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MillimeterStep by Step: Valkyrie
Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
MGM's Valkyrie is a World War II movie in which one of the most intricate visual-effects shots happens not in the heat of battle, but during an intimate moment on a dance floor. As we watch Colonel Von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) take his wife's hand to dance, a close-up reveals that his badly scarred hand is missing two fingers. It's a character point in Valkyrie that Von Stauffenberg didn't hide his war injuries, and Director Bryan Singer asked Visual Effects Supervisor Rich Hoover and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) to alter Cruise's appearance in hundreds of shots.
"In this particular shot, Tom's fingers are like a character," says SPI Digital Effects Supervisor Peter Nofz. "This scene is supposed to be a tender moment, and it also reveals that this man has lost his fingers. Yet we didn't want his hand to look so disturbing that it would distract the audience and take them out of the movie."
While filming the scene, Hoover had noted camera information that would help Nofz' team later track the hands in the plate photography using 2d3 boujou. "Rich made sure that we had basic information like distance to camera," Nofz says. "But when it came to any completely 3D information, there was nothing to actually record. So this shot was hard to track properly because the only thing we had was the plate itself and there was so much interaction between the two actors' hands."
Hoover decided against having Cruise wear green sleeves over the fingers that SPI would later remove, in order to avoid having green spill onto the fingers that remained. Instead, he had Cruise's makeup artist paint demarcation lines on the fingers with a darker shade of makeup that would be visible in the plate. "So we knew the point at which we weren't supposed to see fingers anymore," Nofz says. "The side benefit is that we got a plate and that gave us good references on what the fingers should look like from a lighting standpoint. If those fingers had been green, we would have been missing that information."
"[Back at SPI], we tried to replace the least amount possible of the fingers. We had scans of Tom's hand and extremely detailed photos of every nook and cranny for textural reference. Then—just in case we needed it—we built an entire CG hand."
SPI used Autodesk Maya to build the 3D stand-in, Maxon BodyPaint to create the scarred surface textures, and Pixar RenderMan for rendering.
The shot came together in Autodesk Flame, where the photographed fingers were rotoscoped out of the plate. "In creating a clean plate, we had to actually remove both hands to make room to put Tom's CG hand on first, and then put his wife's photographed hand on top," says Compositor Todd Mesher. "It was challenging because we had a partial CG hand for Tom, but we didn't have a CG hand for his wife. So how do you intertwine them to make them both look real?
"There was a lot of reconstruction of still frames and morphing and retracking to try and make that all work. I took the match-move information and massaged it into place. I laid the CG hand over the live-action plate and figured out where it could line up. By going back and forth, I could eventually retrack the CG hand that so it matched perfectly. We actually tried to use as little of that CG hand as possible. It was there to blend in if needed. It's really a marriage with Tom's photographed hand."
"This was not a linear process," Nofz says. "We would get a first version of the match move and then render it to get the best look that we could. Then Todd would play with it. Then we'd have the match mover go at it again with very detailed notes—such as, 'On frame 55, you're off by 5 pixels.' Then we'd render it again and send it back to Todd."
Achieving a properly scarred texture for Cruise's hand was also a very iterative process. "We probably went around the block two or three times to find the right amount of scarring and discoloration," Nofz says. "Our color and lighting people had the ability to dial it in. Then finally, Todd could make the scars more or less apparent. Because it was rendered in layers, Todd could play with it even at the last possible moment."
Having this degree of interactivity at the desktop was key to the workflow that SPI had for Valkyrie. "With this workflow, Rich Hoover and I could see iterations of the shot every 4 or 5 hours and figure out the next plan of action," Nofz says.
When the shot was complete, it was 293 frames long. "It's a shot that will go by in a few seconds, and yet I probably had this shot on my desk for at least four weeks," Mesher says.
Credit Roll:
Director: Bryan Singer
DP: Newton Thomas Sigel
Visual Effects Supervisor: Rich Hoover
Digital Effects Supervisor: Peter Nofz
CG Supervisor: Dan Eaton
Flame Compositor: Todd Mesher
Match Move Lead: John Giffoni
Modeler: Jim Doherty
Texture Painter: Dylan Gottlieb
Look Development Lead: Carlos Vidal
Lighters: Joosten Kuypers, Dan Lavender
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
