Author: VFX Blog

Tim Burton’s adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel “Monkey Planet” may have been inspired by the 1968 classic “Planet of the Apes,” but Burton’s film is a whole new barrel of monkeys — courtesy of Oscar-winning makeup artist and ape specialist Rick Baker (“King Kong,” “Greystoke,” “Gorillas in the Mist”).

Baker first became involved with the project in 1995, when it was to be directed by Oliver Stone. At that time, he debated whether to build mechanized heads, which would have looked absolutely real, or to follow the lead of the original film’s Oscar-winning makeup artist, John Chambers, who had designed prosthetic makeup for each character. “I wanted the look to be realistic,” Baker says, “but that’s not ‘Planet of the Apes.’ Part of the charm of the original movies was that they had such actor-driven performances. Maintaining that &#91ethic] meant that we had to take a makeup approach.”

Baker was determined to address certain limitations in Chambers’ original designs, particularly the fact that the teeth were glued into the prosthetic mouths, making it impossible for the apes’ lips to move independently over their choppers. Baker’s solution was to create as large a set of false teeth as possible, distorting the actor’s mouth into a rudimentary muzzle that projected out to be nearly even with the tip of his nose. Baker then applied a very thin prosthetic ape face over the actor’s altered features. “The idea was to try to get as much of a muzzle out of their faces as I could before we applied any makeup,” Baker recalls. “When I tested that on myself six years ago, I made the biggest pair of teeth I could possibly plant in my mouth so I would have as little rubber on me as possible. I have a good-sized nose, so I needed to make a huge set of teeth and really push my lips out just to get it to the tip of my nose. The problem was that my lips kind of flapped down to the floor when I took the teeth out! After I did the first test on myself, I thought I should do a test on someone with a better face — a smaller nose and a longer upper lip. That test was much more successful!”

By the time Baker was hired to work on Burton’s project six years later, he knew exactly what facial characteristics would best suit the prosthetic makeup. “I told Tim in the very beginning that casting would be really important, because the physiognomy of the actor’s face would greatly affect how well the makeup worked and how convincing it looked,” he explains. “But then they cast Tim Roth as Thade, a chimp who’s the villain of the piece, and he has a bigger nose than I do! I said, ‘This is about as bad a face as we can possibly get for an ape, but he’s a good actor, so we’ll make it work.’ Tim probably had bigger dentures and more foam on his face than anybody else, but I think he turned out to be one of the more interesting apes in the movie. The fact that he has a bigger nose makes his character look different right away.”

Once the actors were selected, Baker’s crew made dental castings of their mouths and created positive casts over which they sculpted upper and lower ape dentures, which they then molded and cast. When the dentures were fitted over the actor’s own teeth, they pushed their lips out into the muzzle-like orientation Baker desired. Next, a lifecast was made of each actor wearing the dentures, over which Baker and his crew sculpted the actual ape makeups. Baker then made prosthetic pieces by injecting foam latex into molds — essentially the same material and technique Chambers pioneered for the original film. “My approach was very similar to his work in many respects,” Baker acknowledges. “There’s a major face piece for most of the apes that includes the brow and the upper muzzle, and there’s a lower chin. Because the teeth are independent from the muzzle, the noses don’t protrude as much as the original film’s makeups did, but I think the performance is really what’s important. The idea was ‘less is more.’”

It’s never easy to follow up on a legend, especially when you’ve had a hand in creating it. But that’s exactly the task Paramount recently gave to Dan Curry when he signed on as a visual effects producer on the new weekly TV series, “Enterprise.”

A fan of cult classics like “Things To Come,” “Forbidden Planet” and “War of the Worlds” — and a 1979 MFA graduate of Humboldt State University — Curry cut his visual effects teeth on Universal’s TV shows “Buck Rogers” and “Battlestar Galactica.” After working on 118 feature films, he was eventually hired as visual effects supervisor on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

The success of Curry’s work there — as the artist who helped influence the recasting of Klingons from “space Nazis” into the Samurai-style race portrayed by Worf, and who invented the crescent-shaped “batleth” in the process — has kept him in the Paramount fold. As a result, Dan Curry has produced visual effects for “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Star Trek: Voyager” and many of the “Star Trek movies.”

