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MillimeterOne Hour Photo
Oct 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Ellen Wolff
Snapshot of an Effect
 Background plate of Robin Williams. |
Fox Searchlight's One Hour Photo is an unusual film in many respects, not the least of which is Robin Williams' unnerving portrayal of an obsessive photo clerk. Through this character's eyes, director Mark Romanek reveals a world where danger seems to lurk beneath the surface of everyday events. Unlike many suspense films, however, One Hour Photo uses visual effects extremely sparingly, so when these images do appear, their power is palpable.
One shocking dream sequence begins with a shot of Williams' character standing alone in an aisle of the SavMart mega-store where he works. The shelves are stripped bare and harsh fluorescent light bathes everything in an eerie glow. Suddenly, a bloody tear forms in Williams' right eye, and the whites of his eyes appear blood red. As the camera remains close, the blood rolls down his cheek and runs into the furrows of his face.
To accomplish this effect, Romanek relied on 3D CGI from Richard “Dr.” Baily of Image Savant, and 2D painting and compositing from Method Studios' Chris Staves. “Mark realized that CG would be the best way to do this so he could get the timing just right,” recalls Staves. “Besides, he wanted the tear to start welling up even before Robin opened his eyes.”
One thing that was done practically was fitting Williams with red contact lenses, which covered most of his eyes. Staves extended the red into the corners left uncovered, painting this in Inferno on an SGI. “I basically created a frame of it and then tracked that into the eye,” he explains.
Meanwhile, Baily began the animation process by stabilizing Romanek's plate photography to provide a rock solid image. “Otherwise you're animating to a moving target,” he notes. Analysis of the image was done with proprietary software and then stabilized using Apple/Nothing Real's Shake running on SGI hardware. “The transformations that stabilized this image were stored away,” explains Baily, “because they'd need to be applied to the animation later to make the tear move with Robin's face.”
 Wireframe model of 3D animated tear. |
Baily also used proprietary software to model what he calls “this strange object.” Because the tear is so prominent onscreen, it had to behave with convincing realism despite its surreal nature. It had to well up just above the lower eyelid and then spill over in a particular way so that Williams' bottom eyelashes would distort the tear as it poured from his eye. “The animation had to take into account the protrusions and deformations that individual eyelashes would cause to the surface tension of the tear,” says Baily. “Every eyelash had to be accounted for.”
Romanek had a very precise vision of how this tear should fall. As it dripped down Williams' cheek, it had to curve around the hills and valleys of the actor's face and bleed into his pores. “It couldn't just roll over his skin,” says Staves. “As it hits each crease it instantly fills that crease and spreads out.” This required Baily to gradually alter the shape, changing it from a rounded liquid into a thinning trail of blood that revealed Williams' skin beneath it. “There's a morph — basically a weighted interpolation between these different stages — so that the shape modulates as the tear streams down his cheek,” Baily explains. “I rotoscoped the positions of the creases in his skin and put those little rivers in there. That became part of the interpolation as well.“
 Smooth shaded model of the tear. |
The animation process that Baily followed actually began with a wireframe version. Once that was approved, he loaded it into Wavefront Preview software — which is no longer marketed — and matched it up with the plate photography. To marry this animation to the plate, Baily used the transformations he had stored away from his plate stabilization, and in Preview, he assigned lights to the object. “The highlights on the tear are what give it a 3D look,” he notes.
Using Thomson Digital Images' renderer, Baily wrote a shader and ray-traced the CG tear. He rendered the tear over the background with the ray tracer so the colors of Williams' skin would show through. “You can see through it to Robin's complexion, including all the follicles and pores of his face,” he says. (The TDI renderer has been around for over four years and, like Preview, is no longer marketed. “A huge cult of users lament its passing. Leave it to the French to come up with a poetic method for calculating ray tracing!” Baily asserts.)
What Baily finally delivered to Method for compositing was a rendered element that also contained information on the parts of Robin's face behind the tear. “I provided an opaque matte for the tear which actually punches a hole in the background,” he explains. “So, for the area under the tear they didn't actually use the plate photography. They could just place the tear over the background and do a color correction on it.” Method blended the tear into the photography of Robin's skin, added a subtle shadow underneath it, and tracked it into the movements on his face.
 Final composite. |
To complete the stark feeling of the shot, Method did significant Inferno work on the bright white room surrounding Williams. “Mark wanted it to be as pristine as possible because it was a dream,” says Staves. “We painted out all kinds of details, down to little shelving screws, so that this environment would be perfect and hyper-real.”
The final effect is an iconic, simple image that's both poignant and disturbing, and that speaks volumes about the film's central character. As that character observes in the movie, “Most people don't take snapshots of the little things. But these are the things that make up the true pictures of our lives.”
Credit Roll
Director - Mark Romanek
DP - Jeff Cronenweth
For Image Savant:
Digital Animation Artist - Richard “Dr.” Baily
For Method Studios:
Lead Inferno Artist / Effects Supervisor - Chris Staves
Inferno Artist - Cedric Nicolas
Visual Effects Producer - Justin Lane
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
