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Step By Step: Quantum of Solace

Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

           

Upping the ante for the 22nd James Bond movie was no small feat. But the Columbia Pictures release Quantum of Solace boasts a novel approach to a jaw-dropping sequence in which actors Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko leap from a burning plane and plummet to a sinkhole in the desert below. Director Marc Forster and Visual Effects Supervisor Kevin Tod Haug challenged London-based Double Negative (DNeg) to design this 15-shot sequence in a way that would let audiences see the actors up close as they tumbled to earth.

DNeg Visual Effects Supervisor Alex Wuttke says he considers this bodyflight sequence among the most difficult of the 340-plus shots they created for the film. “Kevin wanted to to capture the event entirely in a photographic way and then choose the camera moves later,” he says. DNeg's solution was to embed a semicircular array of 15 synchronized digital cameras — eight Dalsa 4K Origins and seven CineAlta F23s — into the walls of a wind tunnel, where the actors and their stunt doubles were photographed being tossed around. Tracking markers on the tunnel wall helped DNeg calibrate the cameras' relative positions. This event-capture approach yielded about 140 degrees of coverage from the cameras' POVs, and having all this footage allowed DNeg to reconstruct a dynamic sequence in post.

“We came up with this technique by doing research into computational photography, an area of computer graphics that is quite new,” Wuttke says. “Previous approaches, like ‘bullet time’ in The Matrix, wouldn't have worked because we'd have had to be prescriptive of the camera move ahead of time, and we couldn't have choreographed a camera moving around people who were tumbling out of control. In essence, it's taking a stereo pair of cameras with slight offsets between them, so you're looking at images in the computer and finding the parallax between those points — which effectively gives you depth. That was the foundation for the technique.”

“On top of that, we positioned cameras in high and low positions outside of the main array,” says DNeg 2D Supervisor Victor Wade. “That gave us additional unique viewpoints. It helped with the reconstruction to see the actors from as many different angles as possible. We had a huge volume of data from which we made selects.”

Heavy rotoscoping with DNeg's inhouse tool Noodle was necessary to lift the characters off the background. “Then we used a process called ‘shape-carving’ using silhouettes,” says Wuttke,who notes that proprietary software called Double Vision enabled this process. “We used an algorithm that looked at the matte left over from the roto — wherever it appeared solid was inside the subject, and wherever it was black was outside. We carved out the geometry to effectively give us the actors' shapes in 3D space, and we did that for all the different angles that we'd captured from the photography.”

This process yielded human shapes in rough-mesh form, which the DNeg team dubbed ‘garbage bag’ people. “They looked like real people covered by plastic bags,” Wade says. “But we could see the essence of their action — your brain tells you that they're people.”

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