Week 10: Avengers (2012)

For the final post, I decide to go with a mainstream blockbuster of 2012, Avengers. It’s a much anticipated film that consisted of heroes from the past 5 movies. Still, it managed to live up to it’s hype by being extremely successful.

During the movie, I was intrigued by Mark Ruffalo’s quick transformation into the Hulk. Apparently, the simple answer to that problem was just using a digital double. They made an exact copy of Mark, including his clothes for the shot, and just simply morph him while tearing his clothing apart. The actual actor wasn’t even in the shot itself, but he was in a mocap suit in a greenscreen to capture his punching movement to ease the animation process.

After reading and watching several Avengers’ effects breakdown, I found out they used a lot of digital doubles, in fact, they have one for all the lead characters. Not only did they use it for the visual effects in the post production stage it self, they also use them for pre-visualisation. I am impressed by the believability of their CG as hardly in the audience would think that those characters are real.

 

THE LAND BEFORE TIME

Week 9: The Land Before Time (1988)

 

I’m going to break the combo of recent live action films and talk about an old, animated classic instead. This heart warming story about 5 dinosaurs who were separated by their kin and had to work together to find their utopia and re-unite with their loved ones. After watching the movie again after all these years, I didn’t realise it provided so much deeper meaning other than ‘teamwork’ and ‘friendship’. There’s ‘racism’, the 5 stages of ‘grief’, and ‘independence & maturity’.

As for the style of the animation, it uses realism in both character animation and the scenery. I was impressed  how they payed attention to the physics, like the fluidity of the dew on the tree star leaf and the flowing of the soil while the characters are fighting, and how the shadows would logically form on the boulders and rocks.

Overall, it was a great animation, filled with emotion and lessons in life, and great for both children and parents.

 

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

Week 8: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The highly anticipated third movie for the trilogy was definitely a great movie.

Even though Nolan wasn’t big about using CGI, there was one particular scene that contained an impressive one, and that was the one where the footballer ran through a field full of explosions. The people used a mixture of special and visual effects for this scene. For the special FXs, they would use charges on the ground of the field and a raised platform with holes for the stuntmen to run and fall into. As for VFX team, they would replace the entire football field and make it collapse by using the dirt charges and the falling of the stuntmen as reference for the timing of the crumbling of the earth. As for the spectators, they’re real, every single bit of them.

Apparently, the visual effects team took months to perfect the crumbling of the stadium, just that one shot. I can say, I was utterly impressed with such precision of how the pieces of the ground broke apart as the footballers fell.

http://movies.uk.msn.com/exclusives/video.aspx?videoid=a80e5501-8730-4d74-8aec-66d3671288c9&src=v5:share:sharepermalink:&from=sharepermalink

BLACK SWAN

Week 7: Black Swan (2010)

Before I watched this movie, I didn’t expect it to contain that many VFX (or the lesbian sex scene).

The first one that intrigues me was when Portman is dancing in studio, where there’s a lot of mirrors around. When there’s mirrors, the cameraman would definitely be seen. The production team used a mixture of greenscreen and softwares to manually erase the crew.

On the final scene, where Portman grew the swan wings on stage, tracker marks were used to re-create a CG version of her arms dancing by using motion capture. Once the dancing arms are set, CG artist are able to track the growing wings on it, and then comp it into the shot afterwards. The same method was used for Mila Kunis’ moving tattoo during the sex scene, an animated texture was placed on a mocaped back.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Week 6: The Social Network (2010)

Yeah, who knew a normal looking drama movie would even contain any VFX in it at all? Once again, done by the masters of facial and body manipulation, Lola VFX took the job for face-swapping Josh Pence’s with Armie Hammer’s.

As the director could not find twins that fit the role as the real Winkleross brothers would look, they decided to use Hammer’s face onto Pence’s to create the illusion of twins. Using roughly the same technique as ‘Benjamin Button’, Lola used

1. During pre-production, the actors were trained to both move and look alike with acting training and gym respectively.

2. The two actors acted out the scene with Pence wearing dots on his face to provide a clean line for Lola to track the face on.

 

3. Lola had to recreate the lighting with a CGI head of Pence, so that the replacement of Hammer’s head would be accurate.  Once this match was achieved that head is discarded, but the lighting design is used in the next stage and the object track was kept.

 

4. Hammer was then filmed delivering his performance sitting in a chair filmed with 4 Red cameras. To obtain the correct eye line a back projected 30ft x 12ft screen was placed in his eye line and a projected dot was animated to move – providing the correct eye line position.

