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Reader SurveyOld-Fashioned Filmmaking
Nov 1, 2007 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman
Paul Thomas Anderson's team keeps There Will be Blood ultratraditional.
A typical lighting setup for interior work during production. Photo: Francois Duhamel.
Delicate Effects Touches
The traditional approach to making There Will be Blood didn't change the project's need for some digital effects work. The scope of the movie's invisible effects — including the requirement to illustrate the growth of fictional New Boston, Texas, from a dusty backwater to a major oil-producing center, given a limited budget and tight shooting schedule — precluded the production's ability to build multiple oil wells on location. Therefore, filmmakers built one oil derrick, which they later filmed burning down for a crucial scene in the movie, and they then relied on the team at Robert Stromberg's company, Digital Backlot, to digitally construct the rest of the oil field, with help from Industrial Light & Magic on a couple of sequences.
Stromberg, the film's visual effects designer, teamed with colleague Paul Graff, the film's visual effects supervisor, to supervise execution of the oil field and to digitally enhance the fire at the original oil derrick, as well as the creation of various digital oil and blood effects throughout the movie.
Much of this digital work, however, was traditional in the sense that, whenever possible, filmmakers preferred to shoot elements on a stage and then combine them later to create digital oil, blood, and other things. Still, Stromberg emphasizes that the limited digital shots (about 60) were strategically used only to further Paul Thomas Anderson's story.
“Paul wanted the effects to be invisible, which my company specializes in, so he could tell his story without interference, but they were nevertheless necessary for that exact reason,” Stromberg says. “They were used mainly in key story moments to propel the story forward — showing characters building oil wells, multiple derricks sprouting up, large pools of oil. Those things were too expensive to do on location.”
The oil well gusher/explosion, for instance, was central to the story, and it really was set on fire and filmed by Anderson's crew until the wooden structure burned to the ground. But, the original pressurized oil gush and explosion had to be digital, and Digital Backlot and ILM joined forces to put that sequence together.
“Visual effects were important to that scene in the sense of creating the feeling of power, of the pressure just underneath the surface of the ground,” Stromberg says. “You had to see it build up and then go off. They got many of the elements on set, but we then needed to [digitally] scale up the sequence.”
The digital oil and blood required extensive fluid dynamics work using such tools as Maxon's Real Flow in combination with Autodesk Maya, with Graff doing the compositing work in Adobe After Effects. But filmmakers also used a series of what Stromberg calls “old tricks” to capture elements for some of those shots.
“Fluid dynamics and water simulations were important, but what was more interesting was the things we did to get the texture of those fluids for wider shots of the gusher and some of the spray,” Stromberg says. “We actually shot baking soda against black for some of the oil, and mixed that together with fluid dynamics to come up with the right combination. That's an old trick we used in the old days for distant waterfalls and things like that — sort of a nice mixture of high tech and low tech.
“Another example is the blood spatter in the final scene, where they do it traditionally on set and then, we supplement it as needed,” he says. “You don't always get enough blood, and after the fact, you realize that. In this case, Paul wanted more splatter and more damage to the wounds on [Paul Dano character's head], so it then becomes a post effect. The only hard part with the splatter was tracking it in order to lock it to the environment [on the background plate]. For blood drips, we shot white foam core, corn syrup, and food coloring slowly dripping on a stage, and then we used that as an element. We also shot some hair against the white film core, bloodied and pieced together, and combined that with the blood to create the final wound on the character's head.”
— M.G.
