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MillimeterSurrogates Step by Step
Sep 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Images copyright 2009 Touchstone Pictures. Courtesy Synthespian Studios.
Cyborgs are always in style, as director Jonathan Mostow knows well. After delivering Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Mostow turned to Surrogates, a futuristic tale in which people remotely control robot versions of themselves. The Touchstone Pictures release features Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell as FBI agents and photoreal CG robots animated at Synthespian Studios. "They look human on the outside, but are mechanical underneath," says Synthespian Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff Kleiser. "Our goal was to get the audience to believe that these surrogates are actually robots and not just actors pretending to be robots."
In one scene, Willis and Mitchell confront an odd-looking landlady of an apartment building where a murder has been committed. "The idea was that this landlady's normal surrogate was out for repair, so she's using a cheapo temporary model that isn't complete," Kleiser says. "Originally, the production thought we could do this with a makeup effect, but this temp robot looked like someone in a bad Halloween costume. You could see that there was actually enough room for a person to be under the mask. So we suggested that if we substituted a CG head, along with a neck you could see through, then this clearly would have to be a robot."
"It was an opportunity to expose that she was in fact a machine," says Surrogates Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Stetson (whose many credits also include the cyborg classic Blade Runner). Stetson collaborated with Synthespians' Concept Artist Diana Walczak to develop a new look for the robot, creating iterations of concept art done with Adobe Photoshop. "I did a sketch rotoing around the actor's mask and using a bit of a CG skull that Synthespians had developed," Stetson says. "Then we added bits of a robotic neck to the concept and developed a 'homemade' previz. We put a little repair sticker on it to emphasize that it was a rental unit. Jonathan Mostow approved that, and Synthespians took it from there."
The scene unfolds in the hallway of an apartment building, and Stetson had shot the stills of the hallway that would later be inserted as a background for the actors, who were filmed against greenscreen. "We took measurements when we shot the greenscreen," Stetson says. "The very last thing I did was go back to that hallway to match the camera positions for the various takes that were done there, so we could tile the background images in Photoshop."
The shot was constructured primarily at the Synthespians studio in Williamstown, Mass. Since the camera was moving and the landlady was walking around in the shot, the Synthespians team tracked the motion of her performance and the camera using Autodesk Maya and 2d3 boujou software. "The camera move was subtle, but because the landlady was walking and turning her head the shot required a fair amount of tracking," Kleiser says.
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