Yet, despite having spent decades working on the Enterprise — literally! — Curry says he feels like he’s working on his “first professional job out of school. In fact, everybody’s jazzed about working on ‘Enterprise.’”

This isn’t just hype. A look at any of the Enterprise episodes proves his point. In fact, the visual effects team of Curry, Ronald B. Moore, and Mitch Suskin has come up with a new look for the space warhorse that is both fresh and retro. This is critical, given that Enterprise is cast in the uneasy place of happening after our own time in reality, but before the “Star Trek” timeline of the original series that the fans are so familiar with.

Walking this tightrope is a challenge. On the one hand, “we owe the audience visual effects of a quality and calibre that they’re used to,” explains Curry. On the other hand, Paramount’s team must keep the “dating” of these effects right, so that they don’t seem out of place in the well-established Trek universe.

Designing The NX-01 Enterprise: Past Meets Future
Without a doubt, it’s the Enterprise itself that posed the biggest challenge for the art department headed by Herman Zimmerman and Doug Drexler, and Curry & Co. in visual effects.

The solution? “The Enterprise was aesthetically evolved backwards from the ‘later ships,’ just like the Chrysler PT Cruiser,” says Curry. “The PT Cruiser is basically a 1930s car, but it’s got all the modern technology of today, and carries a sense of modern design with it.”

Inside, the Enterprise is based on Herman Zimmerman’s visit to a nuclear submarine. That’s why “it feels like a place where people actually work and live, with handles to grab onto when the going gets rough,” he notes. The ‘first’ Enterprise is also more functional than its forebears. “We wanted something that fit what a pilot would want, because he’s the one who actually flies the ship.”

Outside, the Enterprise is “brushed metal with a hint of copper to it,” says Curry. Packaged in a thin, saucer-shaped craft that reminds one of the future Enterprises, viewers can easily deduce the chain of evolution here. The latest ship still stands out as a unique design statement.

So Where’s The Model?
There’s something else that’s very different about this Enterprise ship — quite simply, it doesn’t actually exist. Admittedly, Dan Curry does have a foam core mockup made by designer Doug Drexler which Curry flies around the office — Dan claims he only does this to map out the ship’s motion for storyboarding.

“We’re doing the show all CGI this time,” Curry explains. In other words, there are no detailed physical models of the NX-01, fated to hang in Planet Hollywood decades from now. (The Enterprise 1701-A can be found at the Las Vegas location, if you’re curious.)

Instead, the ship itself was digitally designed and mapped by Paramount’s art department. From there, the design was turned over to Curry, Moore, and Suskin. With the help of Foundation Imaging’s Rob Bonchune and Pierre Drolet, plus CGI software like Newtek’s LightWave 3D and Alias|Wavefront Maya (run on Alpha Workstations), they turned the Enterprise NX-01 into a living, moving reality. One that has yet to exist in true time and space.

Why is Enterprise exclusively relying on CGI when previous Star Trek productions have stuck with models? “We decided that we wanted to raise the reality quotient of the show, and have the freedom of design and motion afforded by CGI,” answers Curry.

However, there are two other reasons why Enterprise has wholeheartedly embraced CGI. One is the need to realize scripts on screen within budget, and on time. That was relatively easy in the days of Captain Picard, but as “Deep Space Nine” progressed, “the writers kept coming up with bigger and bigger shows,” Curry says. “There were programs where we had to show fleets of hundreds and hundreds of ships. This was physically impossible to photograph; besides, the improvements in digital animation meant that the quality concerns that had kept us with models were no longer a problem.”

The second reason is flexibility. “With models, there’s only so far you can rotate them before you see the mount,” explains Curry. “There’s also limits in how far you can move east/west in the shot, and how far they can travel across the track. With CGI, all these limits are gone: we have the complete freedom we need to do true filmmaking.”