 

5. The four Red cameras are combined to produce one full face texture mask, with the Red captured performance with the correct lighting from the DMX panel.

 

6.A scanned version of Hammer’s head is now animated to match the 4 camera filmed performance. The digital animated head is hand animated to do this, but the animator has the action filmed from 4 angles to reference. The digital head needs to animate to match the performance.

 

7. The original Pence head PFtrack is now applied to the animated texture projected digital face. This provides a moving – correctly positioned, correctly lit, very real face mask.

8. This face mask is now integrated with the original background plate.

 

 

 

9. This comp was then beautifully and very accurately color graded to match the on stage multiple RED performance to the exact lighting of where Pence’s body was in shot.

http://videos.nymag.com/embed/player/container/1920/953/?title_height=24%22%20width%3D%22616%22%20height%3D%22428%22&content=D9PMJT0RFM6P6D4L&widget_type_cid=svp&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Flolavfx.com%2Fnews%2F

 

CAPTAIN AMERICA

Week 5: Captain America (2011)

Till now, ever since I’ve watched this movie, I’ve wondered how did they shot a wimpy looking Evans. They can’t possibly shot him being wimpy first, then continue shooting when he’s buff, right?

Lola VFX, a team whose famous for digitally altering a character’s looks and age with just the footage of the shot alone. Plus, they do it without any special 3D gimmicks, just plain 2D compositing with autodesk Inferno and Flame.

 

Lola used 3 different techniques to shrink Chris in over 300 shots.

1. Using a Body double / actor doubling for the entire body.

2. Digital head replacement / face projection. For example, when Rogers was at the recruitment center – standing semi-naked in the queue, about to be rejected near the start of the film. This was only used in about 5% of Lola’s shots.

3. Shrink and scale the actor in the principal photography. This was used in about 85% of Lola’s effects shots.

Although it sounds simple, the third approach was the most complex. They had to manually remove unwanted shadows, both on the surroundings and body. Lola scale’s Chris’ body as much as 30%, at that particular area would become less grainy. They had to de-grain and re-grain just to match that area to the rest.

Since majority of the shots were altered by scaling, a lot of factors had to be considered in order to look like Chris was skinny, e.g oversized clothing, walking with bent knees, actors looking at his chin so that shrunken Chris would be at their eye levels. In order to keep skinny Chris consistent between shots, Lola had to use a 3D model, but just as a reference.

Shooting the scene is done with 3 steps. First, buff Chris acts the scene. Then, Chris’ double acts the scene, mostly for the lighting reference. Finally, a clean motionless pass.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER

Week 4: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Rated poorly for it’s serious tone and other aspects, however, this movie is a gold mine of visual effects.

One in particular that catches my eye was the horse stampede scene where Abe was fighting his mother’s murderer.

I was very impressed by the sheer insanity of the scene, there are so many horses that it’s just crazy. First, they shot the scenery with a clean slate with absolutely no horses at all. As Bekmambetov wasn’t allowed to let the horses run a dusty area because it may hurt their eyes, he decided to go with CG ones instead. As they wanted believable horses, Weta digital had to research and build a horse from scratch, right down from their muscle structures, to their facial expressions. As for the shoot, they had to design a horse rig that would match a horses movement in order to mocap it for the CG horses.

As for the actors, they has to use a lot of digital doubles. They scanned the actors faces with various expressions for more realism to their doubles.

Rendering that scene was definitely a challenge due to the dust particles, the 3000 horses, and not to mention the horses mane. So, to tune down the scene, they had a system to automatically reduce the number and quality of the hair as the horses gets further away. Hence, only about 12 horses had the full set-up at a time.

 

IRON MAN

Week 3: Iron Man (2008)

Everybody loves a superhero movie. Iron man is one of those movies that actually provides with some great visual and special effects.

One example was Tony’s escape from the terrorists in his exo-suit. I was convinced that the shot was taken with an actual person in a suit with actual pyrotechniques. But these pictures proved otherwise.

They used clean slates with various layers to be comped together. A reflective ball is used to capture the surrounding background and to be added into the CG object’s shading. Different layers like fire, falling debris, sparks and dust are used instead of using actual explosions, most likely to ensure the safety of the crew on set.

I can say I was very impressed with this scene as almost no one can tell the Mark 1 was in fact a CG object at first glance. It shows how simple compositions are able to produced such believable results.