, B.C., facility; Toronto's Intelligent Creatures; and CIS Hollywood). A host of images — the destruction of cityscapes, a glass palace on Mars, one character's unique flying ship known as the Owl Ship, the organic mask of another character called Rorschach, and much more — all posed unique challenges for the visual-effects team, under direction from Visual Effects Supervisor John “D.J.” Des Jardin.
Manhattan Method
The vexing question as the project got under way, which had to be solved ahead of all other challenges, was how to realistically and logistically create the iconic and extremely powerful character known as Dr. Manhattan. In both the graphic novel and the movie, Manhattan is a physicist whose body is ripped apart until he reconstructs it as, essentially, a perfect male specimen — teeming with unlimited energy, constantly glowing blue, and able to grow to unlimited heights. Picking a methodology for creating Dr. Manhattan and confirming through tests that it would be both feasible and believable on the big screen was, in Snyder's words, the central issue “that made the entire movie viable.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
