New Moon Director Chris Weitz Blog (Part 2)
Kristen Stewart to Horse-Sized CGI Wolves: “I’m Getting the Fuck Out of Here!”
The fight between Edward and Felix, the hulking Volturi vampire, which happens toward the end of the New Moon, has plenty of special effects, but it’s nothing compared to the wolves and the fighting sequences with the wolves. The wolves in the novel are described by Stephenie Meyer as being the size of horses, which gave both the standard and the challenge of designing these creatures. Normally the challenge of creating CG creatures is that you spend loads and loads of time coming up with character sketches, but in this case we knew what we wanted: We wanted wolves. Plus, I was really fortunate — since we only had 10 months from beginning to end, which is nowhere near enough time to do these things — to have a bunch of great people, many of whom I’d worked with before. Susan MacLeod, the visual effects producer from The Golden Compass, was producer and supervisor on this. Mike Fink, who was visual effects supervisor on The Golden Compass and won the Oscar for his work, was running Prime Focus, which was one of the houses we used. Plus, we also had Phil Tippett, our ace-in-the-hole, a two-time Oscar winner, who’s legendary and insanely capable (he did the visual effects forJurassic Park and Starship Troopers, and did work on the Star Wars movies) and Matt Habgood, who was his head visual effects supervisor on this one. They’d actually done some wolves for The Golden Compass,amongst eight billion other companies. So the R&D was already done in terms of the look, leaving us to focus on the question of establishing how we were going to build the skeleton, the muscles, the fur, and all of those dynamics — and, of course, how that was going to work out for every individual shot we were going to do, which was about 80 wolf shots.
Marketing threw us a complication by requesting a wolf shot they could show in the first trailer, and we thought that they were smoking crack, but Tippett said that his team could come up with it. Tippett Studios had come with a very early “proof-of-concept” wolf, which was very good but which nonetheless ended up going through about 557 iterations. When you look at an individual visual effects shot, each one is identified by the scene number, shot number, and then version number, and some versions go up into the hundreds. We did the usual thing here — I don’t want to make it sound like it’s brand-new: You take the iris of the actors who are playing the characters that are going to transform into wolves and you map them onto the eyes of the wolves. You can’t just put human eyes in, because the eye shape of wolves is different from a human’s, so you have to get that right, creating a hybrid that is believable as an anthropomorphically expressive character that still looks like a wolf. You then try to construct the musculature of the wolves’ faces in such a way that they seem to match up in some manner with the actors who are playing the characters who transform into them. Then it’s a question of monitoring each shot as it progresses along the way.
Most of you know the stuff about wire frames: blocking it out, muscles, and all that hoo-ha. What I’m very careful about and keen about during all of this is something that makes me probably disliked by animators: I try to restrain them from going for the supercool factor. What happens is that every animator, given a shot, wants to make that shot as interesting as possible, and that doesn’t always serve the action necessarily. An example of this is that there was a moment where a wolf was doing a sort of back-kick, and I said, “No, that’s too ‘kung-fu wolf’; we need to have him do something more wolflike.” Then there are moments where a wolf would suddenly do something too geeked-out. You could tell there was some guy, who was stuck in a cubicle all day, who figured out some really cool thing to do. I was always the guy who was giving them the bad news that the wolf’s actions have to fit into the flow of the character and feel like something that character might do. I literally don’t want shots to be too cool, because then the audience says, “Whoa, that was a really great special effect!” But during that time, they’ve stepped out of the movie and they’re not experiencing it anymore.
I think there’s one shot in the movie that goes past what is my defined limit of what is “too cool.” The shot is one in which a wolf is charging directly at the screen, and there’s some distortion due to the length of lens that’s implied there; it’s a very short lens, probably a 24 mm, which means there’s some distortion around the edge of the frame. You can see this shot in the trailer, and understandably so, because yes, it’s so rad. But in doing it, I had misgivings because I thought we were getting dangerously close to being too cool for school. The key thing was to keep the animated characters in the story.
