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n n n n Stereo 3D•Visual Effects Lighting artists at Pixomondo learned that the continuity in this film was in its consistent beauty. Rather than trying to match the lighting on partial sets, they discovered how to mimic the cinematographer's intent. Grossmann says. "Continuity was out the win- dow in major ways—the Eiffel Tower moved where it needed to be, some routes made no sense at all, the train station would look differ- ent in some shots—but there was consistency in that everything looked good. That was the continuity." The second challenge for the artists was in understanding how to achieve the look of movies from the early 20th century. "The hard- est part and the most exciting part for the art- ists around the world was the exploration," Grossmann says. "In most movies, you're doing something like swinging Spider-Man across a bridge. For the artists on this movie, it was never as simple as, 'Here's your desk and your shots.' It was, 'Here's your desk and here are 16 hours of highlight reels, some books, and a thousand images of old sets, old trains, old train stations.' No one cranked out work for weeks, sometimes months, until they got into the mood and tone and look. And then, so much of this movie is a homage. An artist might present a shot and point to something that was distracting, and we'd say, 'Yes, but it's distracting on purpose because it references this old film, this old clip.' " The lighting artists had similar challenges. As always, they would light the scenes to be photographically real, but their reality needed to be a film shot on a back lot in 1930. "This wasn't an available light film," Legato says. "It was a lit movie, and the lighting is part of the story telling. It's not real life. So, we had more than one sun. We put lamps behind windows, arc lights behind alleys. It took a while for the artists to get it because it isn't what we're trained to do. We usually try to fool the eye that some- thing is hyper-real. We were still making it photographically real, but the photo graph had a tone to it. So we'd show people examples, tear 24 December 2011/January 2012 sheets, clips from old movies." Making it even more interesting for the lighters was that the angles might change from one shot to another, as if the sun moved 180 degrees. "It works because the shots are beauti- ful," Grossmann says. "It all feels the same, but if you mapped it out, you'd see that it's all over the place." Knowing this, the visual effects crew didn't bother shooting chrome balls on set to gather HDRI and match the lighting. "We realized that if Bob Richardson lit some- thing, he'd light what's there," Grossmann says. "If there were five people in the room, he'd light those five people. So, if we added a glass roof, a train, and a luggage cart, it wouldn't do any good to have HDRI because if those elements had been on the set, he would have lit it differ- ently. We had to match his intent." Similarly, the artists needed to match Richardson's intent in all the CG shots that had been impossible for Scorsese to shoot traditionally. Magic Hour In addition to set extensions and virtual back- grounds, much of the visual effects work cen- tered on Méliès' illusions. "As the film starts to explore who Georges Méliès is, we see shots that are magical in nature," Grossmann says. "I could talk for hours about all the little mag- ic tricks. Hundreds and hundreds of shots. By the time we were done, I realized we had done every trick in the book. They're not like cool magic-wand gags. They all have ground- ing in old film tricks and in some part of the story. We did all the classic cinema tricks from modern times to today, and pushed beyond anything done before. Miniatures. Digital characters. Stop motion. Time-lapse photog- raphy. Persistence-of-vision animation. Matte paintings. Motion-captured characters. Iris wipes. Morphs. CG augmentation. Even the choreography of a cross-dissolve became a new art form and became visual effects. It was a homage to the kind of work Georges Méliès did, but in a modern-day fantasy film. And we created all those tricks for stereo. I've got all my passport pages full now." In one scene, the children open a secret box that causes an explosion of CG papers to fly out. The images on the papers represent the collected work of Georges Méliès. They swirl around the room in a way that creates an opti- cal illusion, the perception of animation. It's a persistence-of-vision trick, like a flip book, but a 21st century visual effects version. In another scene, Hugo fixes a mechanical mouse, a mouse that, when Méliès winds it up and places it on the table, spins around, wig- gles its tail, and looks up and down. The crew used stop-motion animation for the mouse, shot it in stereo, and then augmented it with visual effects. For a montage that shows the degenera- tion of Méliès' studio from happy success into post-World War I bankruptcy, the artists mim- icked time-lapse photography using computer graphics to create the images. "The movie is full of these things," Gross- mann says. "We'd take sections of sets and performances, string them together, and cho- reograph them as if they were one shot. In some shots, we'd have two minutes of visual effects strung back to back. We didn't have to do a CG tsunami. But, we had CG crowds, fire, snow, wind, water, steam, smoke—a crazy amount of effects. It was humbling to do this while referencing and studying someone who invented the genre. Méliès' work was pretty miraculous. When we studied his work, some- times it took days to figure out how in the hell George Méliès did this." In this film, the innovation was in mak- ing the visual effects created to bring Mé- liès' illusions to life seem real, and to do so artfully. "We used visual effects and stereo 3D not as separate items, but as a tasteful, integral part of the storytelling, as impor- tant as music and lighting and acting," Le- gato says. "Our innovation is in appreciat- ing the art of filmmaking by using the tools that used to blow us away with how clever and technical they are, with, now, how beautiful they are." n Barbara Robertson is an award- winning writer and a contributing editor for . She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. Use your smart- phone to access related video. Computer Graphics W orld