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Synthespians: Surrogates, Skin Deep and Deeper Synthespians had planned to do 60 shots to help sell the idea that the people in the film are robots, until Stetson asked this studio and others to do a digital makeup test. e test was to make Willis look younger when he plays his surrogate during the first half of the film. Synthespians passed, and then picked up another 200 shots that involved de-aging Willis and polishing some of the other actors. Approximately 35 people in the studio's Los Angeles and Massachusetts facilities worked on the project. "ey realized that if Greer is going to have a robot version in the real world living his life, he's not going to create a 60- year-old," says Jeff Kleiser, Synthespians founder and visual effects supervisor. "e surrogates can look however the people want. So, we made Greer's surrogate look like a younger guy, like Willis looked in [the TV show] Moonlighting. And, we made him look consistently young in all different types of light- ing environments." e studio started with a cyberscan of Willis's face to create a 3D version in Autodesk's Maya that the modelers modified by lifting skin in his chin area, smoothing wrinkles around his eyes, and shortening his ear lobes. Yannix, a studio in ailand, tracked the camera motion and the motion of Willis's head in each frame so the artists at Synthespians could fit the CG head onto the actor's body. To texture the model, Synthespians' art- ists projected the filmed footage of Willis onto geometry that matched his performance. Artists working in Apple's Shake manipulated the textures as needed and then cleaned up the wrinkles and other imperfections enough to make the robotic substitute look younger but not plastic. "ere was too much perspective change on his head as he was acting to use a 2D solution," Kleiser says. "So we came up with this next-gen technique, which involved tracking the cyberscanned head to the performance. We were able to match the 3D head to his head." In addition to creating Willis's surrogate, Synthespians also touched up some of the other actors, to clean up imperfections the robots wouldn't have. But, they also peeled back the magic, figuratively and literally, to prove that the robots weren't human. eir CG peekaboo endoskeletons appear in approximately 60 shots. In one scene, a beautician pulls back the skin on a surro- gate's face to reveal the mechanical infrastructure. In another, a landlady has a CG skull and neck made of digital pistons. Stetson describes a third hint at the robotic substructure. "e human Greer finds his surrogate wife, Maggie, entertain- ing friends by passing around a 'jacker' device that sends an elec- tronic signal," he describes. "When he's confronted by his wife, he smashes the skin off one of the surrogate party friends and you see the endoskull." Sandbox/Assemble: Robot Factory, OD Device, Battles Nothing sells the idea of a culture dependant on robotic surro- gates more than seeing a factory pumping out thousands of me- chanical doppelgangers. Assemble, a small studio in Berkeley, California, worked with Sandbox, a small studio in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to create the robot factory and other shots. All told, the two studios created the most shots—approximately 350. "We treated the two studios like a separate creative partner for the movie," says Stetson. One scene the studios worked on takes place on an army base. "We see thousands upon thousands of people in chairs operat- ing surrogates elsewhere in the world," Stetson says. "Sandbox and Assemble created that special satire, and they also did the big factory shot where you see Greer [Willis] and Peters [ac- tor Radha Mitchell] being escorted through the manufacturing building with huge assembly lines." Assemble built the robots, and for many shots, Sandbox handled the compositing. "Our shop does straightforward 3D and 2D," says John Nugent, VFX supervisor at Sandbox. "Assemble does specialty CG—the complex models with lots of moving parts. For the big, wide factory shot, Bruce and Radha look out into a green- screen, so Assemble built the endless line of CG robotic ma- chines picking up arms and legs, art welders, and rows of sur- rogate bodies moving like suits on a dry cleaner's rack." e biggest shot for Sandbox alone were battle scenes for (Top) Synthespians digitally polished surrogates into subtle perfection. (Bottom) The studio inserted internal mechanics for robotic reveals. Visual Effects n n n n October 2009 43 ©2009 Touchstone Pictures, Inc.