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MillimeterRidley Scott Makes War
Jan 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
 Complex practical effects combined with CG
enhancements made Black Hawk's combat realistic. |
In his zeal to recreate the 1993 firefight between U.S. Special Operations forces and Somali militia fighters accurately for his new film, Black Hawk Down, director Ridley Scott found himself engaged in “the most grueling shoot I've ever directed, by far.” As that effort wrapped up, Scott insisted he was “extremely satisfied” with his attempt to illustrate the horrors of unconventional, modern combat in the film version of the best-selling book about the tragic battle of Mogadishu, during which American forces were ambushed while trying to capture a Somali warlord.
Scott is cognizant, however, that the attempt — though he hardly realized it at the time — now takes on special significance as the film debuts exactly when American Special Forces (including some Army Rangers actually featured in the movie) are once again in action overseas.
“We were well into the effort, and along comes September 11, and my original plan to have 11 months to shoot and edit was changed,” says Scott. “My first thought was to retract, to push the movie back. But we thought again, and decided this film could not be more relevant, so instead, the release was moved up [to the end of December]. That left us with less time to make this film as realistic as possible. I was determined not to take any artistic license and to stick strictly to the actual battle report. That posed lots of challenges in our time frame.”
Scott adds that, in large part, he was able to succeed by working closely with veteran partners on recent films — particularly editor Pietro Scalia and the visual effects team at The Mill, London (see below).
But for their work to be meaningful, Scott had to first navigate a large crew through a 16-week shoot in the Moroccan coastal town of Sale. Among this crew were 35 real-life Army Rangers who not only perform stunts in the film, but also performed security duties, protecting four authentic Army Blackhawk helicopters rented to the production on the condition that only Army personnel perform stunts involving the vehicles.
Also central to the effort, according to Scott, was a carefully coordinated practical effects effort under the leadership of special effects supervisor Neil Corbould. That team allowed him to create and capture the vast majority of the film's explosive ordinance in-camera, according to Scott.
“The rocket-propelled grenades [RPGs] firing, all the explosions — we did it all live,” says Scott. “Neil's team found an interesting way to propel grenades via radio control on thin wires, and other things like that. Very dangerous effects work that they pulled off flawlessly.”
 The Mill, London, tweaked the film's color pallette
in post to enhance elements captured in-camera, and in combination with
Asylum, Santa Monica, also provided extensive CG and compositing
services. |
Still, at the end of the day, Scott says the offline edit phase, performed by Scalia in consultation with Scott, was the most crucial factor in creating what Scott calls “linear sense” out of hours of chaotic combat footage.
“We did over a million slates shooting this movie, which is a lot for a feature film,” he says. “It was very tricky for Pietro and myself to sort through all of that and turn that massive amount of coverage into an understandable, cohesive cause-and-effect situation. In that sense, editing was like remaking the film all over again. We had the footage and then had to build the story. It was a real problem because this particular story is based on a real event, and that real event was relentless — it didn't stop for 18½ hours that day in Mogadishu. We had to figure out, where and when to let up. At first, I thought I would apply normal rules of drama to break up the action, but then I realized that isn't what happened in reality. Since I wanted to stick strictly to the original report, I didn't let up a whole lot. We pretty much kept our foot on the pedal the whole way.”
Helicopters Down Digitally
Black Hawk Down was the third consecutive collaboration for The Mill, London, and Ridley Scott (the other two were Gladiator and Hannibal). This time the goal was to create realistic helicopter crashes and combat sequences. Tim Burke, The Mill's visual effects supervisor on the project, says The Mill supervised 210 digital effects shots, creating half of those in London and collaborating with Asylum of Santa Monica on the rest.
The Mill concentrated mainly on the helicopter crashes and extensive compositing work, such as generating dust and black smoke during the Army raid and helicopter crash sequences, Burke explains. “We also provided matte paintings of the Army air base, put digital bleachers into an abandoned stadium, and did some of the nightvision stuff, where soldiers are looking through infrared goggles.” Taking advantages of lessons learned on Gladiator, Mill artists also created lots of CG extras and set extensions to give scale to the Somali crowds.
However, the job of combining CG helicopter elements with live-action material of stunt copter crashes, close shots from a full-size, copter mock-up, and miniature copter shots was the most complex, according to Burke.
“The crashes combined all sorts of things,” he says. “We had full-screen CG helicopters, CG crewmen, stunt doubles, model shots, and live-actions shots to combine in Inferno and Flame. In particular, though, Ridley wanted to create the impression of a huge, spinning mass after the helicopters crashed — showing their roto blades spinning and chopping into the ground after they hit. That came from some reference footage we obtained showing a dramatic crash at an air show. The copter crashed, rolled to its side, with the blades still turning, gouging earth until they snapped and broke. Ridley was taken with this footage, so that was the basis of our CG work on the two crashes.”
 Director Ridley Scott says he supervised the most
complicated shoot of his career in Morocco during the production of
Black Hawk Down. |
Burke says Mill artists built a CG helicopter in Maya and created “a dynamic software designed to calculate how the blades would react to rotating and hitting the ground, first bending and then breaking. We first did a CG simulation of the whole thing, and then shot background plates in Morocco, along with plates of the full-size helicopter on a wire rig. Then, we constructed animatics from different camera POVs in Maya of the blades. We gave those different options to the editor (Pietro Scalia), and he helped us establish the speed and rotation of the blades in each frame. After that, we put our fully rendered CG helicopter into the shot, over the live-action plate.”
Burke adds that Mill artists then added interactive debris, dust, concrete particles, and broken blade pieces and composited them together with plates of a fifth-scale miniature of the helicopter, in order to seamlessly combine those elements with the helicopter.
“It was all coordinated very carefully,” Burke adds. “We even programmed the movement of our animation into a specially constructed model mover on our miniature stage. That allowed us to move the model in ways that repeated the exact actions of our CG helicopter. We shot the miniature with some real dust and debris so that it mixed and reacted perfectly with our CG footage.”
Such shots also required extensive match-moving work, which The Mill performed using a combination of Boujou and 3D Equalizer software. “We did some complex tracking stuff,” he explains, “including a complicated Steadicam shot, where we built an entire POV in the computer — a full move around a character after he falls out of a helicopter, with dust and debris swirling around him.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.