CGSociety :: Production Focus
28 January 2010, by Paul Hellard

The story is set in the weeks after Nelson Mandela was sworned in as South Africa's President, and the measures put into place to gather the nation together after the apartheid terror. It was an emotional story to tell, so none of the 600-odd VFX shots had to be visible. This was a huge challenge and a triumph almost as big as the Mandela story itself.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

The crew ended up using the existing stadiums to track off. They created a synthetic stadium, sometimes matching the ones they had before, back into it, so then the synthetic characters could be used to populate that. "Sometimes, it was supposed to be a completely different venue entirely, so we'd completely change it out," adds Owens.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

On another occasion during filming, Kodak 5219 35mm film stock was used, and there was an issue with ultraviolet and infrared light showing colors in particular angles. A player would be backlit and his costume would be green. The camera would pan around 180 degrees with him and suddenly his costume would be brown. But within the story, the rugby costumes had to be that green because it had become a powerful element to the story.

In a previous film Michael Owens worked on closely with Clint Eastwood, he was asked about the possibility of exaggerating the damage to a fist after Eastwood had punched it through a window.

"We ended up putting the digital make-up effects on him throughout the rest of the movie," explains Owens. "Through that experience, it opened up a valuable technique for him. He said, 'you know, I'm never doing makeup effects on the set again!' Not that you wouldn't need make up people because they are a valuable asset." About 200 shots needed that 'digital dust up.'

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

Clint Eastwood gives some direction to lead actor Matt Damon.

CIS completing about 600 shots including digital main character replacements in wide shots, upwards of 30,000 people in some shots, large scale mid-ground CG crowds up to 1/4 screen height from head to toe, and all the virtual stadium/crowd shots with no plate photography.

The Overall Visual Effects Supervisor Michael Owens, has worked with Clint Eastwood on a few of his films. Changeling, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino and Space Cowboys. This team including CIS Vancouver's Geoffrey Hancock won Best Supporting VFX award at last year's VES Awards.

In the screenplay of Invictus, obviously the first problem for the VFX crew is that they'd be shooting in what would be seen as full stadiums. Michael Owens explains. "It's impractical to do that in terms of so many extras etc. I suggested to Clint that we shoot it in an empty stadium and we populated it all in CG."

Doing it this way, Eastwood could stage the actors and the players and the VFX crew could take care of the background later. "We had a bunch of extras to fill in here and there, just very few," explains Owens. "Just about everything on the ground and the stadium were changed, moved, painted and the only original areas were the foreground players and the grass below their feet."

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

CIS Vancouver?s Visual Effects Supervisor, Geoffrey Hancock, likes the idea of using VFX in a non-VFX driven movie. Being able to nudge the story along with subtle additions to the visuals alone is a privilege.

"We spoke often about making the crowd in the stadium become almost a character in the film," Hancock says. "There were distinct behaviors and emotions we needed to portray in different games." Pulling emotional strings with the color pallet and lighting, and in this case, to hold people's attention with a background's 'personality'.

Traveling to Cape Town and Johannesburg for surveys and the material that came back was ripped to pieces. "We thought we rebuilt the stadium," says Hancock, "but in actual fact, it was being changed every week for different angles, different lighting, all kinds of closeups etc."

There were all kinds of references shot for the scenes in the stadium sequences and invariably, it was all over the map. "Foreground light could be so very different to the background light," Owens describes, "that no-one would think these two light strengths or values could be for the same shot, but yes they were. It was nerve wracking, quite frankly."

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

On 'Invictus', the action on the pitch was furious and fast-paced. The dialog in the scrums and half time pep talks etc, had to be captured as quickly as possible. "These guys were really getting the hell beaten out of them as the game progressed. In 300 shots or so, we put blood smears, black eyes, the beginnings of bruises and even dirtied and scuffed costumes, all in digital makeup," says Owens, "and it made a huge emotional difference and a huge dramatic takeaway. This was a great technique to be able to amp up the emotion of something. It plays dramatically but you can't tell we were there."

In Letters from Iwo Jima there was one shot where a soldier had to cry quietly. Then in Gran Turino, Clint Eastwood had to do the same style of shot but he knew that when he cries, it would appear too messy.

Michael Owens was asked to digitally create just one tear. Eastwood put in the acting performance and Owens found he could light and time the tear, mould and move the tear. "It's a subtle thing but it truly helped to move the emotion of those scenes so much better," he says.

Michael Owens is quoted as calling the Invictus stadium job, the 'biggest rotoscoping job in the history of cinema'. As a bit of history, in Letters from Iwo Jima, Michael and his crew did a huge rotoscoping job to pull in a background for a huge wide shot out on a hill in Iceland that was doubling as the hill on Iwo Jima.

When it came to doing a very similar but even bigger job in Invictus, the job was given over to Owens once again. CIS Vancouver ended up coordinating and hiring a bunch of facilities around the world to do this rotoscoping.

"It would never have happened if we didn't have the capability that we have today," says Owens. "I can Cinesync with anybody on the planet, and work alongside him with him on a monitor. The rotoscoping job was pre-determined and something we could all prepare for."

One huge challenge in creating the crowd that would populate the stands behind the action in the South African stadium was that they were never going to be doing anything regimented or the 'same sort of randomness' as Owens describes. Invictus brought that whole process up to the next level.

Massive crowd simulation, and to a larger extent Houdini, was employed to create flexible, controllable characters, mocha to track all the elements, then Nuke and Shake to lay all them together.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and CIS Vancouver.

Imagineers Systems mocha was used extensively to track the 'blood and guts' on several characters. "At the certains, to strengthen the feeling that these players were being really damaged, mocha helped us keep track of all the scuffs, scratches and bruises, as time went on," describes Hancock. "It soon became necessary for us to do a layer of digital make-up for the end half of the game."

There was a whole lot of motion capture and a huge build-up of the Massive brain and CIS Vancouver had to approach it with a completely different mindset. Geoffrey Hancock's crew worked out how to generate caches of motion and bring it into Houdini and relight it. "That mean't not one of the setups had to be re-simulated," explains Hancock. "So costumes, skin tones, makeup and body types were all done to such a huge level that you would never see that cyclic randomness. The result was completely seamless."