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| THE FILM BACKGROUND: A New World of Design |
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|by Scott Essman
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With the success of recent blockbusters such as Titanic, The Grinch, and X-Men, Hollywood is at it again, producing a slew of “big ticket” pictures. After a mid-1990s slow period for big-budget spectacles, recently, the various studios green-lit sequels such as Jurassic Park III, remakes including Planet of the Apes, and franchise pictures, including projected three films for a Lord of the Rings trilogy and two Matrix sequels. And with big pictures come big sets, big backdrops, and the necessary design elements to make them work on screen. Here, then, is an inside look at the production elements involved in several of those films with a special inside look at the new frontier of film design — the digital backlot.
Founder of Matte World Digital, a full-service film production facility in Northern California, Craig Barron was born in nearby Oakland and started his career at ILM as a camera assistant in their matte painting department in 1979. Fortuitously, his first film was The Empire Strikes Back, and he never looked back, moving through ILM during its most successful decade, helping to create practical matte paintings for the backgrounds of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films before leaving to form Matte World with other ILM staffers after completing ILM’s Willow as Director of Matte Photography.
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Now Barron, also a film historian and avid enthusiast of all things cinema, heads his own studio where filmmakers call upon his group to create backgrounds that would either be too costly or prohibitive to film in a live action format. In the beginning, Barron said that his company was somewhat reluctant to go digital. “We weren’t quite comfortable with how the digital technology added artifacts to our matte paintings,” he said, “so we actually tried to stay quite traditional and concentrated more on the big miniature/matte painting combinations with rear projection as a way to create our images — very similar to how they did the original King Kong, really. But of course, we were dabbling in digital because you could see that in some cases it was very effective to use.”
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 |
Gradually, Barron and co. integrated digital technology into their work, which, a decade after forming Matte World, includes the fabrication of backgrounds for some of the most prominent filmmakers in the U.S. Here is a sampling of some highlights through the evolution of their craft:
Terminator 2
A recurring theme in the film is that the lead character, Sarah Connor is watching children play in a Los Angeles schoolyard; once an atomic bomb blows up, and she witnesses a nuclear holocaust. In the end of the film, for a future coda sequence, director James Cameron wanted Sarah to be viewed as an old lady at the playground watching a similar group of children play — it bookends the film and states that nuclear war was avoided. The one shift in the location is that the scene is of Washington, D.C. where Sarah’s son, John Connor, is working in government to spread the humanistic word as opposed to leading the human race against a machine-based terrorism.
For the scene, Matte World created a DC in fifty years from now. “In the shot, the camera tilts down, and among the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument, we created a view of futuristic buildings that are made of glass,” said Barron. “It continues to come down to the park and you see Sarah there watching children play on a playground. It didn’t quite fit in with the drama of the story, so Jim cut the sequence out. When they did this ending, they kind of felt that it was better to keep it more ambiguous. It was a nice opportunity to work for him, and we ended up working with him again on Titanic later as well.”
Batman Returns
“Batman Returns was important for Matte World — I was nominated for an Oscar for Visual Effects,” said Barron. “We did the wide shots of Gotham City, a couple of shots of the Bat Cave and the Bat Beacon in the sky over the city. We also did the opening sequence from the beginning credits flying up to the window of Cobblepot Mansion. That was a miniature over a rear projection silhouette of Cobblepot in the window. We shot that practically as an element to go into the shot. The movie was an opportunity to make things a little bit more fantastic within a realistic context. And of course, to get nominated is an honor. To be recognized by your peers was really terrific.”
Casino
“That was again another virtual set, or what we call the digital backlot — I call it environment creation, because it’s more 3-D,” Barron explained. “We were supposed to create the Las Vegas of the 1970s, so it was our job to recreate some of these classic icons. When we created the Dunes sign, we actually talked to the builder of the sign. He had all the original plans so that we could accurately recreate it in the computer. He gave us his original drawings which we digitized on our graphics tablet, and then brought in, so that scale and relationship were exactly correct. There was also the Tangiers Hotel/Casino, which is a fictitious one. So the point was to put the fictitious Robert De Niro--the Tangiers Casino on the Strip of Las Vegas that had the traditional signs in the background. And that location was actually a Howard Hughes casino called the Landmark Hotel that was gonna be torn down — in the movie Mars Attacks, they blow it up! And then we added all those other sign images and the buildings in the background that established the hotel, where the rooms were.”
