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Reader SurveyStep by Step: Into the Wild
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
When audiences see Into the Wild, they probably won't notice the visual effects that were necessary to capture this wilderness tale. Sean Penn's film, for Paramount Vantage, re-creates the true story of Chris McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch), following the young man's odyssey into Alaska. McCandless' adventures include being caught inside a car during a flash flood, and that is one of the sequences for which Penn enlisted the expertise of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Entity FX.
“If Sean could have safely put Emile in a car in a flash flood, he would have done it,” says Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Mat Beck. “He was committed to complete realism.”
Beck and Entity's Visual Effects Supervisor Marty Taylor knew that Hirsch would be filmed in a car in a dry wash and that they would add the water digitally. But they got more than they bargained for. The practical effects crew had rigged the car to spin around — to suggest a reaction to rushing water. The camera, shooting into the car from outside the rear window, would capture the whole event. But as things unfolded, a second camera also rolled nearby. It had been used to capture miscellaneous backgrounds such as sunsets, but in this case, it caught a raking angle on the car being swung around and smashing into a large rock. While this view was unplanned — the footage even included crew members — it offered an objective perspective that Penn liked. Would Entity be able to make this shot work?
For a movie that is about responding to what fate gives you, Beck says, “It's a good symbol, because it wasn't planned. But this serendipitous camera perspective was fortuitous. It helped the sequence.”
It also required an enormous amount of digital tweaking at Entity FX. The only thing that would be preserved was the car hitting the rock, and Entity used Adobe After Effects and Autodesk Inferno to rotoscope those elements. The actual background was erased, because it was shot during the day and the flood was supposed to occur at night. When Beck and Taylor set about creating a new background, they lowered the horizon line by about a third, which had the effect of dropping the camera's perspective down closer to the car. “That gave the shot more immediacy and power,” Beck says.
Entity's team then stitched together a new background environment from myriad elements, using reference stills and footage of mountains and shrubbery captured on location. “Modern matte paintings are different,” Beck says. “We did not paint these elements; we moved them and sized them and foreshortened the landscape to make everything fit together. Then, to give more interest to the background, we added individual bushes and hillocks that would catch highlights from flashes of lightning that we lifted from another shot. Because the flash flood comes from a rainstorm in the mountains, we took the liberty of having that storm throw off a fair amount of lightning. You always have to cheat and assume some kind of light so you can see things.”
The floodwater itself was a mix of photography and pure CG. “We see water splashes, which help tie it together,” Beck says. “With the real car, there was no water — just dust, which we had to get rid of.” Entity was even able to incorporate footage that Beck shot with his own digital video camera. “The chaos of turbulent water is great, and you can steal that,” he says.
Computer-generated water splashes were integrated with photographed water in two key areas: the water splashing on the car and the splash as the car hits the rock. “Big splashes were tied with some real splashes that we'd stolen, and we animated those same splashes falling onto the car,” Beck says. “So absolutely real footage becomes the ‘binder’ that tied the CG splashes to the car.” Entity modeled CG versions of the car and the rock that operated as virtual stand-ins, providing surfaces for the animated water to react to.
The water animation was done primarily with the particle system in Autodesk Maya. The flow patterns of the particles were based on custom scripts written by Entity's Lead CGI Artist David Alexander. His efforts produced water that rolls down the car and leaves believable marks. And at the moment of impact between the car and the rock, CG water splashes hit the rock and it becomes wet. “Those splashes really say that this car hit this rock, which of course it didn't,” Beck says with a laugh. The CG water was rendered at 2K in Maya hardware, he says. “We have not only a Boxx render farm, but we also have a group of machines set up to be a hardware render farm.”
Compositing was completed in Inferno, and small details such as the car's cracked windshield were incorporated. Beck says that there were surprisingly few iterations, considering the large number of elements that went into the shot.
“It became successful pretty quickly. We worked closely with Sean's editor Jay Cassidy, who would send us the latest Avid cut to load into our Avid. We used remote conferencing software called CineSync, which allowed us to look at the shot and see it in conference with him.”
Beck admits that it was a challenge to take a serendipitous piece of footage and turn it into an effects shot. “But it was definitely worth it,” he says. “You have to leave room for stuff that you haven't figured out. Sean is smart enough to do that. It's a great example of the old saying: Chance favors the prepared mind.”
CREDIT ROLL
Director: Sean Penn
DP: Eric Gautier
Editor: Jay Cassidy
Senior Visual Effects Supervisor: Mat Beck
Visual Effects Supervisor: Marty Taylor
Special Effects Supervisor: Donald Frazee
For Entity FX:
Compositors: Eli Jarra, Brian Petras
2D Artist: Dax Siplin
Lead CGI Artist: David Alexander
CG Previz Artist: Kaz Yoshida
CG Artists: Rik Panero, Mike “Pharoah” Barrett
