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Step by Step: Jarhead

Nov 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

Playing With Fire

Sam Mendes, the Academy Award-winning director of American Beauty, is hardly associated with visual effects, but he needed them to create Jarhead for Universal Pictures. Based on a U.S. marine's memoir of the first Gulf War, Jarhead includes the conflagration caused by the burning oilfields of Kuwait. Since images of that disaster were seared into the public consciousness through TV news coverage, Mendes was keen to represent it accurately, and that meant recreating fires that rose 400ft. into the air. One signature shot depicts marines in near silhouette as towering infernos rage nearby.

“In this ‘third act’ of the film, every shot was a visual effects shot,” says Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) Visual Effects Supervisor Pablo Helman. “We thought that we would shoot a bunch of fires on set, but the fires of Kuwait were so huge that actually we only got one fire on set.” However, Helman had his own effects crew filming fire and smoke footage, and from that ILM would later cull the photographic elements that could be manipulated and composited into DP Roger Deakins' plate photography. “We created a library of fires shot at different distances under different lighting conditions and under different weather and wind conditions,” Helman explains. “It was really important to Sam that the scale of the fire was right, so we never shot miniature elements.”

The practical fires that were shot on set during the filming of Jarhead wound up serving as sources of interactive lighting, reflecting off of the oil-caked actors and flickering in pools of oil on the ground. But back at ILM during postproduction, Helman's team removed those ‘placeholder’ fires and began manipulating the library of fire elements that would take their place.

“Sam wanted the fires to have a lot of violence, which they have in the reference footage from the Gulf War,” notes Helman. Mendes was given a range of choices during post, since Helman's team had shot fires at different film speeds as well as from different distances. The elements were shot with the camera locked off, and they were captured in tiles, which provided Mendes with mix-and-match capabilities.

“Sam embraced the fact that he could control everything; that he wasn't tied to what he had shot,” Helman says. “He started using his eye, and saying, ‘Maybe the top of that fire is too fast,’ so we started splitting the fires into parts. The bottom of the fire might be used at the speed that we shot it, and then the top would be slowed down — say around 30 percent.” When it came to merging the disparate fire elements together into a single blaze, Helman observes, “You'd be surprised at how forgiving that process was.”

The crew manipulated the photographed fire elements with Discreet Inferno, and placed them into the shot with ILM's proprietary tool Zeno. Helman explains, “Zeno is a match-moving tool that allows us to composite things in 3D. We did a match move, and the match move gave us information as to where the fires should be placed. If the fire was 400ft. tall and I wanted it to be 200 yards away from the soldier in the foreground, we knew where it needed to be in space.” The fire elements were placed on 2D cards. He says, “Through Zeno, we positioned the fire cards in z depth so that they would move correctly.”

In addition to integrating the fires, ILM added atmospheric effects that included an animated smoke-filled canopy in background, which was done as a matte painting in Inferno. “That had to be tacked behind the horizon so there's a sense of depth,” Helman says. “The canopy is the result of all this smoke accumulating on top of the fire, and you don't have that if you're only shooting one fire. So all that stuff we manufactured, using smoke that we had photographed. This is a very iconic shot, and all the soldiers are completely backlit. An effect throughout the whole shot is the sun peeking through. So at the beginning of the shot there are a lot of ‘God rays,’ and by the end of the shot — 170 frames later — it has become darker. It's daylight, but because the scene is engulfed in the smoke and fire, it looks like night.”

The final compositing was done in Inferno, and the end result is a jigsaw puzzle of carefully choreographed photographic elements. “It was a very complex compositing environment,” says Helman. He was relieved, though, that it was accomplished without having to add 3D computer-animated elements. Helman has extensive experience with that, having supervised the CG pyrotechnics in Terminator 3. He notes, however, “Jarhead wasn't sci-fi. If it looked fake, Sam was going to call me on it.”

But Helman won't soon forget that the fires he shot for Jarhead were palpably real. He says, “We were shooting about 170ft. from many of them, and my eyebrows are still growing back!”

Credit Roll

Director -	Sam Mendes
Director of Photography -	Roger Deakins
Visual Effects Supervisor -	Pablo Helman
Special Effects Supervisor -	Steve Cremin
For Industrial Light and Magic:
Inferno Artist -	Adam Howard
Digital Production Supervisor -	Grady Cofer
Digital paint & Roto Supervisor -	Beth D'Amato
VFX Producer -	Jeanmarie King

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.