“We used this Radiosity technique which was very effective,” he added, “because Radiosity describes the balanced light in an environment, and it’s not used very much. And I’m really not sure why because I think it’s a very effective way of creating scenes for films. So much that if you walked out onto a street at night and you set up a light and you bounced that light off of a surface like a bounce card, that light would propagate out into the environment and affect other surfaces in the scene. So Las Vegas is all about reflecting light bouncing off these different surfaces at night. We use it very effectively on a lot of our shots in Casino.”
Titanic
“We did the shot of the Carpathia rescue ship as the last traditional matte painting we did,” explained Barron. “The live action of rescue survivors in a boat rowing toward the Carpathia was photographed. Allan Marchaud, who does all these great paintings that are in books about Titanic and ocean liners, had done a painting like this which we were asked to copy. And to this we added the matte painting of the Carpathia itself. The smoke itself was a CG smoke element that was added, the icebergs are added, and there’s also a separate lifeboat that’s been added as a green screen element. Those are all actually digital elements that are created separately and then added in. But the tricky thing on that, of course, was that it’s shot from a boat. So the camera’s rocking and the horizon is going up and down. We had to recover that camera move and then apply all our elements to that so that everything looks like it belongs in the scene.
Truman Show
“Truman Show was for the most part photographed in a place called Seaside in Florida which was created by this one architect as a model town,” reflected Barron. “The production designer built the first story of a few downtown buildings--the insurance company that the Truman character works in, for example. So they shot all the scenes in the square and on the street with only the first story of the buildings in the frame. But in all the wide shots, we would then finish off by 3-D models that we built of the various buildings. Originally they were going to be four-story buildings, but when we actually designed them, we felt ’Well, the building goes out of frame at the top. Maybe we’d better make ‘em not quite so high.’ So very simply, at Peter Weir’s request, we segmented out one story of the CGI model and created it compositionally the way he wanted to see it. That was a very effective usage of what we call the 3-D backlot or digital backlot, where the production essentially built what they needed to of the set, and then we create everything else for the wide shots.
“Since we’re working in 3-D,” Barron continued, “the director was free to pan, tilt, dolly, whatever he needed to on the scene, and then it was our job to recover the camera move and then create a virtual camera move in the computer. Essentially the computer camera and the real world camera are doing the same things. We also did an extra-wide enhanced shot of Seaside looking down inside the Dome: the story point was that Truman’s world had to be an island, because the character was afraid of leaving the city. And so, we created those shots to establish the environment.”
Soldier
“Soldier was a disappointment in the U.S., but it was very successful in Europe,” Barron described. “Kurt Russell played this genetically obsolete soldier who was standing on this huge mountain of space garbage – old airplane parts, discarded technology, etc. We pull back from his face to see that he’s in this environment. You can only do so much on a sound stage, so it was our job to give it a broader scope than you can achieve on interior sets. We added dust storms and did a shot of a sunrise behind an old aircraft carrier. If you envision a Western landscape of Yosemite or John Ford’s locations when he shot all those classic Westerns, we were to create the equivalent of that as a used technology environment.”
Armageddon
“That was difficult because it was a shot that got added at the last minute - there were two films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, that were both coming out at the same time and Deep Impact came out first, so the feeling was wanting to make Armageddon more global,” remarked Barron. “Deep Impact had dealt with New York, so the producers of Armageddon felt, ‘Why don’t we add these other shots so we see how the meteors affects different parts of the world?’ Those were all added very quickly at the end of the production. So, we did the Paris aftermath shot where you see this big crater — a gouged section of earth by the Arc De Triumph. We couldn’t use the Eiffel Tower because that had been exploded in a previous shot! A lot of destroyed buildings and smoke and fire were added, and we had some traffic going down the street, because we figured that there would be ambulances driving to rescue people.”
X-Men
“We created a virtual scene in New York at night where they’re fighting atop the Statue of Liberty,” said Barron. “We supplied backgrounds to other companies for compositing or created the shot inventory. For instance, when the X-Men set off the mutant effect, we created the environment, but Digital Domain was creating the effect itself. So we would pre-composite our background, give that to Digital Domain digitally to add the actual mushroom explosion. But we also just did a lot of fairly traditional shots where they needed to establish that the scene was in New York.