It’s this freedom that Curry likes best about CGI. “It’s a lot like composing music,” he says. “It lets you create a feeling; a flow, a rhythm, and majesty to the visual sequences.”

Launching A Love Affair With Fans
To prove his point, Curry talks about the most-anticipated part of the Enterprise pilot: the launch of the new (or old) Enterprise from orbital drydock.

In a word, it was magnificent — visually slow and graceful, like a great ocean liner leaving a pier.

According to Curry, it was supposed to be. “This is the first time you get to see the Enterprise in total,” he explains. “My desire was that, by the time the ship comes fully into view, the audience has fallen in love with it.”

What really enhanced the launch sequence — and made it believable — were the details. The hoses pulling away from the Enterprise, Space Shuttle-style, as it moved away from the station. Two spacemen are working on the orbital platform, looking below as the massive Enterprise passes underneath.

The hoses were meant to link Enterprise to the NASA launches of our time; one that the viewers feel a sense of connection to. The spacemen outside were meant to offer a human scale of comparison, much as they did in the opening credits of Deep Space Nine. The end result, as anyone who has seen these and other Enterprise sequences will attest, is a profoundly believable piece of visual effects.

What’s Next For The NX-01
So far, “Enterprise” has truly gone where no TV franchise has gone before. That is, Paramount’s been able to dust off a concept that’s grown a bit long in the tooth, and give it a whole new lease on life. Without a doubt, much of the credit has to go to the artistry of the visual effects generated by Curry, Moore, and Suskin.

It also has to be attributed to their decision to go fully CGI. In today’s entertainment industry, where the public demands better effects and more of them, CGI has become a must. “However, it should be noted that technology is no substitute for artistry,” cautions Curry. “The requirements of storytelling, and the artistic vision of the filmmakers, still reigns supreme.”

So what happens next? “We’ll have to wait and see what the writers come up with,” laughs Curry. “No doubt they’ll find something even grander to challenge us with, even with all our technology.”

Renting cameras, lighting, support gear, and other equipment is standard operating procedure in the motion-picture industry. With the rise of digital cinema, however, some equipment has become affordable enough for purchase, particularly in the postproduction arena. Increasingly, production companies and producers face the question of whether to rent or purchase production and/or postproduction equipment. Every situation requires careful analysis of the pros and cons of either scenario. There are numerous benefits to renting, and quite a few for purchasing, so how does one go about arriving at a final, educated decision?

The important issues to consider are the specifics of the project or business you are taking part in. You have to know how long the project will last, and how long the equipment will be utilized. A solid budget or financial plan will also be a major deciding factor. Finally, you have to anticipate what you will be doing a year from now, and whether you will still need the equipment at that point.

Your overall timeframe is an important element in analyzing your needs. If you anticipate that your upcoming project will be of short duration, then renting is the option for you. If, however, you expect a continuous flow of new business and projects, you might want to consider purchasing.

As we all know, technology develops faster than we can keep up with, and before too long, you realize that all that new software and hardware you have is outdated, replaced by newer, faster, and more efficient versions. We all like to wrinkle our noses at the manufacturers, but in reality we should be thanking them for constantly improving on their products. Let’s face it: Whatever they can do to make our lives easier is more than welcome. The plain fact is that technology — especially digital technology — is advancing at an ever-quickening pace. That’s good news when it comes to improving creative tools, but it can be tough when it comes to amortizing upgrades.

Obviously, the cost of upgrading equipment every time there’s a new software development is prohibitive. The compatibility issues inherent in ever-advancing computer gear can also prove maddening — and expensive. Prudent producers and fiscally responsible companies inevitably cry “Foul!” And once they’re done venting their disgust at manufacturers reps, they inevitably pick up the phone and call the local rental house.

Renting’s major advantage is that it enables a producer or production company to be constantly up to date on the latest technological developments. And as updates occur the rental equipment is configured to the new technology, ensuring that users always have state-of-the-art equipment at their fingertips. Essentially, you are paying a premium for the top-of-the-line and most advanced equipment.

