Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/161463
Although it was impossible to track a real bullet train and capture authentic backgrounds, a van with a rig sporting eight Red Epic cameras in a panoramic configuration drove down an elevated freeway in Tokyo recording "almost a Google street view" of the train's backdrop. "We could speed it up and take out the road and cars," Hill explains. "It was never going to be quite the right perspective, so we did some distortion and rebuilding — but the footage still gave us a solid template. It all went much faster than building a full CG city." Weta also added signage and advertising to bring the colors of Tokyo to the scene. Hill notes that for a company that "tends to build worlds entirely digitally," Weta's extensive use of 2.5D techniques for The Wolverine was something new. "Augmenting plates is a very powerful technique," he says. "You're automatically working with reality that the director has filmed, the DP lit and everyone's happy with, so there's a lot of value in that. You have to be clear about its limitations, but you can finesse what you've already captured to a big extent." THE CONJURING Real life meets the supernatural in The Conjuring, the true story of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, the couple involved in ridding Amityville of its horror, and the Perron family who confronted witchy doings in their new home in 1971. Visual effects by Pixel Magic (www.pixelmagicfx. com), which has offices in Toluca Lake, CA, and Lafayette, LA, help tell the tale in ways both undetectable and spooky. Pixel Magic created 150 VFX shots, keeping in mind the brief from Warner Bros. and director James Wan. "Things couldn't look so supernatural that people wouldn't believe they could have happened for real," says Raymond McIntyre, Jr., a VFX supervisor, partner/VP at Pixel Magic and the film's on-set VFX supervisor. "There couldn't be any Harry Potter in it — no magic. When we couldn't get the results we wanted practically, we used CG. But we tried to keep everything grounded in reality as much as possible." The Perron's story was grounded in reality. The house they moved into had a history of possessed witch mothers and murdered children, starting a century before. Things signal trouble almost from the outset. The Perron's youngest daughter, who will soon be in peril from her own mother, finds an antique music box, which serves as a portal to the past. It reveals, in composite shots by Pixel Magic, reflections of long-dead child victims in its spinning mirror. Digital breath shows how cold the house has become. UV lights reveal ghostly digital handprints and footprints on the walls and floors. Flocks of digital birds menace the house at night. A complex shot that first reveals the witch begins with Lorraine Warren gathering laundry from a clothesline. A sheet flaps on the line and flies off, drapes itself into a human form, falls off to show nothing's there, wafts up to cover a second-story window, then falls away once again to reveal the witch in the bedroom window where Mrs. Perron is asleep. McIntyre says the sheet was initially intended to be a practical effect. "But given the time we had, we decided to do it digitally," he reports. Still, having witnessed the attempts to rig the practical sheet proved an advantage. "I saw how the real sheet behaved in space, with the light, as it was flying. That really helped create the CG portions of the shot." Mrs. Perron develops subtle, then more severe, bruising on her body as the witch quite literally grabs her and takes possession during the film. Pixel Magic used a 2.5D technique to project Photoshop files of makeup effects bruises onto her arms where tracking markers had been placed and created depressions in the skin showing the witch's hurting unseen hand. Stunt work and digital effects combined in the terrifying attack on daughter Nancy, who's lifted up by her hair and flung and dragged across the room. Individual strands of Nancy's hair start to lift in the air, then more and more hair rises until she's lifted off the floor and flung at her parents, breaking glass French doors. Then Nancy is pulled across the floor by her hair, spinning in all directions. "The big chunks of hair we could do practically with clips and wires, but to get the individual strands of hair to perform the way we wanted them to in an extreme close-up of Nancy we had to use CG," says McIntyre. A stuntwoman was hoisted by practical wire, her was hair created in CG and stretched to lift and pull her around the floor. The wires were digitally removed in post and replaced with more flooring. To release Nancy from her torment, Lorraine Warren grabs a pair of scissors and cuts a hank of digital hair and watches it fall to the floor. But when it hits the floor the shot transitions to practical hair shot by McIntyre in post. "I got a wig, cut and dropped it to capture the real physics of hair hitting the floor," he says. "It would have meant a ton of render time and simulations otherwise." During take one of the shot, Lili Taylor, who plays Mrs. Perron, wasn't quite prepared for the breaking glass and had a genu- inely frightened reaction to it. The director was delighted with her response but preferred the action that played out in a subsequent take. So Pixel Magic was charged with stitching the best of two takes together with painstaking rotoscoping and background replacement. Another seamless VFX sequence from Pixel Magic opens the movie, creating from plates of the location and stage houses what appears to be a single Steadicam shot. It shows the Perrons driving up to the house on location, moving through the front door, traveling through the inside of the house onstage, then moving out the back door and into the location house's yard. Pixel Magic removed some of the scary from a shot where the possessed Mrs. Perron changes her physical features via prosthetics — contact lenses, veins, lips, skin treatments — then returns her back to normal. Artists used 360-degree photos of Lili Taylor's four stages of makeup and a digital head they'd made as a guide to help them paint her back to normal. Pixel Magic also created a set extension in post for the rocking chair sequence to deliver a camera angle not captured on the set. "I photograph everything and take a lot of HDRI photos for lighting reference," says McIntyre. "We couldn't have created the digital matte painting needed to complete that scene without the photos we had — both my own and those from the on-set still photographer. We were generating a camera angle that didn't exist." The company's toolset included The www.postmagazine.com Pixel Magic helped a sheet take human form and added digital bruising for The Conjuring. Post • August 2013 17