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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.
Visual-effects house Rhythm & Hues, which teamed with Digital Domain on the project, was largely responsible for the film's creature work, including Yetis and a three-headed dragon.
CG sets were largely avoided, and under sometimes grueling conditions, Duggan's team spent much of its time capturing effects plates during principal photography without the benefit of motion control and, often, greenscreens.
Indeed, the DP and the visual-effects team all say that one of the great leaps forward in the state of the visual-effects industry is the ability to capture workable plates through the natural flow of the photographic process, thanks to great confidence in advances in tracking software and a growing range of post options.
“We tended to use as little greenscreen as possible, and when we used it, it was to enable set or location extensions or add additional background elements such as CGI characters behind our actors,” Duggan says. “At times, we were shooting in gale-force winds in a sandy desert location outside of Beijing.Setting up greenscreens there was sometimes impossible, and our visual-effects crew had to make the decision, at times, to rotoscope our characters when scenes required the addition of background elements behind them. At times, complete CGI backgrounds were created from the still photographic references taken by the effects crew at those locations.”
“Long gone is the day of motion control and screen work for this kind of shoot,” Hynek says.
“Here we go to the desert [in China],put together a package of what we need to shoot for this or that, and they say, ‘Don't bother bringing those big greenscreens,’” Butler says. “‘You'll have to use techniques to extract and composite layers.’ That means we let Rob do what he wanted and we pulled [mattes] off that. In our case, we improved on techniques we have used for a while — combining [The Foundry's] Nuke compositing package, which allows us to incorporate rotoscope splines in the composite, combined with optical flow techniques for perspective. Then you can post-apply motion-blur attributes to those profiles to create a matte that is very similar to a scene-derived matte, and it ends up looking very good.”
Cohen had Digital Domain and Rhythm & Hues split up most of the effects shots based on each company's specialty. Thus, most of the creature work — most prominently, a three-headed dragon, Yeti creatures, and a Nian beast that is essentially a combination of a giant dog and a lion — was handled by Rhythm & Hues. Digital Domain focused on major battles between rival armies of undead warriors and development of the terra-cotta-styled warriors and the digital, Jet Li-inspired, shape-shifting, Chinese emperor mummy who serves as the movie's villain. Many times, however, the two facilities shared shots, with R&H creatures sewn into Digital Domain battle shots or Digital Domain's emperor mummy brought into contact with the creatures created at R&H.
Spears, visual-effects supervisor on the project from Rythm & Hues and a seasoned veteran of big CG pictures, says even by the standards he's used to, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is particularly notable for the scale and volume of the visual-effects requirements.
“The sheer complexity and number of shots probably makes this one of our tougher shows,” he says. “The biggest problem for us was the scale of what is going on, and the schedule for getting it all done. There is a lot of interaction [between CG characters] and the real world in this film, for instance.”
Jet Li, the mummy
Li is seen in human form only briefly at the start and end of the picture; he is a synthetic character for most of the movie. Developing his mummy proved to be one of the key challenges involved with designing the entire movie.
“In his mummy form, he and his whole army are terra cotta — meaning they are supposed to be [clay-like] inanimate objects that come to life,” Butler says.
“Originally, the Jet Li mummy was supposed to be terra cotta the whole way through, and that made him not all that expressive,” Hynek says. “The idea of the terra cotta moving and cracking meant it limited how expressive the character could be. So Rob thought that might be too distracting for the entire movie, and asked us to try something to differentiate him a bit. So we created the ‘under-mummy’ idea — the notion that underneath the terra cotta is the real emperor character, all burned and desiccated, so eventually he breaks out and we see him like that.”