“They photographed the film up in Canada and a lot of sequences take place on Ellis Island,” Barron added, “so our job was to add the New York horizon in the background for various shots. It’s basically creating the virtual New York and putting it back there. In some ways that’s really straightforward; Batman was much more demanding because we had to create a stylized heightened reality of Gotham City.”
Lewis and Clark - IMAX Film
“IMAX is essentially a frame that’s several times bigger than a traditional 35mm frame, so obviously we have to work at a resolution that makes that acceptable in the compositing process,” Barron described. “We’re doing a buffalo stampede as Lewis and Clark talk about coming over the plains and seeing masses of buffaloes. We’re also doing Indian villages that obviously don’t even exist any more. And we’re doing certain enhancements to the environment like making waterfalls bigger, taking out telephone poles and the like. There are several shots that are body and fender work or just removal — ‘This shot of the lake is perfect except that there’s these houseboats out there. Can you take those out?’”
The Utilizer
“I made a short sci-fi film which was on the Sci-Fi Channel that dealt with going to different dimensions with different landscapes and locations,” Barron said. “It’s based on a Robert Sheckley story about a character who gets this machine that allows him to wish for anything tangibly to be created out of matter by pure thought or by just asking for it. We produced the whole thing here at Matte World Digital. We had a slow period, and it was very much like the MGM Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals: we cleaned up the barn and put on a show in our spare time. We made the film about two years ago and sent it to the Sci-Fi Channel who bought it — they’ve showed it several times.”
THE DESIGN FUTURE
“I think what’s going to happen in the future is an extension of what you’re seeing today,” said Craig Barron. “More environments will be created on the computer, and those environments will look more realistic. I think it’s still a struggle to make digital work look realistic. There’s a lot of computer generated imagery that doesn’t look like it belongs in the real world. It has the look of being lit from within versus light falling on it.
“We’re always interested in creating the reality of the scene, so software will continue to get better, rendering times will be faster and images will look more realistic. I think we’re at a state of the art where images look pretty good, but they’re certainly not as undetectable as some of the matte shots used to be.
“Also, the digital backlot will be more accessible for filmmakers who aren’t making big effects pictures. They too will be able to have sequences that are created through the computer to help tell stories. It’ll be less considered special effects and more just the process of making movies. I think it is going to be very helpful in making films more effective and less expensive in the long run.”
|
|
|
With the success of recent blockbusters such as Titanic, The Grinch, and X-Men, Hollywood is at it again, producing a slew of “big ticket” pictures. After a mid-1990s slow period for big-budget spectacles, recently, the various studios green-lit sequels such as Jurassic Park III, remakes including Planet of the Apes, and franchise pictures, including projected three films for a Lord of the Rings trilogy and two Matrix sequels. And with big pictures come big sets, big backdrops, and the necessary design elements to make them work on screen. Here, then, is an inside look at the production elements involved in several of those films with a special inside look at the new frontier of film design — the digital backlot.
Founder of Matte World Digital, a full-service film production facility in Northern California, Craig Barron was born in nearby Oakland and started his career at ILM as a camera assistant in their matte painting department in 1979. Fortuitously, his first film was The Empire Strikes Back, and he never looked back, moving through ILM during its most successful decade, helping to create practical matte paintings for the backgrounds of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films before leaving to form Matte World with other ILM staffers after completing ILM’s Willow as Director of Matte Photography.
Now Barron, also a film historian and avid enthusiast of all things cinema, heads his own studio where filmmakers call upon his group to create backgrounds that would either be too costly or prohibitive to film in a live action format. In the beginning, Barron said that his company was somewhat reluctant to go digital. “We weren’t quite comfortable with how the digital technology added artifacts to our matte paintings,” he said, “so we actually tried to stay quite traditional and concentrated more on the big miniature/matte painting combinations with rear projection as a way to create our images — very similar to how they did the original King Kong, really. But of course, we were dabbling in digital because you could see that in some cases it was very effective to use.”
Gradually, Barron and co. integrated digital technology into their work, which, a decade after forming Matte World, includes the fabrication of backgrounds for some of the most prominent filmmakers in the U.S. Here is a sampling of some highlights through the evolution of their craft:
Terminator 2
A recurring theme in the film is that the lead character, Sarah Connor is watching children play in a Los Angeles schoolyard; once an atomic bomb blows up, and she witnesses a nuclear holocaust. In the end of the film, for a future coda sequence, director James Cameron wanted Sarah to be viewed as an old lady at the playground watching a similar group of children play — it bookends the film and states that nuclear war was avoided. The one shift in the location is that the scene is of Washington, D.C. where Sarah’s son, John Connor, is working in government to spread the humanistic word as opposed to leading the human race against a machine-based terrorism.