“We have very experienced technicians and long-standing relationships with the manufacturers,” comments Bill Weisman, manager of the rental department at Moviola, in Hollywood. “This ensures that the equipment or system being rented will be reliable and hassle-free. And if for some reason a client runs into a snag, we will be right on top of getting them a replacement, or repairing the problem in the most efficient manner possible.”

Renting also presents a consistent demand on your cash flow. You can budget rental fees far in advance, as there is only slight fluctuation in the market costs from year to year, and an accurate estimate is relatively simple. Perhaps the most attractive feature of renting is that it also eliminates the need to come up with the funds for the major capital investments that purchasing requires

When you own your own equipment, you are solely responsible for maintenance and repairs. These costs can be excessive, especially when you are dealing with high-tech digital items. As a renter, you typically have access to service and tech support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the time, the service contract is included in the rental agreement. In some cases, contracts can be purchased for an additional sum, much like securing an insurance policy or extended warranty.

Post Production Workflow is often the most overlooked element of creative production. Most budgets set aside a certain portion labeled as the “contingency.” This is to cover the costs of unforeseen circumstances beyond the control of the management that would be detrimental to the timeframe and the project itself. One way to assume more control over the workflow is to ensure the reliability and performance of the equipment you use. When you purchase a piece of equipment, you have to keep it up and running at top performance for the duration of your project. One can never predict when a piece of software will lock up or a piece of hardware will malfunction. When presented with a work stoppage as a result of equipment failure, most would prefer to make a phone call and have the equipment replaced without missing a beat. Those pressed by deadlines and pressure from investors and executives are the best candidates for renting. A reputable rental house will generally repair or replace the faulty item immediately. After all, customer satisfaction is their business. Their motivation lies in the happiness of their customers. In the rental arena, good relationships, customer service, and client satisfaction lead to consistent and repeated business.

If service and support fits into your business plan or budget, then purchasing the equipment may be the right choice. If you are considering purchasing, but don’t have the revenue to warrant a support department, you might consider a third party. Most companies that sell digital equipment also offer the option of a service contract, which for a fee will ensure that your equipment is performing smoothly for the duration. And don’t forget the manufacturers warranties; varying in length, your warranty will guarantee your equipment in the event of a malfunction or defect not caused by you.

Although it may overwhelmingly look like renting is the best option in any circumstance, there’s still a lot to be said for purchasing. There are many types of companies that benefit greatly from buying and maintaining their own equipment. Most advertising agencies will have in-house production, editorial, and graphics departments handling the various different aspects of a particular project. To maintain a smooth workflow, they will configure all of their hardware and software to work in sync across many computers. By purchasing, they have total control over the equipment’s configuration and operation. The same goes for media departments in major corporations, where the output is critical to the company’s overall communication and operations. These large companies can afford the service costs and benefits from owning. Smaller companies that cannot afford to do all of their media work in-house will farm business out to post houses, graphics, and media-design firms. It’s these companies that benefit the most from owning the equipment. Their revenue is based upon billable periods of time. When they purchase their equipment, they calculate the amortization, and charge accordingly. Once the equipment cost has been recouped through billable usage, the revenue is pure profit, less upgrades and maintenance.

“We are equipped to both rent and sell equipment and systems,” explains Randy Paskal, Moviola’s Managing Director. “Either way, our goal is to help the client determine their needs, and see that they receive top-of-the-line service and support for whichever route they choose.”

There is a financial benefit, both to renting and to buying. When you rent a piece of equipment that relates to your business, you can simply write off the expense. A rental is a clean transaction. This is ideal for those producers and companies that do not want any assets at the end of the day. On the other hand, if you are purchasing, you can depreciate the equipment and write off the loss. With the latter, you can amortize over three to four years, and integrate upgrades into your amortization schedule. This will allow you to maintain your margin of profit.

