CGSociety - DISTRICT 9 [PART 2]

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Texturing, lighting and pampering the critters of 'District 9'.
Image-Engine completes the story.

CGSociety : Production Focus Part 2/2
3 November 2009, by Paul Hellard

The Executive Producer of 'District 9' Shawn Walsh, had been following Director Neill Blomkamp's career pretty closely for some years. It was a pleasant surprise when Neill got in touch one day asking if he was interested in collaborating on a project. "We'd nearly crossed paths many times, but we didn't know each other," adds Walsh. He says Neill sent him "great rambling bits of text that included all kinds of wildly imaginative stuff he wanted in the film. It was all very improvisational."

Peter Muyzers, Digital Production Manager, thought there was something about the first connection with Neill's assistant that convinced him to explore the film project a little further. "There was a brief outline in an email that immediately struck us as interesting," Muyzers explains.

The Mission
It's no secret Neill Blomkamp has always had a keen interest in seeing Vancouver prosper as a center for filmmakers. Post production services and visual effects are crucial to being able to execute whatever he has in mind - which almost always includes computer generated images.
It's also true that the film was originally imagined as a Weta Digital project, but with major projects like 'Avatar' having a huge effect on their workforce, Neill argued for the opportunity to take the film elsewhere and Peter Jackson agreed.

"I think it had more to do with focus than anything," explains Shawn Walsh. "Neill just wanted a passionate group of his own that was going to embrace his film." Blomkamp vetted the project to various houses, but he was really encouraged by [eventual] On-Set Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Muyzers and Shawn Walsh showing him what was going on at Image Engine and they pitched successfully for the work. "That had a lot to do with Peter and Neill connecting with respect to how the film was going to be shot on location in South Africa because Peter would be responsible for the on-set supervision," explains Walsh. "It is great when you see two people connect like that because you know you can support and foster that relationship."

Muyzers and Walsh were surprised by how much Neill already knew about them. "He really keeps tabs!" exclaimed Walsh. "I think that softened the landing on his leap of faith. Once we got the ball rolling, we worked very closely with Line Producer Trisha Downie and Post-Production Supervisor Pippa Anderson at WingNut, along with the film's financiers, to ensure that we were working with a budget and plan for visual effects that would stand up over the whole duration of the project."

Challenges
Neill presented Image-Engine with an amazing challenge. Take something completely foreign and seamlessly insert that element into a cinematographic shooting style that is designed to feel overtly unpolished and raw: a documentary film sensibility. There are aspects to many of the shots that are simultaneously bizarre and surprising, yet totally believable and completely integrated into the live action photography. That challenge was not sequence based, but rather existed in all of the shots. "We had many short sequences and one-offs that proved very challenging from a tracking and digital management perspective," explains Walsh, "but ultimately our work was like one 27 minute sequence dealing with variations on similar digital assets."

Just make it look Cool!
One of Blomkamp's best and most often used directions will simply be this: "Just make it look cool". Creature Supervisor James Stewart thinks the word 'cool' has a tremendous amount of implied trust as it assumes that they are thinking the same thing when that word is used. "Firstly, the greatest aspect of Neill's directing was his ability to empower the team as artists," says Stewart. "This was the key aspect to our relationship with Neill. He thinks like an artist so we were able to cut through a lot of red tape and get a tremendous amount of art on the screen."

The sculpts from Weta gave the Image-Engine (IE) team their starting point for both creatures. Christopher and Little CJ. So much of the creature was laid out initially and it was up to IE to interpret it into something that would work logically and rig it that way.

James Stewart's job was to play art director and supervise the build process. Crew familiarity for the character started when Shawn handed them the book, 'A Smaller Majority'. This was the book that Neill had used to wrap his head around the character. Inside were incredible pictures of bugs, slugs, crabs, spiders. They asked the author to send a DVD of RAW images so they could have the most realistic images possible.

"If you look at the Goliath bug, that color was used for one of our aliens, the grasshoppers for another," explains Stewart. "There was not a shell on the character or a spec highlight that we were not able to compare to something in real life... all good art is that way. My job was making sure that the reference was hit and that artistically everything worked... and worked together with the backgrounds they would be intended to fit into."

Image Engine didn't have many generalists. There were solid modelers, texture artists riggers and look development artists. "I think having talented experienced artists make artistic communication much easier and the possibilities seem infinite," adds Stewart. "This was the feeling I got from this crew."