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October 17 2008
Sep. 15, 2013
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Coming off the monster success of Monster House, director Gil Kenan chose the sandbox at Tom Hanks' Playtone Productions and Walden Media for his next project: an adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau's wildly popular novel, City of Ember, about the race to save a dying, underground city well past its 200-year shelf-life starring Bill Murray and Tim Robbins, it opened October 10th.
It took dedicated farms weeks to render the underground City of Ember, shown here in progressive stages. Clip courtesy of Walden Media and Luma Pictures. (Click to play or right-click here to download mov.)
Says Kenan:
The City of Ember is a character in the movie, so it was vital that production designer Martin Laing and I build something as realistic as possible, and the effects team be able to render it. We put ourselves in the position of The Builders, the founding fathers, who hastily built this City to protect their citizens from an unexplained harm, and guessed at what they might need to remain sheltered there for at least two centuries. When our story starts, the City has long passed its 'expiration date.'
Pandemonium of Titanic Proportions
It was originally scheduled as a "fairly humble, establishing shot," recalls VFX Supervisor Eric Durst, of the first time viewers see the generator, a massive—and massively deteriorating—structure located far beneath the City's buildings and streets that illuminates a canopy of lights above, without which the citizens of Ember would be plunged into a void of total darkness and certain death.
City of Ember's VFX Supervisor, Eric Durst
If the generator is the heart of the City, it's supposed to look as if it's about to go into full-scale arrest, with frantic workers on scaffolding 30 stories high and scores of fire fighters battling electrical charges and smoke, while rivers of water, which power the generator, rush below.
"We were on a huge soundstage in Belfast, Northern Ireland," Durst recounts, "the old Harland and Wolff shipyard where they built the Titanic (no, not Cameron's, the real thing!): 100 feet high, 500 feet long, and 400 hundred feet wide, the only place big enough to build and house our sets. Once there, we all realized—Gil Kenan, the producers, and I—that since this was such a pivotal sequence, it would require a much more dramatic approach on a grander scale, with more actors, elements, and sweeping camera movement than originally planned."
In that moment on set—and they happen often on large-scale, effects-driven films like City of Ember—the creative team had to think fast (every idle hour burns up thousands of dollars in production costs) in order to ensure they captured enough "coverage," that is, native, in-camera footage with live actors on the set, plus pick up shots of various "elements," like workers on scaffolding, in order to have all the data needed to enhance the scene and match everything digitally in post-production.
(One element the filmmakers couldn't capture was explosives. With a history of bombings from "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, film permits for anything with pyrotechnics are nearly impossible to obtain. So, the sparks and fire, which look incredibly photo-real, are actually computer-generated.)
Durst describes a sweeping shot for this first glimpse of the generator (dubbed "the pandemonium scene"), a combination of in-camera crane and Steadi-cam footage, plus CG, later "composited," (digitally "blended") in post production by VFX house, Luma Pictures. "The camera swoops over the shoulder of 'Doon' (Harry Treadaway) one of the lead characters, and booms up to reveal this generator of titanic proportion, then does a 180-degree reversal to track Doon as he backs away from the chaos."
Young Doon sees the massive—and massively deteriorating—generator that powers the underground City for the first time in a complex, composited shot; image courtesy of Walden Media and Luma Pictures.
Says Vince Cirelli, VFX Supervisor for Luma: "This shot had everything in it! An actual set, a CG set, live actors, plus 3D CG objects such as the generator, water and fire. And the whole sequence had to be timed to a CG camera move." Luma worked closely with Production Designer Martin Laing, whose team built out the first floor of what was to be a thirty-story space, in order to ensure the virtual set matched the actual set. "We're very proud of the seamless result we were able to achieve," says Cirelli. "Seamless" is Durst's watchword for effects that are, well, effective.
"Visual effects should support storytelling, not vice versa," says Durst, who has spent nearly thirty years in the VFX industry, starting out in hand-drawn animation at Cal Arts—whose alumni include John Lasseter—before working on one of his first feature projects, TRON, which he calls "the world's greatest hand-drawn, 'computer-animated' film." Later, Durst joined VFX pioneer John Dykstra at Apogee, the precursor to ILM, where he directed commercials—he's the mind behind the memorable animated Volkswagon campaign, "Fahrvergnügen,"—then went on to effects supervision for other features such as End of Days, The One, Batman and Robin, and Spiderman 2. (You can view some of Eric's work, including a racy, banned-in-the-U.S.A. George Michael video, "Freeek!" in the YouTube gallery we created here.)
Back to the Beginning
While the "pandemonium scene" was changed on-set, on the fly, the opening credit sequence was modified after principal photography had wrapped and the initial effects were completed. As Durst tells it, the original opening sequence began tight on what is revealed to be a filament in a light bulb. Then, the camera pulls back and that light bulb becomes one in a sea of bulbs lighting up the entire City of Ember. "We fly over the City," says Durst, "and tilt down to reveal 'Lina' (Saoirse Ronan) as she descends a flight of stairs. The camera tracks her to ground level and follows her as she runs through the streets and into the town square." Sounds good, right? And it was, an impressive continuous shot combining live action and CG created by French effects house, Buf.
The virtual City of Ember set had to match the actual set built on a shipyard-cum-soundstage in Northern Ireland where the Titanic was built (no, not Cameron's…the real thing!) Image courtesy of Walden Media and Luma Pictures
But when Director Gil Kenan began editing the film, he felt that the introduction of Lina was premature, and that a scene between Doon and his father, 'Loris' (Tim Robbins), discussing the dying city was needed to introduce the story. The new scene would have been simple enough to shoot—if all the sets had not been struck (torn down) months earlier. So, Durst brought in Amalgamated Pixels (Get Smart, Nim's Island) to help solve the problem. "Our solution was not to re-shoot the entire opening sequence," says Amalgamated's Executive Producer, Michael Morreale, "but to insert a newly-shot exchange between Doon and Loris into what Buf had already created."
The challenges were manifold: create a camera move that would match the move created by Buf months earlier; build a virtual replica of the actual set and all its real-world "dressing," including pipes, surface texture, wires and signage; drop the actors (who filmed their new scene against a green screen) into the "Doon's apartment" set seamlessly, and do it all without getting "busted," Morreale's term for those moments when obvious computer effects or imagery distract from the story by pulling the viewer "out of the moment."
First, the team at Amalgamated used software such as Maya to "rough out" the set—the building that housed Doon's apartment. "We didn't 'dress it' or apply any texture at this juncture, just got the shape and dimensions right," says Morreale. Then, using pre-visualization software, they were able to take Buf's computer-generated camera move and "do the math" to figure out exactly how the camera needed to move—crane position, speed, etc.—when the actors shot their new scene against a green screen on a sound stage. Once Kenan approved the "pre-viz," the actors were assembled, the scene was shot, and Amalgamated began combining, or compositing, the live action footage of the actors with the newly-created CG set, and integrating this scene into the entire opening sequence.
Amalgamated worked on another important sequence, this one involving clouds and light. "It was shot with the actors against green screen and background plates, beautiful matte paintings," recalls Morreale. "But it was too static. The clouds needed to be animated, and the light and shadow on the actors' faces had to change accordingly." The team set about making the clouds more "volumetric and dimensional," a process that Morreale says involved as much artistry as technology in order to make everything look natural. "But, as the great Disney animators always said," he notes, "nothing in nature is ever 'natural.'"
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