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Reader SurveyEnabling Mike Nichols
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Richard Edlund spearheads invisible effects for Charlie Wilson's War.
Whodoo Efx used Autodesk Flame to create the seemingly endless refugee camp in Charlie Wilson's War using elements shot on location in Morocco and in California and incorporating CG crowd elements as well as textures shot with a high-resolution still camera.
Visual effects guru Richard Edlund says his second collaboration with director Mike Nichols on Universal Pictures' Charlie Wilson's War had a “much different gestalt” than their first gig together, on HBO's Angels in America in 2003 (see “Making Angels”). Angels, Edlund says, was a theatrical fantasy-based project for television, produced by Nichols, who brought Edlund onto the project after it was well underway. Charlie Wilson's War, on the other hand, was made for the big screen on a strictly controlled studio budget with a creative need to authentically replicate real historical events and locations and engage in grueling location shooting across the globe.
Still, there was a basic similarity between the two projects in terms of Edlund's contribution as visual effects supervisor.
“[On Angels], I learned how Mike wants to shoot, and through experience, I learned to let help him have it his way — to figure out how I could allow him to shoot things the way he wants to shoot them, and then be able to do whatever we need to do to successfully create his desired effect,” Edlund says. “He's brilliant, but with that brilliance, he can be somewhat eccentric in his approaches. So you have to find out what he needs — and you eventually figure out he's right, and you do whatever is necessary to make the movie better. I functioned as Mike's enabler on this movie.”
Key shot
In the case of Charlie Wilson's War, the film's approximately 200 digital effects shots included the need to build realistic but stylized views of the Las Vegas Strip and Washington, D.C., circa 1982, and a fantastic view of the Capitol's monuments as seen from Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson's apartment complex, looking across the Potomac. It also included the creation of photoreal, Soviet-made Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters and violent rockets and Gatling gun explosive rounds fired from those helicopters, which literally vaporize fields of fleeing Afghani Mujahideen fighters. The most significant requirement was the creation of the film's turning-point shot — a wide view of a seemingly endless refugee camp teeming with activity on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That view illustrates the moment in the film when Wilson's attitude profoundly changes.
“In the shot, Tom Hanks [playing Charlie Wilson] is on a hillside near the graveyard on one side of the camp and turns and looks across the camp and it goes on to infinity,” Edlund says. “With my friend [Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, BSC, ASC], who was also the cinematographer on Angels in America, we shot day plates for that [on location in Morocco].”
Edlund says the weather in Morocco was so unpredictable that the crew rebuilt at Mystery Mesa, near Santa Clarita, Calif., where they shot more camp-activity elements with hundreds of extras. “It was all pieces of great material,” he says. “So the art department and set decorator created another block square camp shot at Mystery Mesa, and fortunately, on the day of shooting for dramatic effect, it was very windy, so we had tents flapping in our matte shot as far as you can see. Mike felt that the foreground of the plate was lacking dramatic effect, so we took a big number of production vignettes — shots from both Morocco and Mystery Mesa — and put them into the foreground area. As Charlie gapes at the unbelievable scene he's witnessing, we pull out wide.”
“During the pullout, we rack focus and pull out extremely wide, which signals the shift in Charlie's viewpoint,” says Helena Packer, visual effects supervisor on the film from Whodoo Efx, Santa Monica, Calif. — the sole digital effects boutique used on the project and a close collaborator of Edlund's. “You cheat the perspective by making things a little larger than they need to be up front and do a very slow ramp pullout. It's not literal, but sort of like impressionistic art, and it was all [digitally stitched together] out of pieces of things we shot. There are some [digital people] in the distance in the crowd, but most of the people you see are rotoscoped extras. We did the whole thing in [Autodesk] Flame.”
Packer set up the project to have all 3D work and compositing done upstairs from Edlund's office in Santa Monica, with all of the CG work done in Autodesk Maya and all compositing done in Flame and Adobe After Effects. Edlund and Packer emphasize that, thematically, the vast majority of the work involved a similar approach as the refugee camp — the photographing of images and textures that were then digitally pieced together to fit Mike Nichols' specific creative needs. Even the CG Hind helicopters were skinned with strategically dented and roughed up metal textures from the one real Hind used during the production.
