Post Magazine

June 2017

Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/837213

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 18 of 43

www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JUNE 2017 couldn't cross," says Westenhofer. "No man could get across there because there's so much ma- chine gun and sniper fire — that's 'No Man's Land.' This is one of my absolute favorite scenes in the film, from a digital effects standpoint. Nothing groundbreaking, but the art department actually built, in the back lot of Leavesden, a real trench, which was as hard to shoot on, as it probably was to fight on, with mud. We used a Spider Cam sus- pended across, just because trying to do any kind of camera move in those conditions was very dif- ficult. That's why Gal Gadot is my absolute hero. Not only is she an amazing person, but she went out in a bathing suit in February, running across a muddy field in England, and never complained. As we're huddled up in our parkas, she's doing that. She was Wonder Woman for all the crew mem- bers, for sure (laughs). "So, we built one trench and detailed it really well. And that actually served for both sides — the British and the German. The effects work here was just a ton of tracer fire. They've been pinned down for months and months in these trenches and [Wonder Woman] says, 'this is ridiculous,' so she gets up and naively charges across the field, taking on three machine guns. There's just tons of tracer fire and it's in the scar- iness of the machine gun fire that actually kind of creates this beautiful sequence. It culminates with her digi-double leaping into the trench and taking out the Germans and a couple of machine gun nests. That continues to a village that she gets word had been captured by the Germans, and that they were not treating the civilians very well. So, she's trying to save them. This is what we see in a lot of the trailers — where she's tear- ing through the buildings, kicking ass. "That was a combination of using Gal — in- cluding several shots where we use Gal for the first half, pan across and then blend into a stunt double who's doing some heavy martial arts work with a face replacement — just about every trick you can use in there. One of my absolute favorite digi-doubles is when she leaps out a window. In a shot done by MPC, we originally shot a stunt double leaping out, but it just didn't have what we wanted, so we ended up using the full digital double. For the face on that, we ended up putting five Alexa's on an array and had Gal sit down with facial dots and act out various sequences from the movie. We played her back the dailies and she performed to that." Finally, Westenhofer says the third act of the film is where a "bulk of the heavy visual effects work" is, complete with fully-digital locations and greenscreen shots for an all-out battle finale between Diana and Ares. "We go inside to a little piece of concrete and from then on, Dneg created everything you see," he says. There's a storm that destroys most of the airfield where the scene takes place. This is also where the character of Ares fully transforms into his true self. "They fight for a bit, and finally there's a big explosion with a bunch of bombs and projectiles all around and [Ares] is caught in the flames. He then assumes his true form, and draws in a lot of metal from around the airfield and builds a sheet of armor around himself. From then on, it's a digital cre- ation. There are times when he 's completely digi- tal, and we use the face from that same four-cam- era Alexa rig, and then there are other times when, in close-up, we had [actor] David Thewlis in a tracking suit so we could track the body and use just his face from the photography. The armor, though, was always digital. That involved a great deal of motion capture. Stunt doubles with face replacements for Diana were used here, as well as digital doubles and a fully digital airfield and tank. Dneg did quite a bit of work here, too, enhancing the scared face of one of the film's villians, Dr. Maru (also known as Dr. Poison), as well as cre- ating an effect for Ares' face after he takes a pill that gives him powers." MPC had reported back to Post at press time, saying that for this film, it had relied on a com- bination of tools that included Maya, Zbrush, Houdini, Nuke and Renderman, among others, as well as proprietary tools such as Kali. This is the studio's in-house destruction tool, which earned MPC an Academy SciTech award. Despite the number of visual effects shots in the film, Westenhofer says, "I don't really look at this as a typical, heavy visual effects superhero movie. This is special with regards to superhero films in that it's a character journey. The effects and the action sequences you expect are all there, but playing a nice supporting role. There are great action sequences, that's not to be denied, but it is first and foremost a journey of Diana and Steve, and that was really nice." The VFX team spent a lot of time perfecting the look of Themyscira. Dneg and UPP created period work for London scenes. MPC, Dneg and Weta all contributed to the lasso's look.

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - June 2017