There was an endless back and forth between the animators (or the animators through the supervisors) and myself and Susan MacCleod: examining every detail, every little bit of hair as it’s behaving in the wind. And also, part of making these things work is contact with the environment, so that when a wolf lands it’s kicking up dust — but the right kind of dust that’s appropriate on the ground right there. We use a special silver ball to measure the light that’s coming from every possible direction so that we can reapply it to the 3-D wolf. All that stuff applies, but it’s also about tweaking every shot, not just in a mathematical fashion, but also to make sure that it feels right, given everything else. Those moments are like little nuances of performance that you might ask your actors for but in this case you’re really asking your animators and compositors for it. It can come down to boring things like whether or not something feels composited correctly or whether a wolf feels settled into the environment or not.
I think any animator will tell you that the toughest things to do are CGI characters interacting with the real world and two CGI characters interacting with each other. That comes up when two creatures fight with one another, and although it’s something we’d done before with The Golden Compass, we had much more time to do it for that film. There’s a wolf fight in New Moon that works extraordinarily well, but you’ve really got two mathematical equations battling it out. You’ve got two physical representations of what something would be like in 3-D space which are conflicting with each other, so you’re figuring out what would give and where, and I can’t claim to hold the keys to that kind of mathematics, but that’s the stuff that takes up a lot of server space.
If all this sounds too distanced, let me give you an example of a really difficult moment of knitting this together with the actors. When you’ve got Kristen Stewart, an actress who refuses to do anything that doesn’t feel real — she won’t play movie moments; she’ll only play character moments, and God bless her for that because she makes things seem more realistic — but you’ve got all your storyboards, and in the storyboards it all seems perfect. They show this guy turning into a wolf and chasing her, but right before the chase there’s a moment of recognition, and then she runs away. Well, Kristen, most rightly so, says, “The moment this guy turns into a wolf, I’m getting the fuck out of there,” and you have to adjust on the fly, even though you’ve got these gigantic cameras. We were using VistaVision cameras, which were originally developed for a very different purpose, but they’re cameras working in a very different format so that you can adjust within the frame; you can blow up into the frame without losing resolution. So you’ve got the most unwieldy cameras imaginable, and trying to deal with some pretty quick-fire, emotional situations, and Kristen has to react to an imaginary wolf. In fact, if you got anything for her to react to, it’s the most preposterous-looking Styrofoam giant wolf imaginable. To react to something quite laughable in a way that is quite believable is a hard thing to pull off, and that challenge is the bane of any director who is working with actors in a mixed reality-and-CG environment. It’s just really, really hard to do. You end up talking it over with the actors, but it takes some patience on the part of CG people as well, who go in expecting to work the way that the storyboards were supposed to work. But if you know people well enough, and they trust your knowledge of what they have to do well enough, you can come to a situation where the CG stuff is doing what it’s supposed to and the actors are also doing what they’re supposed to.
Even if you’ve gone through a situation like that, there’s a leap of faith whereby, for months and months and months, it’s just an actress running from a piece of Styrofoam in front of a green screen, and whether the studio is going to trust you, that you’re going to get it right, is a huge issue. For months and months and months, you’re telling them that it’s going to be really cool, don’t worry about it. That was true about the sequence where the wolves were chasing Victoria through the forest. It looked like crap for months and months. I have been through an experience with New Line, on The Golden Compass, where they didn’t understand, which is shocking, because they made three Lord of the Rings movies, and they should be able to understand green screen and CGI, and they acted like they had never seen it before. They had absolutely no faith in how it was going to turn out, and as a result, the film was hampered and damaged, and special effects that were going to be amazing were cut. But in this case, with Summit, after the movie that I directed, The Golden Compass, won the Oscar for special effects, there was a certain amount of trust involved, where I could say, “This is going to be good; trust me on it.” It helped too that Wyck Godfrey, my producer, had also done I, Robot and Eragon and knew these things take time in order get them right. And finally, you have this sort of “Aaahhhh” moment where the effects are dropped in and suddenly everything looks kind of cool.
Source
xoxo
Carrie
0 comments:
Post a Comment