For the scene, Matte World created a DC in fifty years from now. “In the shot, the camera tilts down, and among the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument, we created a view of futuristic buildings that are made of glass,” said Barron. “It continues to come down to the park and you see Sarah there watching children play on a playground. It didn’t quite fit in with the drama of the story, so Jim cut the sequence out. When they did this ending, they kind of felt that it was better to keep it more ambiguous. It was a nice opportunity to work for him, and we ended up working with him again on Titanic later as well.”
Batman Returns
“Batman Returns was important for Matte World — I was nominated for an Oscar for Visual Effects,” said Barron. “We did the wide shots of Gotham City, a couple of shots of the Bat Cave and the Bat Beacon in the sky over the city. We also did the opening sequence from the beginning credits flying up to the window of Cobblepot Mansion. That was a miniature over a rear projection silhouette of Cobblepot in the window. We shot that practically as an element to go into the shot. The movie was an opportunity to make things a little bit more fantastic within a realistic context. And of course, to get nominated is an honor. To be recognized by your peers was really terrific.”
Casino
“That was again another virtual set, or what we call the digital backlot — I call it environment creation, because it’s more 3-D,” Barron explained. “We were supposed to create the Las Vegas of the 1970s, so it was our job to recreate some of these classic icons. When we created the Dunes sign, we actually talked to the builder of the sign. He had all the original plans so that we could accurately recreate it in the computer. He gave us his original drawings which we digitized on our graphics tablet, and then brought in, so that scale and relationship were exactly correct. There was also the Tangiers Hotel/Casino, which is a fictitious one. So the point was to put the fictitious Robert De Niro--the Tangiers Casino on the Strip of Las Vegas that had the traditional signs in the background. And that location was actually a Howard Hughes casino called the Landmark Hotel that was gonna be torn down — in the movie Mars Attacks, they blow it up! And then we added all those other sign images and the buildings in the background that established the hotel, where the rooms were.”
“We used this Radiosity technique which was very effective,” he added, “because Radiosity describes the balanced light in an environment, and it’s not used very much. And I’m really not sure why because I think it’s a very effective way of creating scenes for films. So much that if you walked out onto a street at night and you set up a light and you bounced that light off of a surface like a bounce card, that light would propagate out into the environment and affect other surfaces in the scene. So Las Vegas is all about reflecting light bouncing off these different surfaces at night. We use it very effectively on a lot of our shots in Casino.”
Titanic
“We did the shot of the Carpathia rescue ship as the last traditional matte painting we did,” explained Barron. “The live action of rescue survivors in a boat rowing toward the Carpathia was photographed. Allan Marchaud, who does all these great paintings that are in books about Titanic and ocean liners, had done a painting like this which we were asked to copy. And to this we added the matte painting of the Carpathia itself. The smoke itself was a CG smoke element that was added, the icebergs are added, and there’s also a separate lifeboat that’s been added as a green screen element. Those are all actually digital elements that are created separately and then added in. But the tricky thing on that, of course, was that it’s shot from a boat. So the camera’s rocking and the horizon is going up and down. We had to recover that camera move and then apply all our elements to that so that everything looks like it belongs in the scene.
Truman Show
“Truman Show was for the most part photographed in a place called Seaside in Florida which was created by this one architect as a model town,” reflected Barron. “The production designer built the first story of a few downtown buildings--the insurance company that the Truman character works in, for example. So they shot all the scenes in the square and on the street with only the first story of the buildings in the frame. But in all the wide shots, we would then finish off by 3-D models that we built of the various buildings. Originally they were going to be four-story buildings, but when we actually designed them, we felt ’Well, the building goes out of frame at the top. Maybe we’d better make ‘em not quite so high.’ So very simply, at Peter Weir’s request, we segmented out one story of the CGI model and created it compositionally the way he wanted to see it. That was a very effective usage of what we call the 3-D backlot or digital backlot, where the production essentially built what they needed to of the set, and then we create everything else for the wide shots.
