Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterMaking History
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Ed Zwick defies the forest.
Overall, in terms of the visual style and how it translated into the DI, Leonnet emphasizes that filmmakers intentionally stayed away from trying to achieve perfect symmetry between all images, due to the nature of the story.
“Eduardo took an extremely natural approach,” she says. “There was often a frantic feeling either happening, or about to happen, in the film. In order to reflect that chaos, it did not make sense to perfectly match each shot. Even if scenes took place in a similar environment, they each had a slightly different feel. The hues of the snow, for instance, varied from shades of green, cyan, and blue. Nothing felt intrinsically neutral in these areas.”
In Zwick's view, all of this work done during
production and in post-production was a continuation of a larger,
ongoing design process. That's how he approaches all his films (see digitalcontentproducer.com
/mil/features/video_making_samurai), and in this case, he's extremely proud of the result.
“Everybody together helped create that sense of a passage of time in the forest, where you stay in one place geographically but the seasons change around you as the partisans build one place, tear it down, and constantly do these things over and over to survive,” Zwick says. “That kind of thing is very important in storytelling. That is all design work. [Costume Designer] Jenny Beavan, [Production Designer] Dan Weil, set design [by Veronique Melery] all came together, along with Eduardo, of course. That is something well worth talking about — it's central to what makes this film work.”
Ed Zwick wanted to emphasize the location of the story of the Bielski partisans for his new period film Defiance — the forests of Belorussia (now Belarus), which shielded more than 1,200 Jewish refugees from the Nazis. He therefore shot almost the entire film in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio on an extremely grainy stock (Kodak Vision 5279 500T) inside a claustrophobic forest location in Lithuania, near where the actual events took place.
Brief, but Effective
Defiance only has about 100 digital-effects shots, but they are crucial to the story, and they had to be crafted to compensate for things that simply were not feasible to do in-camera on the production's tight budget and timeline. Among those things: the creation of German Stuka dive bombers that attack the partisans, a mass grave, weather changes to account for seasonal shifts, and crowd extensions to depict armies and refugees in numbers sufficient enough to be believable.
All the visual-effects work was done at Visual Effects Supervisor William Mesa's Hollywood shop, Flash Film Works. As sophisticated as the CG work — largely done in NewTek LightWave — was, the integration of this material into Eduardo Serra's plates was the biggest challenge for the effects team, according to Mesa.
“Everything about this film was done to give it a real sense of what these people went through, and that is the basic similarity to the work we did for Ed on Blood Diamond and, before that, [The] Last Samurai,” Mesa says. “Integrating that into what was done live, or things that had practical effects like pyro added to it, was complicated. And some things we did digitally that they could have done live — like bullet hits on trees or people — just because our schedule required we get the timing right, rather than trying to trigger it all perfectly one time on set. Most of that integration work was done in [eyeon Software] Digital Fusion, with 3D tracking done in SynthEyes [a camera-tracking tool from Andersson Technologies].”
A lot of the extension work was extremely subtle, such as adding snow to shots to change vistas and adding digital extras to crowds of partisans or soldiers. However, the Stuka bombing raid, which comes at a key point in the film, is clearly the most complex effect. According to Mesa, all those shots consisted of dozens of elements, with one having about 60 elements.
“All the planes were CG and the falling bombs were CG, and then the explosions were practical [created by Special Effects Supervisor Neil Corbould's team],” Mesa says. “There is a big tiltdown shot where bombers come overhead and we look up at them and then tilt down to the camp, where we see the bombs exploding as they impact the ground. We created all sorts of elements for the bombs dropping — adding machine gun fire from trees, people getting blown apart, and a lot more. We built accelerator rigs of the different actors flying across the frame from explosions, and they are all comped together into the shot. It was the only way to do it — we couldn't possibly have put enough people together to do a practical firebombing like that. So we shot separate elements, put the people back in, and then had numerous runs at the shot where we put the people in various specific places, so they are in the right place at the right time during the attack. It was quite complex. We did something similar with another shot when a bunker where women and children are hiding is hit by bombs, and people go flying everywhere.” — M.G.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.