Guiding the eye to the Invisible Digital Effects for Changeling.

CGSociety :: Production Focus
6 November 2008, by Renee Dunlop

Losing someone in a crowd isn’t easy when you are filming on a small lot with just a handful of extras.

The overwhelming task of finding a child lost in the vastness of 1928’s Los Angeles can’t be portrayed with a two hour close-up. To reveal the silent scream of Angelina Jolie’s character in J. Michael Straczynski’s Changeling, VFX Supervisors Michael Owens, and CIS Vancouvers’ Geoff Hancock helped build and populate a back lot city block into a budding metropolis meandered by a million unique paths.

Through set extensions and matte paintings, digital vehicles and Massive pedestrians, Owens and Hancock gave life and depth to a storyline that imbibed the definition of subtleties. What is unique about the perceived simplicity of such a task, assuming the work is even noticed, is how crucial it can be. While not the standard VFX fare of explosions and superheroes, the visual FX in Changeling helped reveal the power of emotion rather than the power behind a dynamite blast.

Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood and writer J. Michael Straczynski

Building Blocks
Drawing the eye away from the digital work and towards the story points, framing the storyline in photorealistic and historically accurate emotional queues first led to a great deal of research. Los Angeles was still shiny and new in 1928. The cars were some of the first off the line and every one still had a shine. Clothing was made of wool, hats and gloves were proper attire, and movements were small, formal, and refined. But there was a seediness to the town as well, one that needed to reveal slowly, creating a mood of pressurized confinement in a town brimming with corruption and etiquette.

CIS Vancouver, previously Rainmaker, was the facility predominantly chosen to do the project. Michael Owens explains, “Early on in conversations with clients (director) Clint Eastwood and (producer) Rob Lorenz, we were trying to figure out what scenes would be enhanced by visual FX. We were all thinking that whatever we were adding was supposed to be peripheral. It wasn’t supposed to be a platform for VFX, it was supposed to be peripheral to the story. We did a lot of architectural and vehicle adds that were all period to the 1928.”

Geoff Hancock of CIS Vanvouver found the process very rewarding. “It was great working with Michael because he really likes to focus on the story and how VFX can enhance that. He really urged us to strive for the grammatical complexity. Because it wasn’t a huge over the top in your face FX, you couldn’t get away with anything, it just had to look like you expected it would.

“It took a lot of research to figure out what really needed to be shown,” said Hancock. “We had to start from scratch because so much of the material that is commonly available is more modern, and we weren’t able to leverage any existing models. In most cases, everything from textures to models to mocap was recreated from the ground up. We had to talk to the mocap performers about how people walked differently in that time. They weren’t just strolling down the street, especially in the parts of the movie we were recreating. It was center city, some of the busiest intersections in LA, where people were out on the town.”

The first challenge for Owens was to maintain the pace that Eastwood is known for. In Eastwoods case, this meant avoiding bluescreens and relying on roto. “I knew early on, well before Changeling, that Clint worked very fast. He was patient if needed, but his desire was to cruise through and not slow down and dwell on things. It’s not that bluescreen isn’t a viable technique, it’s just that the further I go into my career the more I realize it’s better to do it this way, unless technique-wise you are just going to shoot yourself in the foot. Bluescreen can be done, and we do them, but on Flag of Our Fathers, we started to go in a direction where we didn’t use any.”

The obvious question is, what are the benefits to such a workflow? “The director doesn’t like bluescreens and the crews slow down. When you don’t use a blue or greenscreen the lighting is so much better, because you don’t have all that spill going on, and the light comes from where it should. If you roto something into it and it’s done well, it looks far more realistic in the composite. So we limited ourselves to just where it was reasonable to put a bluescreen in, such as the end of the street on the back lot, where we put a bluescreen up on either end. It helped when we needed it to and it was so far back it didn’t really affect lighting. That is where Clint is very amiable. If you have to have it, then do it. But if you can do without it and you can keep getting better at it, then let’s live without it because it makes his life better, and quite frankly it makes ours better too.

“We shot on the recently burned down back lot of Universal to gain the foreground part of a lot of the street scenes, and we opened up the streets considerably. We had a lot of extras on the back lot, but we had to add to them considerably. Then the challenges was taking the digital crowd to the next level, and making sure the audience wasn’t aware of it. We used Massive crowds and we did a lot of mocap to facilitate the animation.”