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MillimeterA Sense of Place
Mar 21, 2002 12:00 PM, Kristinha McCort
Building Effects for Ararat
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Atom Egoyan's latest film, Ararat, is not what one would consider an effects-intensive movie. But, according to Egoyan and visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi of Toronto-based Mr. X, the effects that do exist in the film are crucial to constructing the film's historical narrative.
“It's not a big splashy effects movie, but I am interested in the ways that technology allows you to do more subtle, quiet things, which can really leave an impression,” states Egoyan, who adds that the ability of digital effects and filmmaking to manipulate history is actually an important sub-theme of his most recent tale.
Within Ararat's narrative, a filmmaker whose mother was killed in the Armenian genocide shoots a movie depicting the holocaust that touched his life. Berardi and his team at Mr. X enhanced Ararat's flashback sequences, which present Turkey and the Armenian city of Van in 1914.
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When constructing the matte paintings revealing the city of Van, Berardi and digital matte artist Kristy Blackwell did not have a clear reference to how the Armenian city appeared in 1914, when the historical narrative takes place.
"It was very difficult in terms of architecture and landscape,” explains Berardi. “The problem was that Van is completely in ruins now, but the story takes place just before the major destruction happened.”
Berardi and Blackwell drew their inspiration from historical books on Turkey and Van, as well as from footage taped by a location scout who went to the region. They also consulted with production designer Phillip Barker, DP Paul Sarossy, and Egoyan to develop the composition. Berardi supervised the live-action shoot in Drumheller, Alberta, whose landscape he found remarkably similar to Turkey's.
Blackwell constructed the primitive 3D geometry in Maya. Once the edits on the shots were locked, she began working in full resolution.
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“What we quickly found was that building too much detail wasn't working for Atom,” says Berardi. “He wanted to maintain a bit of mystery about the old city and keep it tantalizing.”
Blackwell painted in Photoshop and created 3D elements in Maya. The team used Shake for rough composites, and Aaron Weintraub completed the final composites in Flame.
Location became problematic when Ararat filmmakers were shooting a battle scene depicting a large Turkish army encroaching on Armenian territory. The scene called for thousands of soldiers, but the Canadian Badlands proved too tough a terrain in which to bring that many actors. To resolve the issue, Berardi devised a method that allowed the production to accomplish the illusion of thousands, with only 200 extras positioned in the formidable locale.
Berardi divided up the battle-scene landscape into four areas. During the shoot, filmmakers did four setups, each with 200 extras positioned in one of the quadrants. They shot each quadrant locked-off separately with a VistaVision camera, moving the extras from quadrant to quadrant to accomplish each shot.
 Filmmakers created the illusion of a mass exodus by shooting the foreground of the exile with around 200 extras and then digitally creating the people who comprise the rest of the line. |
“In most cases Atom is moving the camera, and to cut to a big battle scene moment with a lock-off wouldn't look right in terms of continuity,” says Berardi. “So I promised him that if we could shoot in VistaVision, that we would give him digital camera moves in post.”
For each shot, the effects team lifted out the action area from the four VistaVision layers with a hand-painted matte. Weintraub composited the quadrants together in Shake to achieve the basic backdrop, and effects artists added action with smoke, gun fire, and more people. When Egoyan approved the composition, the artists began working on the camera moves.
“Our composite at that point was in 3K resolution, and we were finishing to 1.66 2K, so we could pan our final 1.66 camera view through the higher-resolution background to get dynamic moves without resolution loss,” recalls Berardi.
“VistaVision was beautiful for the effect,” notes Egoyan, who approved the use of the format for the scene. “It was just spectacular in terms of how we could move in and out without any sort of grain or exaggeration.”
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Berardi also thickened up a crowd for Ararat's exile scene, which depicts thousands of Armenians marching out of Turkey. Filmmakers shot the foreground of the human mass with around 200 extras, and the effects team digitally created the people who comprise the rest of the line.
“I brought Dave Calder, the lead animator on the shot, the camera information, relative distances, and photographs,” says Berardi. “Dave remodeled the landscape, match-moved the camera into position, and started building the 3D — everything from horses to Turkish soldiers to peasant women. He built about 10 or 12 different sorts of people.”
Calder used Maya for 3D and 2d3's Boujou for match-moving.
Berardi notes that while he took photographs of the extras in costume to gather a color palette reference for the 3D characters, the shapes and models that Calder finally created were fairly primitive.
“We didn't do cloth at all because they were so small in frame,” he notes. “It was really about their motion. These are a beaten people, and the line had to convey that.”
Berardi says he enjoyed a strong collaboration with Egoyan early on in Ararat's development.
“We have worked pretty closely with him,” Berardi notes. “I was involved in preproduction and the shoot, and now that we are in post, he is here everyday directing and giving us feedback on his work.”
Egoyan wouldn't have it any other way.
