Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/5474
December 2009 45 Visual Effects n n n n e Orphanage and previsualizations for one set of storyboards. "e point was to get them excited and to make sure they understood what previs is," he says about the group in China. "It can be an effective and useful tool, but only if the filmmakers understand what they're looking at, that it's not just cartoons." Previs was crucial for this feature since it cen- tered around three immense battle scenes that required detailed choreography of a huge number of practical and digital effects. Production Challenges When production started, Hayes began back- and-forth trips to China, as the shoot spanned all four seasons, much of it near the Yangtze River, which plays an important role in the story. With a crew of 700 people and up to 1000 extras, anything could hap- pen—and it did. "We had a plan, but everything was run-and- gun," says Hayes. "It was chaos, but with a vision behind it. John was never out of control with the movie he was making." Still, the production had its share of disasters. "We had two of our sets built on a flood plain, and you'd come back the next day and the set would be washed away," Hayes recalls. "e extras were all from the People's Liberation Army. You'd train 800 people what to do, and the next day you got 800 new soldiers, and all that training was wasted. We had to retrain new guys every day." For the last third of the production, five units were shooting day and night. at in- cluded a list of heavy-hitter directors and cin- ematographers: Corey Yuen, action director; Patrick Leung, naval unit director; and Lu Yue, first director of photography, who was later re- placed by Zhang Li due to health reasons. Ac- cording to Hayes, e Orphanage's producer Ken Kokka and visual effects digital produc- tion manager Tiffany Wu (who is fluent in Chinese) also proved extremely valuable. Woo had decided that Red Cliff—which was budgeted in the $80 million range—would consist of two movies for the Asian markets; another version for the US and Western audi- ences would combine those two versions into a single release. In the final picture, Parts 1 and 2 combined had 860 visual effects shots. e Orphanage handled approximately 300 of those. "We stopped counting when we got to over 2000 plates," says Hayes. A large portion of the budget went to the cre- ation of many practical effects, including an en- tire fleet of boats. "By the time they had built so many practical boats, we were down to a small figure for the VFX budget," says Hayes. Boats, Battles, and More e Orphanage was the hub for all the VFX work, which included contributions from across the globe: Anibrain (Mumbai, India), CafeFX (Santa Maria, California), Crystal CG (Beijing, China), Digital Dimension (Montreal), Frantic Films VFX (Los Angeles), Hatch (Los Angeles), Kerner Optical (San Rafael, California), Make FX (Los Angeles), Pixel Magic (Los Angeles), Red FX (Montreal), Tippett Studio (Berkeley, California), and Xing-Xing (Beijing). On the first movie, e Orphanage primar- ily did comp work. But the VFX house soon shifted into high gear for the second movie, when it was tasked with creating a digital straw boat that would soon be studded with hun- dreds of arrows—a sequence that comprises approximately 30 shots. e CG model was necessary since it was impossible to get practi- cal straw boats to move in formation. Initially, the group photographed a practical boat mod- el from every possible angle. Hayes used Maya to previs a single frame, and asked Woo what he thought about the framing. When he knew how many boats were needed and what kind of rotation, the team used that one CG model to represent a few dozen computer-generated boats, and then redressed them with new flags for variation. "We also did a lot of particle arrow shots, fleets of ships, and set extension shots," says Colcord. Creating the previs for all these shots was perhaps the biggest challenge. "We used Google Earth to find maps of locations and based rough environmental geometry on those. We were also trying to make it realistic in terms of how we would shoot [the sequence] within the limitations as we knew them, real- izing we would have no motion control." In addition to Maya, the group used Mental Images' Mental Ray for rendering, e Found- ry's Nuke for compositing, and Vicon's Boujou and Andersson Technologies' SynthEyes for tracking and matchmoving in the scene. To figure out how to set up a formation of sol- diers in a tortoise-shell pattern, previs animator Bruce Dahl determined the necessary number of soldiers in a given segment of the formation and how they would move to trap the oppos- ing army in the corridors of the pattern. "I had figured they would make up a whole organiza- tional chart based on our little previs, but when they shot the live action with 300 Chinese army extras and horses out in the blazing sun, they had a print-out of Bruce's render—and that was it," he says. "And it worked!" Other CG work posed specific challenges, as well: "dealing with arrows at a macro dis- tance from the lens as the camera flies 800 y ards, cloth simulation, digital soldiers … all of that," Colcord says. "ere was a lot of re- projection in the straw boat sequence because we didn't have the budget to do the large-scale ships in CG at a medium distance. So, for ar- rows flying ship to ship, the middle part of the shot would be full CG, bookended by re-pro- jected live action." Frantic Films created a fleet of 2500 computer-generated boats for a big naval battle that takes place in Red Cliff. The studio also generated the water and reflections.