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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.
Digital stills
Edlund, a world-class still photographer whose work over the years has graced record album covers and been exhibited in galleries, photographed many of those elements himself using a Nikon D200 10-megapixel camera. Virtually all the pieces of the nighttime, stylized shot of Washington, as seen through Wilson's apartment window, were captured by that camera. Edlund arranged them as a collage, and pieces that did not fit the creative intent of the shot were then painted out or manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and in Autodesk Flame at Whodoo, and then inserted into bluescreen plates, which had been shot on a stage at Paramount Studios by Goldblatt's team.
Those background plates were filmed against a gigantic bluescreen, which was designed by special effects coordinator John Hartigan, and interlaced with red, blinking LEDs arranged into 4'×4' grids to create hot-tracking points for the Whodoo team to use during the compositing phase. Whodoo then added moving water, cars, and twinkling lights — all animated in Maya.
“At 10 megapixels, the camera gives you the equivalent of a 4K scan, and the chip is the same size as a 35mm film frame, basically,” Edlund says. “So I got a number of those images out of the camera, and when we put them together, we wound up with an excellent 16K image.”
For the shot illustrating the view of the Las Vegas Strip, the filmmakers couldn't use modern still photos because the Strip has changed so dramatically since the early 1980s. Instead, they painstakingly researched the look of the Strip back then and had artists Michelle Moen and Roger Kupelian create a sophisticated matte painting. They then added CG elements — particularly for blinking neon signs — and combined that with stock footage from that era of cars driving down the Strip.
It was all put together via “some extremely fine compositing work” at Whodoo, according to Packer. Tracking was more complex for that shot, because there was no opportunity to use the kind of bluescreen that the Washington shot featured. Packer says her team used PFTrack (from The Pixel Farm) and Flame to track elements to the background plate.
Still, Edlund suggests that a background in still photography is crucial for this kind of visual-effects work, and he says it is a skill and knowledge that is sometimes lacking in today's industry.
“The whole intent of visual effects is to create shots that are believable — that look like they were shot with a movie camera at 24fps,” Edlund says. “You have to create them and intercut them with shots that really do come from a 24fps movie camera, so you better understand what is going on photographically to make the shots match. … Supervisors who have a background in computer science, and hopefully art, need to see the classic movies, like Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai, and study the photographic artifacts and understand the tricks you can do with photography to fool the audience into making them believe what you want them to believe from the shot. That's why it is better, when possible, to shoot high speed, or shoot miniatures, and then mix or intercut that into [digital shots]. I prefer to use reality as much as possible for such things.”
Hose of death
At the same time, illustrating reality and achieving a filmmaker's aesthetic needs have to happen simultaneously when working for Mike Nichols. Therefore, one of the film's most prominent effects — Russian helicopters gunning down fleeing Mujahideen and Afghani villagers — was intentionally crafted to have an almost video-game feel to it.
Edlund and Packer say the tracer fire, dubbed “the hose of death” by Edlund, pictured in those scenes is both realistic and stylized at the same time.
“The Russian pilots and gunners were flying over fleeing people and villages and literally hosing them down with the rapid-firing, multiple-barreled Gatling guns, which spewed tracers, explosive rounds, and lead,” Edlund says. “In our research footage, it looked like they were watering the lawn.”
Indeed, Packer emphasizes that their research indicated that video of real helicopter attacks very much evoked that video-game aesthetic.
“We saw lots of real video footage from combat in Afghanistan during this period, and that is what really happened — people were instantly obliterated when they were hit,” she says. “There was very little left of them — some smoke and rubble, and they disappeared, except maybe for a body part here or there. At the same time, Mike Nichols did not want there to be lots of blood and gore or body parts in those shots. …
“But the tracers actually did shoot out and ricochet around and obliterate people. The 50-caliber guns actually fire at such a fast rate that looks something like that. And the people who manufacture those tracers actually have different formulas for the phosphorus in them, so they can be seen best at different times of the day or night [in order to allow planes to see the direction of their bullets]. We styled it around the sunset formula, actually — a reddish/orange color similar to what they really used at that time of day.”
