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MillimeterStep By Step: Thunderbirds
Sep 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
No Strings Attached
When Universal Pictures tapped London-based Framestore CFC to handle all 680 effects shots in director Jonathan Frakes' Thunderbirds, the assignment was ideal for visual effects supervisor Mike McGee. A childhood fan of the '60s-era television series that inspired the film, McGee admits, “I had the pajamas, the bedspread, the wallpaper, and the toys. It was such a big part of my childhood that I had clear images in my head before production started.” Unlike the puppet-based TV series however, the Thunderbirds movie effects were primarily CGI. “There were no strings attached!” McGee says.
One sequence that evokes a definitive image from the original series depicts the huge Thunderbird 2 spaceship leaving its “secret island” rock silo. It rumbles out while palm trees fall away and create a kind of runway. After rising up to a 45-degree angle for take-off, it fires its engines and pushes off with a blast. The camera pans and tilts with the ship until it's completely airborne. Thunderbird 2 screams past the camera, and the audience is in flight with it.
The process began with six months of design work. Modelers used Alias Maya running on Linux-based PCs to create 3D Thunderbirds. McGee was particularly focused on having the ships convey a consistent sense of scale. “In the original series, you were aware that the models changed scale from one shot to the next depending on which props and miniatures had been built. We were concerned that the ships stay the same size throughout this movie. It's made for kids and it's hyper-real, but we didn't want to cheat the scale.”
Painted textures, created in Adobe Photo-shop, were then applied to the 3D model. “Color changes were made once the ship was rotating,” notes McGee. “Because of the contours of the ship, the lettering actually warped quite a bit as it traveled across the surface. Thunderbird 2 was the workhorse of the fleet and the director wanted it to look real, so we went for a dinged-up look — but not too shabby!”
Projecting textures onto 3D geometry was a key technique. The effects crew had captured digital still images and 35mm footage of a tropical island. “A large 4K matte painting of the rock silo door was painted from our photographic references,” McGee explains. “This was imported to [Apple's] Shake. To give this more of a sense of depth, we warped it through a faux depth matte linked to the motion from our CG camera.
“The background was completed by compositing a ground plane that was again photographic stills pieced together to give us a projection that we could lay down like a carpet,” he says.
Much of the vegetation in the shot is a mix-and-match of 2D elements and photography of live trees. When the camera is moving a few feet off the ground before the ship takes off, it passes by bushes made up of 2D elements, each offset ever so slightly like a series of flats. “So as we're panning,” says McGee, “it feels like a three-dimensional object tracking past you. With the 3D ship in the middle of this scene, these flats sell themselves as 3D.”
The only “real” elements in the shot are images of a live palm tree that was filmed multiple times from various angles against bluescreen. That tree was then digitally replicated to create the huge corridor of trees that tip over when the enormous ship pushes out from its rock silo. “We imported a palm tree from Belgium and then constructed a rig to tip it over,” McGee recalls. “Then we hit it with a huge wind machine that blew the fronds exactly the way we wanted — it was lots of free animation. There are no obvious architectural structures in this scene to sell the scale of the shot, so we had to rely on known things like palm trees with fronds.”
A custom “Shake 3D” suite of nodes enabled the compositors to layer the trees in 2 1/2D, linking every tree plate to the CG camera. “Where necessary, we took coordinates from Maya and typed them straight into Shake and positioned the plates with precision. When the forest was completed on one side, the trees were simply marched in 3D to the other side and became the ‘runway.’”
To create the blasts of smoke and dust from the ship's engine, simulations were done in Side Effects' Houdini. While most of the CG elements in the scene were rendered in Pixar's RenderMan, Houdini's Mantra renderer was used for rendering passes of heat haze. The final element in the composite was digital photography of the sky, shot on location and doctored in Photoshop. Virtually all the compositing was completed in Shake.
A key step in the process was the grading work done in Framestore CFC's digital mastering suite. Their setup includes FilmLight's Northlight scanner and Truelight color management system to grade the images and shoot them out to Arri laser recorders. They also relied on FilmLight's Baselight system. “[It] enabled us to add camera shake and directional motion blur, almost like realtime effects. For example, as the ship was rumbling to take-off, when the camera was close enough, we could control the frequency of the camera's vibration.”
The process was so interactive — McGee likens it to a telecine transfer — that they could add camera shake and then go back and alter a composite if necessary. The ability to tweak the details was especially important for a long signature sequence like this one, says McGee, “because we have lots of details and a long time to look at them.”
Credit Roll
| Director - | Jonathan Frakes |
| DP - | Brendan Galvin |
| Visual Effects Supervisors - | Mike McGee and Mark Nelmes |
| 2D Supervisor - | Jonathan Fawkner |
| CG Supervisor - | Craig Lyn |
| Effects Supervisor - | Justin Martin |
| 2D Programmer - | Ciaran Wills |
| Digital Environment Supervisor - | Martin Macrae |
| Modeler - | Jenny Bichsel |
| Lead Technical Director - | Robert Krupa |
| Lead Effects Technical Director - | Nordin Rahhali |
| Technical Director - | Thomas Pastor |
| Effects Technical Director - | Adam Jeziak |