With rentals, at the end of the day, you have completed your project, delivered your product, and are left with no loose ends to tie up or equipment to pay for. When you own, you have completed your project, and can turn around and wait for the next one with the equipment in hand.

The demographic of renters versus buyers has changed in the creative industries. Major studios that have historically owned all of their equipment are now turning to renting to eliminate the service and upgrade costs from their bottom line. Smaller companies, which in the past could only afford to rent, are now purchasing and maintaining their own equipment. As the demand for digital content increases, so will the demand for companies to pump it out.

London-based 3D animation and digital effects company Glassworks created a series of IDs in a campaign called “Fingers” for the BBC via agency Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters and director Alex Winter of The Brave Film Company. The IDs make use of live-action heads composited onto live-action hands to promote the BBC’s interactive content on all media, including the Internet and interactive television, under its new name, BBCi. The :20, :40 and :60 IDs are now airing on the BBC.

The 60-second ID begins with the image of a man and a woman sitting next to each other — the image is cropped to reveal only the couple’s heads and shoulders. As the camera pulls back, however, the couple is revealed to be a set of human hands with heads where the wrist would normally join. The bored-looking couple is sitting on a sofa on either side of a remote control. The woman’s finger hovers over the buttons of the TV remote control. The spot’s virtual camera goes on to show other hands in other environments, all looking bored and fed up. Some of the hand people are in an office, bouncing on their keyboards, while others are in a bar, leaning against their drinks. One of them kicks a peanut.

Click for Large Image
The music picks up as the hand woman presses a red button on the remote control — bright lights shine on the hand people and they look up in amazement at the new interactive world they have discovered. More hands join them — some on the sofa, others using a computer mouse to look at the Internet. A hand on the bar jumps up and down in celebration of a football goal being scored. The ID finishes with the image of another couple walking slowly together, joining hands as they turn to look at a giant screen that fills the background.

Glassworks carried out all of the special effects that made the spots possible, compositing the heads and hands together to create a convincing world for the hand people. The process began with tests using DV camcorders before the shoot took place. The shoot itself lasted a week and was followed by more testing to achieve the seamless integration demonstrated in the spot.

“After the weeklong shoot, the project spent two weeks in our inferno* suite,” said Glassworks inferno* artist Crawford Reilly. “The footage was shot without motion control because motion control would have restricted the director too much — we performed the camera moves within inferno* on all the shots. The shots with a lot of movement were the most difficult, but I think we managed to achieve very convincing results.”

“Walking with Dinosaurs,” the BBC decided to bring the magic back to the small screen with a sequel focusing on early mammals, titled “Walking with Beasts.” Technological advances in computer animation made it possible for this series, which aired in November in the United Kingdom, to be even more naturalistic than its predecessor.

Beasts’ creators at the BBC turned again to Crawley Creatures for the animatics and Framestore for the animation series. The project ended up being one of Framestore’s most extensive animation and visual effects projects to date. Mike Milne, director of animation, doubled the size of his team, which was charged with creating ranges of movement and texture even more extensive than those designed for ‘Dinosaurs.’

Principal filming took place last year on several continents and in some instances beneath the sea. Jez Gibson Harris led the model team, which grew from seven to 18 during production. Additional support was also called in from several accessible lance specialists. In the end, over 40 items were created that ranged from full-sized mammoths to small shrew-like creatures. Making the models took a year and a half, with some of the creatures requiring twice the usual time due to the advent of more complicated animatronics. “There were more movements than before,” said Harris, “Lips, ears, and eye movements, which were all more sophisticated.”

The under-skull and body-forms were created in the Crawley Creatures’ ‘mechy’ department, where the team made radio-controlled mechanisms to move eyebrows, whiskers, noses, and mouths. All of these movements were combined to create snarls, snorts and blinks in completed models. The expressions were created through a mix of manual and radio control. “Its very tiring,” said Harris. “Creatures like the mammoth had five or six puppeteers, and special backpacks were designed to take the strain off the operators’ back and hands.” Larger engineering work went into producing Steady Arm rigs — which are similar to the Steady Cam rigs worked by cameramen — to support smaller heads during puppeteering. The rigs helped carry the weight of the heads and facilitate larger movements, while puppeteers controlled smaller movement in close-up shots.

