Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/3597
October 2009 45 Visual Effects n n n n an actor in the middle of a disco and have a caustic light cast across his face, and graft a little piece onto that face. Years ago, we might have restricted the actors and the camera moves. Now we do not. But, it's always challenging and still time-consum- ing. e face can look so different from shot to shot." Brickyard: Digital House, Dead City Ironically, among the 35 shots that Brick- yard created is one that required con- structing a digital version of a building three blocks from its office in Boston. "In the story, it's the mansion owned by the leader of a company," says Brian Drewes, visual effects producer at Brickyard. "ey wanted the building to look imposing and more symmetrical than was shot on set, so we adjusted the façade with CG elements across three or four shots. e largest amount of Brickyard's work, however, involved changing an overhead helicopter shot that traverses the city of Boston. "ey didn't shoot it with the intention that it would be the end shot," Drewes says, "but they chose it in edito- rial." As a result, Brickyard had to paint out moving cars and people, and composite in surrogates, cars, smoke, satellites, and gen- eral mayhem. "ey wanted to see devastation across the city," Drewes says. "It's a great shot and a very long shot, and it was a ton of work. We had to imagine what would happen if everything stopped working; if the sur- rogates driving cars and walking to work would be shut down." To create the shot, which started out at 2000 frames but ended up at 1000, Brick- yard placed CG and 2D people and cars on a ground plane using Maya. "en we added a lot of hand-painted details," Oddy says. For a car that crashed into a build- ing, for example, they might accordion the front by adding 2D on top of 3D, compos- ite in some debris and tires that fell off, and sharpen the scene with glass shards. ey also built CG proxies for the buildings to add satellite dishes, towers, and other me- chanical details. "We ended up modeling the entire cityscape," Drewes says. "We tracked the s hots in [Andersson Technologies'] Synth- Eyes, exporting that data into Maya and then feeding everything into [e Found- ry's] Nuke." As did the other studios, Brickyard also did a little surrogate polishing. "We cleaned up extras they wanted to look perfect," Oddy says. "ey tried to cast as many per- fect people as they could, but we did some neck tuck-ups and wrinkle removals." For one actor, though, they did the re- verse. "She wakes up at the end and you see her as a human, but she looked too perfect naturally, so we added some veins, discol- oration, and age marks," Oddy says. Industrial Light & Magic: Big Crash In addition to these studios, compositing supervisor Marshall Richard Krasser led a group of digital artists at ILM that lay- ered together a car crash. In the film, Guy Cantor (played by James Cromwell) has hijacked the Peters surrogate, the character played by Radha Mitchell, and is operating the surrogate. During a chase sequence, he has that surrogate deliberately crash into the human Greer's car, and then the surrogate gets away. "We filmed the chase at the Par- amount backlot," Stetson says, "and then shot stills in Boston to have backgrounds to fill out and replace the palm trees. ILM's work was mostly 2.5D digi-matte work, plus they created a stunt double, removed rigs, and added CG props and windshields. ey did a nice, clean job." at was the goal, in fact, for all the studios—a clean job with invisible effects. In general, Stetson calls this a medium- size show with an array of interesting tricks. "It's not a giant epic spectacular," he says. "It's a murder mystery, and that's the way Jonathan [Mostow] played it." Of all the tricks, the one that might have the most lasting impact is the work the studios did in making the surrogates look so beautiful. "is technique can give an actor a good 10 or 15 years more range," Kleiser says. "It's easy to make an actor look older with makeup; harder to make them look younger. I suspect a lot of people will take an interest in it." n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. Synthespians developed new techniques to lop several years off actor Bruce Willis, a possibility they suspect other filmmakers will find interesting.