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Ron's Empire

May 15, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Ron Howard builds his own Vatican.

Digital extensions

These processes were invaluable, but largely as a tool to supplement the design work of Production Designer Allan Cameron and his set-design unit. The plan was to build pieces of the historic church locations on extensive sets at the Sony lot and then digitally extend and manipulate them as necessary.

"We all visited our key locations to get the essence and flavor and took a lot of stills," Bickerton says. "But we used a lot of other texture reference as well. Actually, there is a surprisingly large amount of reference available on the [architecture] of these famous churches online and other places. But, you can't just sit a tripod down and do hours of exposures in those places. And, besides, in places like the [Sistine Chapel], there are light levels where you couldn't get a lot of depth of field anyway, so you get guide reference and you build from there. But we eventually realized a lot of our work would involve scale and perspective cheats anyway. To extend an actual set to the actual size or dimensions of the real place was not imperative for the exact shots we needed. What was more important was to get the essence of the place and enough reference to make our specific shots work. So in truth, we were making heightened representations of these places. Allan Cameron built a fabulous replica of the Sistine Chapel with 40ft. walls, and it was an amazing facsimile. It was a faithful replica in the spirit of the place, but not absolutely true in all aspects."

CIS Vancouver played a key role in digitally stitching together the three primary churches. CIS had largely earned the work because the company it evolved from—the former Rainmaker Visual Effects facility of Vancouver—had pioneered some of the techniques on The Da Vinci Code. The basic approach, Breakspear says, was for the art department to build particular set pieces, shoot 360 degrees of greenscreen, and then methodically build out the rest of the environment in the computer. The difference in Angels & Demons was the scale of such work compared to that of The Da Vinci Code.

"In The Da Vinci Code, we had about 40 shots involving a CG church," Breakspear says. "Here, we have three different churches, each very different in appearance, including St. Peter's Basilica. We were responsible for all the CG environmental work in those buildings. Each location has specific events going on—we had to augment a practical burn in the Santa Maria della Vittoria church, adding bigger flames, smoke, heat, haze, and embers. The set department cleverly doubled up two churches into one [Santa Maria della Vittoria and Santa Maria del Popolo], and then we had to make each one match the real locations in Rome. It was very complicated because you have to match everything. The architecture, all the statues, and every surface needs to reflect, bounce, and light accurately, or you won't believe it.

"Our set church had seven chapels on either side, and in reality, the real locations needed only five chapels. That's a big deal, because when you build a CG church, your set should be accurate to the church that exists. When you don't follow that rule, suddenly you have columns connecting to nothing, and places for actors to wander into that don't actually exist. So it was a real challenge to take a real church and do some pretty involved rebuilding of the model to make it fit the church we shot in Los Angeles. Our job was to meld the two environments together and make it all look invisibly realistic."

St. Peter's Basilica posed a different problem for CIS artists: It features 300 years of detailed, intimate, mosaic-based textures that are extremely complicated to replicate.

"Our first trip to Rome was just to get a general sense of the space—how does it feel at different times of the day, what does it sound like in there, and so on," Breakspear says. "Then we went back on another trip to take more extensive photos of the space, and that helped us create basic projection modeling. We then took pictures from different angles, and when you put them together, you can build a model of the image you are photographing. That gave us a good, basic model of the environment, but without the tops of the columns or statues and other little bits, which our modeler added.

"Meanwhile, on set in L.A., we had a full 360-degree greenscreen with a little bit of floor made to match the real location. We previsualized how we would need to move the camera and actors through the set to simulate the basic areas of the church for the particular shots we needed. Then we went back to Rome and shot more stills from the specific camera angles we developed on set. There was no way to shoot every nook and cranny—that would take forever. But we did get the angles we needed, taking close to 10,000 images using both digital and 35mm still cameras. This gave us great flexibility for everything we shot in L.A. We ended up with a model that is perfect from any angle that we needed to shoot for the movie. For our textures, we spent months painting out people who were there when we took photos, touching up floor patterns, and removing any real strong light, since we needed to relight it in CG to specifically match [DP Salvatore Totino's] lighting on set. Just about every frame had 25 to 30 different elements per frame to create the look and lighting that we wanted."

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