Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
Visual Effects n n n n [Pfister] shoot like a whirlwind. So, we roto- scoped the actors off the background using our rotoscope tool Noodle.” Te rotoscopers traced around Ellen as she walked toward the bridge, and then the artists replaced the bridge, road, cars, pedestrians, and trees with digital replicas. Te modeling team worked from Lidar scans to build lightweight animation models that animator Dorian Knapp used to drive a more highly detailed final model. “Te idea was to have it fold down into the road and then unfold itself, like a mechanical piece of origami,” Franklin says. “Dorian developed the rig as he was animating. He came up with a process by which the ridge unpacks itself and springs into place, and gave it a marvelous clanky, rack-and-pinion feel.” As Ariadne continues exploring her Parisian dream, she steps onto the side of a platform and pulls on the handle of a giant mirrored door. Ten, she steps to the other side and swings around another mirror, resulting in two mirrors parallel to each other. We see Ariadne and Cobb in infinite reflections going back forever, little Leos and Ellens between tunnels of wrought-iron arches. When Ariadne places her hand against a mirror, it shatters to reveal a bridge with repeating arches created from the nested mirror reflection. On set, Corbould built an 8x16-foot mir- rored door on a hinge. Te mirror had a large metal rig around it, and the entire unit weighed 800 pounds. “Ellen couldn’t pull the door,” Franklin says. “We had burly special ef- fects guys on the other side pushing. And, this door wasn’t as big as Chris [Nolan] wanted the mirror to be in the film. But, it showed how the reflections move.” Of course, the crew ap- peared in the reflections, as well. As he had done before, compositor Graham Page removed DiCaprio and Page from the plates, and, as before, the Dneg artists built a digital background. Neal and lead lighting artist James Benson wrangled the raytraced reflections of the digital bridge, river, trees, and people in the distance. “Tey studied the way a real mirror moves and added the imperfections that ground- ed it in reality,” Franklin says. “You think of a mirror as smooth, slick, and seamless, but it isn’t.” To replicate DiCaprio and Page, the compositors lifted reflections from live-action images shot at various angles, and for a key moment when Di- Caprio turns around, inserted a digital double. School’s Out Te shattered mirror concluded Ariadne’s first lesson in dream work. So, having learned to control her own dreams, she begins designing At top, a digital bridge builds itself toward Ariadne. At bottom, artists at Dneg re-timed the action in the live-action plates to slow down the dream sequence, and then enhanced the image with digital rain. dreamscapes. When people invade dreams, the dreamer’s subconscious tries to chase them out, and it’s up to the invader and the dream- scape creator to devise evasion routes and methods. So, Ariadne creates looped mazes that resemble Escher’s famous drawings. “We had to work with the art department to build a physical set,” Franklin says. “Te ba- sic idea is well understood, but it works only if the camera precisely lines up with the set. So, we created a carefully designed technical previs that showed the exact camera placement.” Post- production artists tidied up shots of the actors filmed on the physical set by painting out rigs and painting in holes in the atrium surround- ing the stairs cut to accommodate scaffolding. For the heist, Ariadne designs three levels of dreams inside dreams, all the better to hide in. Te trick for Cobb and his team, who will enter their victim’s dream and plant an idea, is that time works differently in the dream world. Dreams are 10 times faster than the real world, and each dream inside a dream is 10 times faster than the first. “Te danger is that at the bottom, Limbo, time runs at a mas- sively accelerated rate, so if you get trapped there, you’re trapped for centuries,” Franklin says. “You would go insane.” Te first level of Ariadne’s dreamscape is a rain-washed American city. Te second level is an elegant hotel with labyrinthine corridors. Tird is an Alpine snowscape with a fortress in the mountains. At the bottom is Limbo. With the help of a flight attendant, Cobb doses his victim with sleeping powder while aboard a flight, and the team successfully enters the industrial magnate’s dream. In the first layer, they’re in a van, with bad guys in a Mercedes SUV chasing them through a rainstorm. To film the sequence, Corbould rigged a three-block stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles with giant rain sprayers, and Strothers masterminded the car chase and gun battle. “We had to do a lot of manipulation to slow down the action,” Franklin says. “Tey shot the van skidding around the corner at 24 fps, but Chris wanted it at 700 fps. So, we needed to do incredible deceleration.” Te re-timing software Dneg typically uses, which relies on optical flow to analyze pixel vectors, couldn’t handle the motion-blurred layers of rain. So, compositing supervisor Julian Gnass rebuilt the shots from scratch by working with a 3D team that extracted ele- ments and re-animated them. “People watch August/September 2010 15