Integrated Team Effort
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Oscar-nominated visual-effects supervisors on the state of the art.
Facial animation of CG-enhanced character Davy Jones was done by hand after carefully studying what actor Bill Nighy was doing in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Photo: © Disney Photo Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Animation
The characters in this year's nominated films couldn't be more different, but the supervisors' animation strategies shared some commonalities. The CG robot characters in Tranformers, sporting layers of glossy paint and thousands of moving parts, were accomplished with brute-force animation. “We had 48 different transformations, and every one was a one-off,” Farrar says. “There was no way to do it procedurally.”
Pirates also relied on significant hand animation, especially for the dazzling CG speaking character Davy Jones. While ILM employed some motion capture of actor Bill Nighy, Knoll says, “We didn't even attempt facial animation. It was done by hand after carefully studying what Bill was doing.” Knoll says he is skeptical that facial capture would have worked anyway. “The capture process itself is very lossy. If you compare images of an actor during capture and the animated results, it's as if you're looking at an ‘emotional blur filter’ — like the corners of the performance have been rounded off and you only have about 70 percent left. That's what looks creepy.”
Photoreal animals were the central challenge of The Golden Compass, which features dozens of scenes with CG bears, monkeys, wolves, ferrets, raccoons, and dogs. One leading bear character had 7 million hairs. “Fur was still a challenge,” Fink says, adding that Framestore CFC came up with new approaches to creating muscle and fat and skin to make the bears move convincingly. “What was groundbreaking was the level of interactivity between the CG animals and the live actors. There would have been no story without those relationships.”
Simulation
While simulation strategies were employed judiciously to jiggle CG springs in Transformers and ripple animal pelts in The Golden Compass, simulation was a dominant technique in Pirates. In particular, a half-mile-wide maelstrom at sea has arguably advanced the art of CG simulation considerably.
“Previously we've done different types of simulations — cloth, particle, rigid-body, fluid — by using separate engines optimized for specific purposes. But it's becoming more and more necessary that things interact with each other,” Knoll says. “So a few years back, we switched over to the Stanford University-based simulation engine, which supports all of these different types of simulation. So we no longer have to do all sorts of tricks to fake that interaction.” (For an in-depth discussion of fluid-simulation strategies, see p. 30.)
Set effects
Despite all the digital developments on display in this year's Oscar-nominated films, there were still essential contributions made by traditional set-effects experts. It's a measure of their contributions that Trevor Wood was named among the nominees for The Golden Compass,while John Frazier earned Oscar nominations for both Pirates and Transformers. Fink says that Wood built a motion base that enabled a child actress to ride on the back of an animated bear. “Trevor built all the actuators and mechanical bits in CG first and then we watched the bear animation with this machine animation inside, to make sure that what we were building would do what we needed,” Fink says. “He then took the CG data, exported that to a computer-controlled machine, and machined the parts to make the motion actuators. And it worked right out of the box.”
Frazier also faced a major mechanical challenge in Pirates, building a huge gimbal that could roll 110 degrees. Knoll says he felt that ILM could use physical ship models because digital tools could correct traditional drawbacks. “Today's technology can fix problems like depth of field and water droplet sizes. We got to have the fun of shooting big boats in a tank, and you couldn't tell they were models. It was the best of both,” Knoll says.
On Transformers, countless cars had to be flipped as though they were pushed by rampaging robots, while miniature buildings were demolished by robots run amok. But Farrar says that shooting elements separately and compositing them in later is still not trivial. “You have to distort them like crazy if they're going track correctly in the shot,” he says.
Parallel post
An undeniable reality of today's visual-effects-heavy films is that they often require collaboration among multiple facilities. Knoll employed Digital Domain and Asylum on Pirates, using teleconferences to foster communication. But The Golden Compass may have set records, with nine shops participating. Fink calls the process “parallel post,” and he says that some shots include the work of four different facilities. “We had a team of coordinators who did nothing but shuffle elements,” he says. The team used cineSync conferences and Sohonet hubs in Los Angles and London to transfer data. “We had so many 2K files flying around that FTP sites were not adequate. FedEx saved us in the end.”
So the degree of difficulty in modern visual effects is measurable on several fronts. That's unlikely to diminish, but Farrar thinks the best visual effects can be evaluated with one simple question: “Is it a good idea?” Quoting multi-visual-effects-Oscar-winner Dennis Muren, Farrar jokingly says, “‘We can do anything.’ We just don't want to!”
- Michael Fink shared this year's Academy Award for Achievement in Visual Effects for The Golden Compass with Bill Westenhofer (Rhythm & Hues), Ben Morris (Framestore CFC), and Trevor Wood (special effects).
- Scott Farrar shared the nomination for Transformers with Scott Benza (ILM), Russell Earl (ILM), and John Frazier (special effects).
- John Knoll shared the nomination for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End with Hal Hickel (ILM), Charles Gibson (visual effects supervisor), and John Frazier (special effects).