“Since we’re working in 3-D,” Barron continued, “the director was free to pan, tilt, dolly, whatever he needed to on the scene, and then it was our job to recover the camera move and then create a virtual camera move in the computer. Essentially the computer camera and the real world camera are doing the same things. We also did an extra-wide enhanced shot of Seaside looking down inside the Dome: the story point was that Truman’s world had to be an island, because the character was afraid of leaving the city. And so, we created those shots to establish the environment.”
Soldier
“Soldier was a disappointment in the U.S., but it was very successful in Europe,” Barron described. “Kurt Russell played this genetically obsolete soldier who was standing on this huge mountain of space garbage – old airplane parts, discarded technology, etc. We pull back from his face to see that he’s in this environment. You can only do so much on a sound stage, so it was our job to give it a broader scope than you can achieve on interior sets. We added dust storms and did a shot of a sunrise behind an old aircraft carrier. If you envision a Western landscape of Yosemite or John Ford’s locations when he shot all those classic Westerns, we were to create the equivalent of that as a used technology environment.”
Armageddon
“That was difficult because it was a shot that got added at the last minute - there were two films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, that were both coming out at the same time and Deep Impact came out first, so the feeling was wanting to make Armageddon more global,” remarked Barron. “Deep Impact had dealt with New York, so the producers of Armageddon felt, ‘Why don’t we add these other shots so we see how the meteors affects different parts of the world?’ Those were all added very quickly at the end of the production. So, we did the Paris aftermath shot where you see this big crater — a gouged section of earth by the Arc De Triumph. We couldn’t use the Eiffel Tower because that had been exploded in a previous shot! A lot of destroyed buildings and smoke and fire were added, and we had some traffic going down the street, because we figured that there would be ambulances driving to rescue people.”
X-Men
“We created a virtual scene in New York at night where they’re fighting atop the Statue of Liberty,” said Barron. “We supplied backgrounds to other companies for compositing or created the shot inventory. For instance, when the X-Men set off the mutant effect, we created the environment, but Digital Domain was creating the effect itself. So we would pre-composite our background, give that to Digital Domain digitally to add the actual mushroom explosion. But we also just did a lot of fairly traditional shots where they needed to establish that the scene was in New York.
“They photographed the film up in Canada and a lot of sequences take place on Ellis Island,” Barron added, “so our job was to add the New York horizon in the background for various shots. It’s basically creating the virtual New York and putting it back there. In some ways that’s really straightforward; Batman was much more demanding because we had to create a stylized heightened reality of Gotham City.”
Lewis and Clark - IMAX Film
“IMAX is essentially a frame that’s several times bigger than a traditional 35mm frame, so obviously we have to work at a resolution that makes that acceptable in the compositing process,” Barron described. “We’re doing a buffalo stampede as Lewis and Clark talk about coming over the plains and seeing masses of buffaloes. We’re also doing Indian villages that obviously don’t even exist any more. And we’re doing certain enhancements to the environment like making waterfalls bigger, taking out telephone poles and the like. There are several shots that are body and fender work or just removal — ‘This shot of the lake is perfect except that there’s these houseboats out there. Can you take those out?’”
The Utilizer
“I made a short sci-fi film which was on the Sci-Fi Channel that dealt with going to different dimensions with different landscapes and locations,” Barron said. “It’s based on a Robert Sheckley story about a character who gets this machine that allows him to wish for anything tangibly to be created out of matter by pure thought or by just asking for it. We produced the whole thing here at Matte World Digital. We had a slow period, and it was very much like the MGM Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals: we cleaned up the barn and put on a show in our spare time. We made the film about two years ago and sent it to the Sci-Fi Channel who bought it — they’ve showed it several times.”
THE DESIGN FUTURE
“I think what’s going to happen in the future is an extension of what you’re seeing today,” said Craig Barron. “More environments will be created on the computer, and those environments will look more realistic. I think it’s still a struggle to make digital work look realistic. There’s a lot of computer generated imagery that doesn’t look like it belongs in the real world. It has the look of being lit from within versus light falling on it.
“We’re always interested in creating the reality of the scene, so software will continue to get better, rendering times will be faster and images will look more realistic. I think we’re at a state of the art where images look pretty good, but they’re certainly not as undetectable as some of the matte shots used to be.
“Also, the digital backlot will be more accessible for filmmakers who aren’t making big effects pictures. They too will be able to have sequences that are created through the computer to help tell stories. It’ll be less considered special effects and more just the process of making movies. I think it is going to be very helpful in making films more effective and less expensive in the long run.”
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