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MillimeterCreation Step by Step
Jan 29, 2010 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
When director Jon Amiel set out to depict naturalist Charles Darwin in Creation, he wanted to visualize the complex cycles of life that Darwin observed in nature. In Amiel's film for the Recorded Picture Company, he accomplished this with a startling visual-effects sequence that shows a dramatic interplay between predators and prey. During a pastoral picnic scene, Darwin (played by Paul Bettany) sees a rat running through the grass. In what could be described as an act of hallucinatory imagination, the camera follows the rat as it crawls into the skull of a dead animal that's lying among weeds. The rat climbs through the eye socket of the skull, and inside we see the maggots that are thriving there. Suddenly, through the skull's eye hole, we see the beak of a bird that's pecking around for food. The bird snatches a maggot from the skull and then flies upward. The bird flies into a hedgerow, and as it thrashes about to free itself, it dislodges a bird's nest. The nest—and a fledgling bird inside it— tumble to the ground, where the fledgling dies and becomes another animal's prey. (The sequence was so emotionally provocative that the film's credits contained a disclaimer assuring audiences that no birds were harmed during the production.)
"We tried to do something quite complicated," Amiel says. "We wanted to show, tooth and claw, how fragile the young of a species are. We were dramatizing a famous passage in Darwin's Origin of Species. This sequence serves double duty—being both objective science and a subjective dream. Darwin had an extraordinary imagination, and we tried to get at the power of his imagination."
To realize Amiel's vision, the production called upon Crazy Horse Effects in Venice, Calif. There, VFX Supervisor Paul Graff, VFX Designer Robert Stromberg, and VFX Producer/Editor Christina Graff developed a way to execute what would turn out to be a 40-second sequence. The trio had shared the 2008 VFX Emmy Award for the HBO John Adams miniseries, but for Creation they had just four weeks' production time. While an all-CG approach would have provided the most control, Paul Graff says, "CG requires a lot of time. We needed a faster way. So we decided to do everything we could in-camera and only use computers for what was absolutely necessary."
"Our approach combined 2.5D compositing and matte paintings with time-lapse material and a bit of live action," Christina Graff says. "The only plate photography we had at the onset of this sequence was the rat running towards the skull." Stromberg then painted several style frames for the proposed sequence, including images depicting what the environment inside the skull could be.
"The camera never got very close to the eye socket of the skull that was actually filmed in the plate photography," Paul Graff says. "So we jumped out of the live-action footage and through the eye socket of the skull really quickly to see what was inside. We did a 3D camera move to settle inside the skull." The interior of the skull was modeled in Maxon Cinema 4D and then mapped with images blended from skull photographs and the paintings done by Stromberg. The mapped images were handled in Adobe Photoshop, and the animated camera move was done with Adobe After Effects.
To visualize the life forms proliferating within the skull, nature photographer Nick Pitt used a Canon EOS 5D camera to capture time-lapse footage of real maggots. A specially designed set was built at Pitt's Farm Studio in Bristol, England, which Amiel likens to "the island of Dr. Moreau." Four different time-lapse shoots were done to get the timing right. The compositors at Crazy Horse then inserted Pitt's footage within the constructed skull using After Effects.
"It's very hard to art-direct maggots over the course of a few days," Paul Graff says. "You see living tissue collapse and sink down, and then specks of white dots appear and begin moving. We had to adjust the time-lapse footage to make it work for this shot."
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