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MillimeterDigital Zombies Attack
Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
George Romero's latest generation of zombies, in Land of the Dead, aren't only more numerous and more deadly than ever before; they are more digital. Romero's zombies have appeared in feature films since 1968's classic Night of the Living Dead, but this is the first time the director has used digital effects to portray them.
A simple, prosthetic zombie head (top) received extensive digital enhancement (bottom) in this scene, and others, in Land of the Dead.
Romero's original plan for Land of the Dead was for practical effects, with limited digital enhancements. Early on, he realized he could get more ambitious if he went digital with certain sequences. He hired Spin Productions, Toronto, to create most of the film's 300 visual effects shots.
“Originally, we quoted about 70 shots for the project,” explains Jeff Campbell, Spin's visual effects supervisor. “Basically, though, it's cheaper and more creative to finish [certain practical] shots digitally, especially when locations don't exist, so our shot count quickly grew. We also helped George digitally pre-visualize scenes extensively.”
In particular, Spin took over a key sequence in the movie, known as the “headless priest” scene.
“The sequence was shot live-action with a dummy and a green-hooded actor representing the headless priest,” says Campbell. “We went digital because of the difficulty controlling the action of the [original animatronic] head, which dangled by a few cords. The dummy gave us great lighting reference, and so we scanned the dummy using an Eyetronics portable scanning system to give us a 3D model and textures. We then developed photo-real hair for the character, thanks to the Shave and a Haircut (v. 3.4) Maya plug-in [made by Joe Alter], painted out the priest dummy from the live-action plates, animated and lit the headless priest attacking, and then tracked and composited the digital character back onto the live-action plates.”