“I think it's really important to have that collaboration early,” Egoyan states. “You obviously have to get your technical needs sorted out, but it also helps to ignite your imagination and lets you know your possibilities.”
The Scorpion King's City of Light
 Matte artists on The Scorpion King had to make scenes filmed in the California desert appear as if they had been shot at the base of a towering North African city. Top: Filmmakers on location in the California desert. Above: A final shot with a matte of the city. |
Having spent much of his career designing darkly lit, futuristic environments for films such as last year's The One and 2000's X-Men, matte artist Deak Ferrand of Hatch, Santa Monica, faced new challenges when designing an ancient desert cityscape for Universal's The Scorpion King.
The film itself is a prequel to 2001's The Mummy Returns and tells the tale of the Scorpion King (played by Dwayne Johnson, WWF's “The Rock”), a ruler who predates Egypt's great Pharaohs. Ferrand, working with Riot, Santa Monica, and entrusted by director Chuck Russell with the task of creating the city where the King dwells, found that he had to design an impressively realistic, but fictional “historical” setting, set under the unforgiving glare of the desert sun.
One challenge was getting the desert surrounding the city to appear North African. The crew had shot the desert city scenes just outside of Los Angeles, and Ferrand found that the location looked obviously Californian. He strived to make the desert look more appropriate for the film's North African setting. He removed the Californian desert's shrubs and grass, added orange sand, and created rock structures to locate the city, taking his cues from both reference books and Lawrence of Arabia.
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“I needed to enhance the environment around the city to make it look like these guys really went to Jordan to shoot this movie,” notes Ferrand. “In Jordan, there is a very specific type of rock structure. In Lawrence of Arabia, there are huge pieces of dark rock emerging from the sand, and because of that rock, people know that it was not shot in California. So we changed our entire environment to fit the city on this huge piece of rock foundation. As soon as we put it there, it looked really foreign, but real.”
Because the city was set in the ancient past but was itself fictional, Ferrand had no immediate historical reference to emulate. But inspiration did come through glimpses of a ruined city featured in Gladiator.
“There is a ruined city that exists in Morocco that they used as a backdrop in Gladiator, for scenes where Russell Crowe's character fights for the first time in the small arena,” Ferrand explains. “This city became our reference. We made it 10-times bigger and then restored it to how it would have looked originally, painting in colors and such.”
Ferrand added to the city's sense of place by adding a nearby river and port that can be seen in many shots of the film. In addition to making the city tall and multi-stepped, filmmakers conveyed the idea that it was an important metropolis of its day by shooting hundreds of extras as traders and merchants camped outside the city's walls.
The film's imposing city structures (top) were inspired by miniatures (above) created by Close Encounters guru, Greg Jein. |
But creating a convincing surrounding environment and structure was not enough. Ferrand found that working with the play of desert light off the city was also essential to making his creation look realistic. For Ferrand, it was a professional challenge.
“When you paint for years these dark cities, you can get away with more,” says Ferrand. “You can trick the audience because you can do anything with spotlights, but here you have to deal with the sunlight bouncing all over the place, and there is only one light source. It only looks real when you get it right.”
Knowing that Russell favors the use of miniatures in his films, Ferrand proposed that they enlist modelmaker Greg Jein (of Close Encounters fame) to create simple models for reference.
“[Jein] built two different scales,” states Ferrand, “one of the fortress on top of the city and one of almost the entire city, and we took pictures of the models outside matching the light direction of the plates. It's a very simple mock-up, but it gave us the scale and the light on the city.”
Armed with the design of the city and surrounding environment, Ferrand and artists Michelle Moen and Rocco Gioffre of Riot created the matte paintings and matched their work to the camera movement of the backplates using the technique of projection.
“Projection allows us to move inside the matte painting in perspective,” says Ferrand. “Clients really like that because it is no longer just an establishing shot of a flat painting. If you want the camera to push in and crane up, it will change perspective and will have parallax.”
Filmmakers shot backplates moving the camera on a crane, and Ferrand and the artists tracked the camera movement using RealViz's MatchMover. They then sent this camera information into Softimage and recreated the city environment roughly in 3D with simple objects. Once they established the 3D representation, they started painting the foreground, midground, and background layers in Photoshop, and then projected these layers onto the 3D objects through the lens of a virtual camera using a shader for Softimage called “Camera Projection.”
“Whatever you've painted sticks to volumetric objects, so as soon as you move the camera, you start to feel that you are really moving in perspective and volume,” notes Ferrand, adding that compositing was handled both in After Effects by the matte team and in Inferno by Bob Wiatre and Brian Hannibal.
Ferrand says he is grateful to Russell and visual effects director Juliette Yager for sticking with subtle shots. He notes that using simple shots not only made his job projecting matte paintings and matching camera movement easier, but it also made his created environments appear more realistic.
“When the moves are subtle, the shot tends to read as real. Every time you go into a move that is crazy, it calls attention to itself as a visual-effects shot. We wanted to make this as transparent as we could.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.