VFX Shown and Told at VES Event

One of the highlights of award season each year is The Visual Effects Society’s Show and Tell event because it offers effects artist a unique opportunity to show voters and members of the general public exactly what went into some of the most impressive shots in feature films, television productions, commercials and video games. Held over this past weekend at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, the day-long event featured presentations by most of the studios nominated for the 5th Annual VES Awards, taking place on Feb. 11 at the Kodak Grand Ballroom in Hollywood.

This year’s Show and Tell proved to be showcase for the impressive work being done in films that would generally not be considered effects-driven films, including Universal’s futuristic drama Children of Men and DreamWorks’ and Warner Bros.’ war pic Flags of Our Fathers. The average moviegoer would be shocked to learn just how many shots in director Clint Eastwood’s WWII drama were digitally manipulated. With Iceland standing in for Japan, mountains and other terrain elements had to be created in the computer and composited into the shots. ‘Anything that looks like Japanese soil is probably CG,’ says visual effects producer Julian Levi.

Digital compositer Bryan Grill notes that Eastwood’s reputation for being ‘One Take Clint’ posed some challenges for the effects team, especially for shots that required a lot of tracking. He recalls how they used poles placed on top of a hill for tracking during one particular shot. ‘After the first take, we see all these guys start to pull the poles out and we’re like, ‘what are you doing?’ And they said ‘We’re getting ready to shoot up here.”

Now that the days of obvious matte painting are over, moviegoers are also unaware of the fact that many seemingly physical environments in movies are completely computer generated. Case in point is Paramount’s Mission: Impossible III. For the signature sequence where Tom Cruise’s character leaps off a tall building in Shanghai, the actors were all shot against green screens in the Curious George parking lot at Universal Studios so the digital artists could ‘redesign the ultimate version of Shanghai,’ as ILM’s sequence supervisor Richard Bluff puts it. Buildings were moved around and automobile traffic was imported from plates shot in both Shanghai and Los Angeles. Bluff says there were 120 shots involved and almost ever one was mostly CG.

Also up for Outstanding Created Environment in a Live-Action Motion Picture is Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Digital Matte supervisor Susumu Yukuhiro notes that nearly 75% of all background elements shot in Dominica for the ‘Cannibal Island’ sequence were digitally re-created. He showed one particular shot involving a primitive wooden suspension bridge where everything to the left and right of the structure had to be rotoscoped in to make it look like it was spanning a deep gorge. ‘I personally thought this was the roto of the year, but after seeing the Flags of out Fathers reel, I don’t know,’ Yukuhiro joked.

The Pirates Sequel is one of three films in the running for Outstanding Visual Effects in an Effects-Driven Film. Visual Effects supervisor John Knoll says the toughest challenge was getting working with the tight five-month schedule. In addition to the extensive digital matte work, the crew at ILM had to do a lot of set extensions, including adding masts to the two full-sized ships used for filming. Further adding to the workload were 19 completely aniated characters, including baddie Davey Jones. On the previous Pirates pic, the mo-capture for the skeletal sailors was performed in a studio. This time around, however, animation supervisor Hal Hickle says they resolved to doing all the data capture on set, which he insists greatly improved the performances. When shots of actors performing in mo-cap gear are projected side-by side with the finished product, it’s easy to appreciate the amount of work that went into creating these characters.

Also up for the top film category is Paramount’s Charlotte’s Web. ‘E.B. White imagined a film version of his book existing in a real world, unlike the also much beloved animated version,’ says visual effects supervisor John Andrew Berton Jr. Berton gives a lot of credit to the Rhythm & Hues team that did more than 300 digital mouth replacements to make animals talk in the film, which employs a mix of real critters and completely animated creations. One entirely digital character is Charlotte, the title spider. John Dietz, visual effects producer for Rising Sun Pictures, says a lot of research and development went into making Charlotte look right because she had to be scary in the beginning but become beautiful by the end of the film. ‘We ended up with about 50 designs as time went on,’ he remarks. ‘Finding exactly the right Charlotte was key to the success of the film.’

The third candidate for Outstanding Visual Effects in an Effects-Driven film is Warner Bros.’ largely overlooked visual feast, The Fountain. Effects producers/designers Jeremy Dawson and Mark Soper note that the project is very different from most of the other films in contention because director Darren Aronofsky wanted to use as little CG as possible. Practical effects such miniatures were used whenever possible and the arresting depiction of deep space was created using microscopic photography performed by Peter Parks. Chemical reactions and fluid dynamics in petri dishes were shot on 35mm film and composited in layers to form the base of the space backgrounds, which the digital artists then augmented to get the desired effect.

‘We tried to explain to Darren that CG would give us more to work with, but we had this mandate to work with practical elements, which made it a lot more challenging,’ says Dawson.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is likely to walk away with the most awards this year beacuse of all the digital eye-candy packed into its running time, but the VES Show and Tell reminds us of the tremendous role that visual effects plays in nearly every featrue film made today, and that sometimes the most clever effects are the ones you don’t even notice.