• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

 

The Fabricated World of The Ring

Jan 1, 2003 12:00 PM, by Ellen Wolff

Near the head of the shot, plate photography of real water blended into a virtual lighthouse landscape.

There's no shortage of surreal imagery in the DreamWorks release The Ring, but one of the more challenging visual effects scenes doesn't appear to have effects at all. A key shot from a helicopter, fully a minute long, takes viewers from above a lighthouse on a rugged shore and across miles of fields. The shot focuses in on a truck that's driving toward a farm where important events will unfold, ending when the truck arrives at a barn door. Although shooting this may have been theoretically possible, in reality the production team never found a lighthouse near a farm that would allow director Gore Verbinski to establish an essential connection between the structures. “The whole motif of the movie depended on this relationship,” says visual effects supervisor Charles Gibson. “This location is almost like a character.” So Gibson, also the film's second unit director, filmed a lighthouse in Oregon and a farm in Washington. Matte World Digital, Novato, Calif., fabricated in 3D the landscape that connects lighthouse to farm. “A good example of how matte painting has moved into the digital age,” says Matte World visual effects supervisor Craig Barron.

“They [Matte World] started with a simple previz,” says Gibson. “Sort of a top-view strategy map so we could figure out what our helicopter approach would be.” On arrival at the locations, the film crew took measurements and placed cones to serve as tracking markers along the helicopter's flight paths. The markers would help Barron's team recreate the camera move to ‘fly’ over the virtual landscape they would later add. The pilot, maintaining similar speeds and altitudes at both locations, carefully followed the path of the cones. “The helicopter was like a motion-control platform,” says Barron.

Finished composite with rescaled lighthouse.

After completing the plate photography of both the head and the tail sections of the shot, Matte World tackled the invented middle section. Using RealViz's MatchMover software, they tracked the camera move to create an unbroken POV. They flew this camera over wire-frame models of fields and a road with a CG replica of the truck — all created with a Windows NT version of 3ds Max. When they presented a previsualized version of the shot to Gibson, he said, “Great. Bring it to life.”

Barron's next step was to rent a plane and fly around his local Northern California terrain, photographing real textures to map onto the wire-frame landscape. This approach allowed the camera to move through 3D space instead of remaining a 2D effect. “We used real-world textures instead of computer lighting,” Barron explains. “We rely on digital artists to create the reality of a scene instead of software to render it. There's so much complexity in the real world that's not yet addressed in 3D programs.”

A CG telephone pole marks the transition from virtual truck and landscape to real truck and landscape.

There was a particular challenge to the project. “There are multiple resolutions going on, and as you fly towards something you have to make sure it doesn't fall apart,” says Barron. “That's a trick that flight simulators use, although hopefully ours is more realistic.”

Matte World populated its landscape with a variety of strategically placed CG trees, poles, and fences. “[That] helped blur the line between reality and matte painting,” says Barron. “They provided dimensional perspective versus just texture maps. The contours of the maps move in perspective, so it looks like we fly over a cliff and reveal something behind it. These are the visual cues that make you think you're looking at something that was really photographed from a helicopter as a continuous shot.”

3D fog creates seamless blend in finished composite.

While the camera follows a CG version of the truck for much of the shot, there comes a point where Matte World transitions from the CG to the real truck that was photographed. “We thought we'd have to do the transition over a long dissolve,” says Gibson. “But Matte World came up with the idea of going behind a telephone pole, which was a great switcheroo.” Barron agrees, “That was fun to do. We had to match the contrast and details perfectly, so that when we did finally transition to the real truck, it didn't look phony.”

Matte World also created 3D-CG fog that ebbed and flowed throughout the scene. “The nice part about doing this virtual landscape in the middle of the shot is that we had two dramatically different lighting conditions for the plate photography,” says Gibson, “and the fog helped create a seamless blend.” The 3D fog helped address the perspective issues involved with an aerial POV. “There's so much perspective in a shot like this,” he says. “You have a flat plain and the verticality of trees and poles. The fog has to react and move in perspective — all axes are moving at once. The camera is panning, you're looking down and you kind of see all three vanishing points, so there's not really a ‘2D fake’ that's appropriate.”

Another crucial CG element was the replacement of the photographed lighthouse with a rescaled 3D version. Because the lighthouse needed to exist within Matte World's virtual camera move and also within the 3D fog, Barron felt a CG version would be easier to integrate and position for maximum effect. The CG model was wrapped with photographed textures from the actual building. As a result, the only “real” thing in the opening shot was plate photography of actual water. Barron was happy to avoid creating surf. “It's computationally expensive,” he says. “Besides, shooting something real and then adding to it is preferable to creating everything from scratch.”

Matte World composited the final shot using Alias/Wavefront's Composer running on SGIs. “It required a lot of tweaking to make it look realistic,” says Barron. “But it's very satisfying to do such a challenging shot where nobody knows you've done anything.”

---

Credit Roll

Gore Verbinski - Director
Charlie Gibson - Visual Effects Supervisor/Second Unit Director
David Nowell - Aerial DP
Chris Anderson - Tracking
For Matte World Digital:
Craig Barron - Visual Effects Supervisor
Chris Stoski - Digital Matte Painter
Glenn Cotter - 3D Artist; Tracking
Darren Mortillaro - 3D Artist
Morgan Trotter - 3D Artist
Todd Smith - Compositor
Mike Root - Software Development

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
© 2012 NewBay Media, LLC.