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MillimeterStep by Step: Watchmen
Apr 3, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Phantasmagorical effects abound in Warner Bros.’ Watchmen, which isn’t surprising given its origin as a graphic novel about superheroes. But alongside the film’s otherworldly visual effects, Director Zack Snyder employed effects to recreate—with notable twists—famed events in history. Among the milestones depicted in Watchmen is the 1963 shooting of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.
For this, the film’s Visual Effects Supervisor John “D.J.” Des Jardin called upon CIS Hollywood.
“Zack wanted to recreate iconic moments and show how they’d be slightly different in a parallel world inhabited by superheroes,” says Bryan Hirota, visual-effects supervisor at CIS Hollywood. Of course they weren’t able to go back to Dallas’ Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was shot, so Des Jardin simply filmed a presidential limo and the actors in a parking lot. It was then up to Hirota’s team to recreate a big-screen version of this event.
The signature images of Kennedy’s assassination are from the grainy home-movie footage captured by bystander Abraham Zapruder, and that’s where Hirota began. “We took the Zapruder film and stabilized it so we could get a really good look at it,” he says. “We also looked online for as many photos of Dealey Plaza as we could find. We wanted to see what kind of cars were parked there and where people were standing on the grassy knoll near the road where Kennedy’s limo was driving. We used Google Maps to get a street view, and we panned around to get the layout of the land. Aside from the size of the trees, it’s still the same.”
The shot Snyder wanted starts with Kennedy’s motorcade arriving, with the camera dollying around. “It’s a God’s eye view because you actually see Zapruder filming the scene,” Hirota says. “Then you see the impact of the shot, and the camera pans around and you see the limo speed away.” Snyder’s twist on history was to include the superhero character The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as a player in the scene, embodying the belief of conspiracy buffs that there was another shooter besides assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “Our camera pans over, and you see The Comedian on the grassy knoll going behind a picket fence,” Hirota says.
CIS Hollywood used a combination of 3D CG elements and 2D matte painting projections to re-create Dealey Plaza. Hirota’s team used Adobe Photoshop for matte painting and Autodesk Maya to build 3D elements and to do the matte painting projections. “We built 3D geometry where necessary and we rendered it in [Pixar] RenderMan,” Hirota says. “Because the camera was moving so much, we’d then take an image and project it back onto the geometry that we’d built and see how it all worked. When we had it in 3-space, sometimes we’d have to clean up the painting projected on the 3D models to make sure that there was no stretching. The moving camera is why we couldn’t just track in a 2D matte painting. The camera is both moving in 3D space and it’s panning around. The camera travels down the road as well, so the environment had to be 3D.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.