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MillimeterMummy Reboot
Jul 1, 2008 11:00 AM, By Michael Goldman
Rob Cohen steers franchise's visual effects in a new direction.
Director Rob Cohen wanted a different feel to his Mummy movie, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, so he brought in an entirely new creative team.
Coming off of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor — the biggest, most expensive, and most complicated project of his career — director Rob Cohen marvels at the changes in visual effects that have occurred in the 12 years since he directed his first effects effort, 1996's Dragonheart.
“Back then, we were dealing with full roto — ILM[Industrial Light & Magic] would have been happy if I never moved the camera,” he says. “We were trying things that weren't done much in those days — shooting a creature in daytime rather than hiding him at night, putting more reflective surfaces on him, giving him the personality of an actor [Sean Connery], and so on. Interactivity was very difficult. The dragon — if we wanted him to touch something, we had to rig it. If he cut a tree with his tail, we had to have a separate [physical] tree-separating gag for perfect timing on the set. There was no flexibility.
“Now, that's all changed,” Cohen says. “In [The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor], we do any kind of interaction — with water, wood chips, clay shards. We have martial-arts contact between spears and [CG] terra-cotta warriors. The amount of contact in that sequence alone was impossible in 1996. In 12 years, it really has become a whole other digital universe.”
In addition to directing the film, Cohen served as chief for the visual-effects effort for the third movie in the Mummy franchise — work done primarily by two visual-effects houses, Digital Domain and Rhythm & Hues (R&H). One requirement of that work, and for the movie's visuals generally, was to get far away from the look of the first two Mummy movies — directed by Stephen Sommers, who serves as a producer on this project — and move in a different direction.
“That's not to say I didn't like those films — I have total love and respect for Stephen,” Cohen says. “I'm proud to say I think what we achieved builds on what he did in the first two films in sense of the entertainment value, but it shows a franchise can have new muscularity and strike off in new directions and doesn't have to be the same thing that came before. I told them when they asked me to direct the movie that I was going to do my own movie, not connected to Stephen's work — his technique or sense of humor or visuals — or the effects houses, or anything. It's a reboot of the franchise. I wanted it to be more textured and historical and edgy and intense.”
Extensive sets were built on backlots in China in an effort to minimize CG sets, with a gold-hued and red-hued palette emphasized.
New approach
Thus, the movie pushes the franchise away from Egypt and into China for an entirely new visual palette and story direction. In keeping with that move, Cohen hired a new creative team for the franchise. He brought in cinematographer Simon Duggan to shoot the piece, Kelly Matsumoto and Joel Negron to edit the movie, and Nigel Phelps to handle production design. He then asked Digital Domain's Joel Hynek and Matthew Butler and Rhythm & Hues' Derek Spears to head up visual effects, working strategically to link the two facilities for the duration of the project while they crafted the bulk of almost 1,000 digital effects shots for the movie.
“Digital Domain was my preferred effects house before this project, and because of the sheer volume of material, we knew we had to pair them with someone who would be a good fit,” Cohen says. “Rhythm & Hues and Digital Domain are physically close to each other [in Venice, Calif.], and [R&H] was the other logical independent company to think of, considering their experience with creatures. I asked the two to commit to work together, including the sharing of proprietary software and data, and that's what they did.”
Cohen and Phelps designed a basic Chinese palette for the film, according to the director. “A lot more gold, a lot more red, a lot more warmth,” Cohen says. “A lot more texture. Nigel and our Chinesedesign team gave us an art department that I really think gave us more detail than you've seen in a movie in a long time. It was almost like going back to the days of the studio system, when you had all these artisans on hand. That's what we had — it was pretty amazing.”
During a production cycle that took almost a year in various locations in China and the Montreal area, Dugganshot the film using two lightweight Arricam Lites, an Arriflex 235, and an Arriflex 435 Xtreme high-speed camera, shooting Super 35 (2.35:1) with a set of Cooke Optics S4/i prime lenses and a full set of Angenieux Optimo zoom lenses. In desert settings and on massive sets built on various backlots in China, the shoot was a particularly grueling one for the production team, according to the DP.
“For a brief moment in the pre-production stage, we looked into shooting with a digital medium, but decided to go with film,” Duggan says. “In hindsight, we made the right decision as we were often shooting with very high-contrast exterior lighting conditions, such as backlit snow and desert sands. The cameras were also subjected to the most physically arduous conditions during our shoot. The snow-covered Himalayan sets were created using tons of Epsom salts, and snowflakes were created with detergent. Some of the visual-effects team's computer equipment would break down in this corrosive atmosphere. And in China, the equipment was sandblasted by windstorms a few times.
“Rob wanted very dynamic visualsfor the film, and the cameras were mostly in handheld mode or flying around on the end of a Technocrane. We also imported a remote-controlled Ultimate Arm [camera crane] and attached it to a Mercedes four-wheel-drive tracking vehicle that a specialized crew of four drove around in China. We used that system extensively on all of our [chase scenes through the streets of Shanghai], when the heroes are chasing after the Emperor's chariot. We got some amazing shots not possible with a standard crane-mounted vehicle.”