The team also designed a wheeled dolly featuring a counterbalanced arm with universal movement in order to make the bigger creatures move more easily. “It could be assembled in 10 minutes, and could be moved around on quad bike wheels,” said Harris. The team used the dolly to help with operating the heads of larger animals like the mammoth and woolly rhino. There were several underwater shots, all of which the team filmed in one day. The most extravagant required that a mammoth fall through a sheet of ice. For this, Crawly Creatures devised a system involving wires and animatronics whereby the mammoth looked as if it were struggling as it dropped.

Once the filming with all of the animatronics was completed, the footage was passed over to Framestore for 18 solid months of work. ‘Beasts’ was such a big task that it would not have been practical for Frametsore to start from scratch. The team used a pipeline similar to the one created for “Walking with Dinosaurs” for animation and rendering, employing 271 separate programs to make the production process run smoothly. 30 artists working on Silicon Graphics and NT workstations spent a total of 11,490 processing hours creating all of the CG that went into the program. Framestore’s render farm, which consisted of 35 dual Processor NT render machines, ran for 24 hours a day for close to a year.

The basic approach for each digital creature was the same. First, a 2D computer animated model of the creature was created, from a selection of angles — top, left side, right side, bottom etc. — which were put together to create a 3D version. The artists then did three layers of texture mapping — first color, then bump mapping and shine. This created realistic looking animals with lifelike skin. After they placed the animals in a shot, the artists added shadow as a final layer.

Perhaps the most time-consuming aspect of the effort was creating the basic skeletons of the many creatures in ‘Beasts’ — several animals had never before been reconstructed, so this was a step up from “Walking with Dinosaurs.” Many of the creatures have evolved into modern animals such as pigs, cats, shrews and elephants. The sheer variety of elements on a mammal’s face — eyelids, eyebrows, whiskers, jowls, twitching noses and ears — made bringing them to life a challenge.

“All of those elements have to be animated,” said Mike Milne, head of computer animation at Framestore. “The number of animation controls the animators have to work with is vast compared with dinosaurs.” The series also contains humanoid, upright creatures, which were difficult to animate because of the obvious comparisons that viewers could make and because the team didn’t know how early hominids moved. “This was more adventurous for us,” said Max Tyrie, animation supervisor at Framestore. “There were more complex shots, more creatures, more hurdles to overcome. It was all very enjoyable.”

Framestore didn’t stop at creating the animals. The team investigated new angles and filming methods to push the animation even further. “We worked with different camera styles from hand-held tracking to wide angle, fish eye lenses,” said Tyrie. They also took various approaches to film speed, using tricks such as time ramping, ultra slow motion and time-slice photography. The team used time-lapse photography in a scene that showed a herd of mammoths grazing while the clouds flew by overhead. “We took our inspiration from ‘Dinosaurs’,” said Tyrie, “and then took into consideration what trends have appeared since then. With this work we are attempting to break the mold.”

Of all the hurdles that Framestore had to jump, realistic fur was probably the largest. “It’s quite tricky,” said Martin Macrae, digital texture artist. “There’s no easy way to do it.” The team tried out a selection of softwares and considered creating a custom program to solve the problem. Finally, they chose a combination of off-the-shelf packages to create the fur pipeline, consisting of Softimage3D, Maya, Mental Ray and PhotoShop. Strands or tufts of hair were hand-sculpted, with one hair in a hundred being individually created. The artists would then enter constraints into the program about how long the hair should be, how dense, etc. The program did the mathematical calculations to create the designated hair. This approach worked best for long hair, while short hair could more often be painted on.

The hard work paid off — the project and the technology behind it have reproduced a world not seen for 65 million years, an ice-bound wilderness in which mammals flourished.