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MillimeterNext-Gen Indy
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
New techniques deliver traditional looks on the latest in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Much of the centerpiece action sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull involves traveling through the jungle, and Kaminski says lighting was an essential part of making the sequence work. The crew brought a 40K Luminsys SoftSun instrument into the jungle, which they used to light the actors in the jeeps. Top Photo: David James. TM & © 2008 Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used under authorization.
Visual effects
Within the production, the role of ILM's visual-effects team involved augmenting and tweaking photography and practical stunts and creating realistic CG creatures along the way that fit into Spielberg's “epic aesthetic,” in the words of Helman.
“It's not a big effects show, but it does have 560 shots — about 45 or 50 minutes of screen time — and it has all the markings of an epic Spielberg movie,” Helman says. “By epic, I mean really wide lenses the majority of the time, and unique camera work and lens choices, composition, blocking, and geography that is very specific to how [Spielberg] likes to work. All of that had to get translated and bleed into the visual-effects work, our lighting, and so on.
“[Having synthetic images bleed into practical plates and sequences required] a great level of integration of a lot of different disciplines at ILM. I've never worked on a show where more integration of departments has been done than this one. Our digital matte department, compositing, TDs, creature development, simulations — all those areas had to routinely work together just to create single shots. That emulated what we did on the entire show. [ILM's] work really went hand in hand with the special-effects work of the team led by [Special Effects Coordinator] Dan Sudick and [Stunt Coordinator] Gary Powell.”
In particular, the amount of shots, and the complexity of those shots, required ILM to greatly ramp up its R&D capabilities. Even so, Helman says the development of the visual-effects work had a particular advantage in having Spielberg in charge of the whole effort. The director, Helman says, for all of his preference for practical, nuts-and-bolts filmmaking, has become particularly adept at “seeing parts of the whole, and understanding what those parts will do together.”
“We developed some very important tools that were needed to get this movie done on time,” Helman says. “Without them, this would not have been the exact same movie — not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also from a scheduling point of view. We had eight or nine months to develop tools, but because of the complexity of the work, that timeline still felt really compressed. The simulation we did for the end of the movie, for instance, took months. So there is no time [in that schedule] to see it all together. You see parts of it, and then imagine what it will do.
“And that's a really great thing about [Spielberg]. He knows visual effects so well, and is willing to look at partial work and evaluate it, rather than looking at millions of pieces being simulated and then saying he doesn't like it and putting us back six months. He is one of those few directors who can judge the partial work and keep you moving in the right direction.”
Outside of the creature work — largely involving a swarm of CG ants, monkeys, and creatures that may be aliens — large chunks of ILM's work involved augmenting shots and building digital matte paintings to give panoramic scope to major sequences, such as the jungle-chase sequence. While the rest of the production stayed firmly rooted in the United States, Helman went to South America to personally shoot the elements that would be sewn into, and around, the principal photography.
“In the waterfall sequence, when they go off a cliff — it had to be digitally augmented,” he says. “There was no such cliff. I went to Argentina and Brazil and shot plate work for it in the VistaVision format. We shot the chase in Hawaii on a flat road that did have an edge, but no cliff edge. That let us get incredible plates in Argentina and Brazil and go into our digital matte department and our CG department and put a huge cliff up there. The digital matte department was particularly huge on this movie — we had more than 18 people in that department. And when I say the word matte, for this kind of work, it has been redefined. That used to mean 2D work, but not anymore. The majority of it is now 3D, involving projecting real photography into geometry, matchmoving, environments, lighting, and lots of other things. We used [Apple] Shake, our Sabre [Autodesk Inferno-based] compositor, and our proprietary [Comp Time] tool to put shots like that together.”
Helman adds that ILM also developed new techniques for using stereoscopic images made out of ultra-high-resolution still images of actors as the basis of some digital doubles work on the film. After photographing actors from different angles with six different still cameras, the company used software to calculate 3D geometry from those photographs for building and moving digital doubles in certain shots.
“And we also developed a completely new tool we call Fracture that I expect we'll use in all kinds of shows later on,” Helman says. “Its purpose is to allow you to automate the rupturing or fracturing of hard-surface models. Previously, we had to break and rebuild and then remodel those models, so that things could be broken again later. In this case, we created a tool that does that automatically through a bunch of different parameters, and it has a simulation engine. That allowed us to do more efficiently the end of the movie, which involves large sets and locations being destroyed.”
He also points to the development of a “jungle implementation tool” that permitted ILM to more efficiently extend environments, which was crucial on this project, because so many scenes involved sophisticated jungle environments featuring real and simulated plants.
As discussed, all of these developments were implemented solely to help Spielberg give viewers a new dose of their traditional Indiana Jones. The director says he firmly hopes that from the moment early in the movie in which an older, wiser Indiana Jones is revealed from the shadows, bending down to pick up his dusty hat, that the movie will be seen as a reintroduction for modern audiences, not only to Jones and the franchise, but also to the traditions and style of the fast-paced B action movies of yore.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
