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Step by Step: Doom

Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

The Shooter Within

Doom isn't the first blockbuster videogame to get a live-action film treatment, but it gets extra points for attempting something that's extremely difficult to achieve with a motion picture camera — a lengthy sequence that simulates the unbroken, “first-person shooter” POV that is the game's famed style. In Universal Pictures' Doom, we get inside the mind of the lead character as he falls into a trance and confronts a succession of villains, including the game's signature hell-knight, The Baron. In a no-holds-barred firefight, a flailing Baron goes down in flames.

Visual Effects Supervisor Jon Farhat, who designed and directed the sequence, recalls, “It was five-and-a-half pages in the script — a mini-movie.” Farhat worked with London houses Framestore CFC and Double Negative and Los Angeles-based Stan Winston Studios to create the film's blend of digital and practical effects. The actor costumed as The Baron was shot via Steadicam by Alf Tramontin, who handled the tricky business of filming discrete shots that would later be seamed together to suggest one continuous POV with several twists and turnarounds.

“There was no motion control, so we had hookups everywhere,” notes Farhat. Among the filming tricks they employed, he reveals, “was putting a line of green tape on the wall. If Alf had to go from camera right to camera left on a subsequent day, he had to make sure that his crosshairs went across that green tape line. Then we'd do a hookup there. Alf was so slick that the speeds he went off of one shot and onto the next shot were perfect. Our hookups weren't cross-dissolves; they were jump cuts.”

For the live-action shootout with The Baron, Farhat employed just a modest amount of on-set pyrotechnics, knowing that the major bullet wounds, muzzle flashes, and immolation would be added later at Framestore in CGI. “In live action, we had a gas cylinder go off and we had flames flare up on The Baron's costume — simply enough to get started.”

The more problematic element that had to be added was a gun and hand in the foreground — omnipresent features of first-person shooter games. Describing the challenge, Framestore Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Nelmes notes the crucial differences between the aspect ratio of a game console screen vs. a movie screen: “With movies, you get more left and right peripheral vision, but you don't have space at the bottom of the frame to have a gun floating around. If you raise the gun up like the game does, then it covers what you're shooting at. We had to be careful to lift the gun into frame as needed, but also keep it out of the way so that we could see The Baron approaching.”

Farhat considered shooting a live-action hand against greenscreen, but says, “We couldn't get the camera where the shooter's head should be. The sequence would have ended up having a slightly out-of-focus gun, which isn't much fun. So we had to design our camera moves knowing that we would animate a photoreal hand and gun in CG.”

Farhat brought Cineon scans of his selected camera takes to Framestore, where compositor Jonathan Fawkner seamed them together in Apple Shake to build the live-action background plate. Framestore had to track the movements of The Baron before any CG bullet wounds and flame effects could be added. Framestore supervisor Nelmes notes, “We used Boujou [from 2d3] for tracking the plate. We tracked wounds onto The Baron and added blood spraying into the air and splattering on the walls. Some were animated in [Side Effects] Houdini and others were painted in [Adobe] Photoshop.”

To set The Baron ablaze, Framestore's Ben Schrijvers used Houdini to blend stock footage of flames with CG animation. Nelmes explains, “We generated mattes for the direction and outline of the flames, but the texture within them was mostly live action. The textures were warped to travel down the path created by Ben.” Since The Baron looms large in frame, Nelmes wanted to avoid the difficulty of matching 3D, CG flames with the actual fire filmed on set. The Houdini elements were then composited in Shake.

The shooter's CG hands and gun were animated in Alias Maya, and Farhat worked closely with animator Kevin Spruce to choreograph their movements. “We generated the CG to approximate a 21mm lens shooting Super 35,” says Farhat. “That gave us a 60-degree cone of vision. I put a gun alongside Kevin's shoulder and said: ‘What do you see?’ We went back and forth until it felt right. Kevin was ‘shooting from the hip,’ tilting the gun's barrel up just a little so we could keep The Baron in frame. There were a couple of areas where we had to cheat and flip the gun off to the side. But it never felt like it was a ‘Movie POV’ trick.”

When it came to rendering, Nelmes notes, “It was easy for us to use the lighting from the set to determine the lighting on the [CG] gun.” The CG was rendered in slices in Pixar RenderMan, run through FilmLight Baselight software to get its digital grade, and then tweaked as necessary.

The final look achieves the illusion of a sequence with no cuts, and it represents a seamless merger of practical and digital effects. Most importantly, the first-person shooter sequence in Doom seems to be passing muster with at least some of the game's 28 million diehard fans. When clips from Doom were previewed at the 2005 Comic Con convention last summer, says Farhat, “the audience cheered.”

Credit Roll

Director -	Andrzej Bartkowiak
Second Unit Director/
Visual Effects Supervisor -	Jon Farhat
Special Effects Supervisor -	Kit West
Steadicam Operator -	Alf Tramontin
Character Design -	Stan Winston Studios
For Framestore CFC:
VFX Supervisor -	Mark Nelmes
Animation Supervisor -	Kevin Spruce
Lighting Supervisor -	Ben White
Rigging Supervisor -	Mike Mulholland
Senior Technical Director -	Martin Macrae
Senior Technical Director -	Ben Schrijvers
Lead Compositor -	Jonathan Fawkner
Compositor -	Anthony Smith

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