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Monstrous Task

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

The choreographed chaos of Cloverfield.

Making a Monster

The Evolving Nature and Importance to the Story of Cloverfield's mysterious CG monster (so mysterious that, at press time, Paramount was refusing to give out pictures) greatly challenged the visual-effects team at Tippett Studio. The creature was intentionally designed to be only semi-visible for much of the movie, viewed through the lens of a non-professional videographer fleeing for his life. Most of those shots, therefore, had to evoke the notion of one seamless cut for lengthy periods. Plus, the shots involving the creature had to be built on an extremely modest budget and timeline — even as story elements kept changing late in the game.

“Before we could even begin working with the creature, a lot of the work involved assembling multiple plates to create one seamless cut,” says Tippett's Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Leven. “They shot pieces [of shots] with [the intent] of having us [put it all together] using different editorial and visual-effects techniques. So there was this big additional process of putting plates together, and sometimes, those plates didn't match very well. For example, there is a shot where an Army soldier shoots a rocket at the monster. Plate A shows the rocket going off on a certain part of the street. Plate B is a completely different part of the street, and yet we had to make the rocket trail one seamless trajectory. In those instances, we started in editorial to see if we could get away with a soft cut or a three-frame dissolve here or there. If that didn't work, we might try a basic morph, and if that didn't work, we might go to a 3D reconstruction of [that portion of] the city, if necessary. If none of that worked, we would use combinations of all those techniques.”

Tippett inherited the basic creature design from designer Neville Page, who provided 3D illustrations created in Pixologic ZBrush digital painting and texturing software. The company treated those models as 3D scan data, and then rebuilt the monster from scratch in Autodesk Maya. The initial challenge came in deciding how much detail to build into various parts of the monster's body, given the initial plan to keep the monster's details a bit of a mystery.

“We thought we would see him only in medium or wide shots, so we did not need to put in complete facial rigs,” Leven says. “But, of course, as the movie went on, filmmakers kept adding more shots, and at the end of the movie, we ended up having a huge shot that is completely full frame, full CG. So we had to keep going back and adding things as we went along. Therefore, toward the end of the project, we ended up doing a muscle simulation and adding a facial rig and subsurface scattering.”

According to Leven, the creature was designed to have a translucent, “almost albino quality” — a white monster, probably from the water, with very little exposure to sunlight. That presented Tippett with another problem: the fact that virtually the entire movie takes place at night in a city that has little electricity or light.

Thus, much of Tippett's labor involved tweaking the creature's color and skin texture and giving him a sense of scale. In particular, the addition of parasitic creatures that cling to the monster helped address the scale issue. The team also brought the camera closer to particular places on the creature's skin to let audiences see veins and pulsating blood clots just under the translucent surface.

“The parasites clinging to him — we treated them like barnacles,” Leven says. “When you eventually get to see how big those parasites really are, when they fall off him, it tells you how big he is in comparison to them — the creature is 300ft. tall, so humans can't interact much with him. So filmmakers had the parasites cling to him and then drop off — they are about the size of Rottweilers.”

Leven says that sequences such as the one in which the monster stampedes down a New York street while a B-52 drops bombs on him and the final, full-frame shot of the creature — supposedly shot by a plummeting video camera after the operator is eaten by the beast — were incredibly complicated to animate, match-move, and composite because of the wild camera approach to shooting the movie.

“The camera moves are insane, and so the match-move artists were the unsung heroes of the whole thing — led by [Match-move Supervisor] Devin Breese,” Leven says. “It wasn't that long ago that we were telling filmmakers that at least 50 percent of their shots had to be pan-and-tilt. And here, just a few years later, it's a complete free-for-all — total freedom for filmmakers. We used inhouse tools for that work, but it was largely done by brute force of hand. There are lots of good [off-the-shelf] software tools around now, but I think most people would agree there is nothing to match the eyeball of a good match-move artist.”

Tippett artists used Maya for animation and lighting, proprietary software for match-move work, Apple Shake for compositing, and Pixar RenderMan for rendering the creature. Chris Morley led the compositing team, Steve Reding was lighting supervisor for the creature shots, Tom Gibbons was the beast's animation supervisor, and Peter Konig was Tippett's art director on the project.
— Michael Goldman

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.