Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/21561
You are shooting a couple characters on bluescreen with whatever amount of set you have, which on this movie varied from none to elaborate. So you are going through an editorial process just like any other film — a lot of it is left to your imagination.” For a much of it “you have a couple char- acters against previs,” continues Haygood. “So you have people in a kind of cartoon environment, but you have just enough to suggest something. So someone not really familiar with it can look at it and go,‘Oh, they are in this street’ or,‘They are in this room,’ or whatever it happens to be. So you are cutting the way you normally would be cut- ting for performances and story and pacing, and the normal things that you do. In a lot of [ways] we ignored the fact that it was a big visual effects movie or that it was a 3D movie.The other stuff gets filled in and you get to the end and you say,‘Oh my god, this is a fully immersive world,’ because you get used to looking at it just as simple imagery with performance and then you get to the end and you see the full scope of the thing, and it’s impressive.” DE-AGING JEFF BRIDGES On of the key conceits of Tron: Legacy is the realization of a believable 30-year-old version of the 61-year-old Jeff Bridges. “Some of the hardest technical challenges were the Clu 2.0 character in stereo,” ex- plains Barba.“From our Benjamin Button ex- perience, knowing that tracking a human head onto a live-action plate of another actor was incredibly challenging.We had to come up with an even more robust system because in stereo there’s no forgiving — half “We did a cast of Bridges’ head at his cur- rent age,” describes Preeg,“and in the com- puter digitally de-aged him into a 3D version of his head.”They accumulated “tons of ref- erence data” and pictures of Bridges in dif- ferent poses.They also made a cast of his teeth and took pictures of where his teeth amalgam of the idealized Jeff Bridges around that early 1980s time period,” says Preeg. On Button, principal photography was done a couple months before they ever got Brad Pitt onto a soundstage to record his head replacements. Jeff Bridges, however, wanted to interact with people on set and be there and be in the moment, so Digital Domain needed to develop a way for them to capture his information on set rather than in controlled conditions later. “We used helmet-mounted cameras all lit with infrared lights so we wouldn’t interfere with any set lighting while we were there,” says Preeg.“We recorded data on set with audio.We had to track that information and get 3D data out of those points.We went with four cameras so we had at least two cameras seeing every point on the face at all times so we could triangulate those points and get real positional 3D information.” For the live-action sequences of the Turning back time: Digital Domain helped Jeff Bridges shed 30 years. a pixel off and it doesn’t sit in the same space on a 3D screen.We had to come up with a system based on what we did for But- ton and take it to the next level.” fit in his mouth.“Obviously there’s lots of footage of Jeff from that time period cause he was in a number of films.We pulled tons of frames from those films and made this younger Bridges, they used body double John Reardon. “He’s a bigger, muscular guy who spent a lot of time studying how Jeff Bridges moved when he was younger,” says continued on page 47 Digital Domain’s Steve Preeg: “You are going to see things that are CG that you will think are live action and things that are live action that you will think are CG.”