CGSociety :: Production Focus
29 January 2010, by Renee Dunlop
Ninja Assassin opens with a scene that helped define its 'R' rating. With little down time and plenty of combat, the action begins and rarely quits. So much so that images for this article were restricted according to MPAA rules for blood.
In the Kill Bill genre with elements of The Dark Knight, main character Raizo (played by Rain) slices and dices his way through nearly every scene in the film. Stunts and fight scenes are top notch and often move so fast your only hope of following the motion is by the digital blood trails.
Yet this is not a shock film based only on peddling mayhem and carnage; it has a tremendous amount of soul and you find yourself sympathizing with Raizo, who is frequently forced into battle to protect himself or those he cares for, making it a film that plays well for both male and female demographics.
"The future of VFX is being able to find that balance, to pick and chose where you put the work."
While finding the soul of the film fell mostly to the acting, the FX studios involved had to virtually rob the digital blood bank to sufficiently slick up the floors and walls.
Working with a limited budget meant the effects were best served abroad where countries offered the desired tax breaks, so most of the work was done in Germany. CineSync and several VFX Supervisors were involved. Main VFX Supervisor Dan Glass wasn't able to be on set but did all the prep, then came on in post.
His Matrix partner in crime John Gaeta was on set as VFX Consultant, second unit, doing element shoot supervising. Chad Jarrett from Blue Bolt was also on set, Bjørn Mayer was both on set for the vendors and was VFX Supervisor for Pixomondo, and Alessandro Cioffi was the VFX Supervisor at Trixter Films. Rise Visual Effects and Evil Eye Pictures were a part of the team, and VFX Supervisor Chris Townsend helped hold it all together.
Glass realized he needed to be with the director, James McTeigue, in both Chicago and Los Angeles for the entire production and needed someone oversee the work in Europe, which is where Townsend came in.
"Initially I thought it would be great, a vacation in Europe for six or eight weeks," but it didn't turn out that way. "I was eventually there for seven months, in a plane or car or a train or a taxi I think every single day. It was absolutely crazy." During production Townsend was based in Munich Germany, "but Monday morning I would fly to Copenhagen and Tuesdays I'd got to Stuttgart, Wednesdays I'd go to Munich, Thursdays was Berlin, Fridays I would go back to Munich visiting the four different vendors we had. We had Trixter in Munich. They, along with Pixomondo in Stuttgart were the two main venders, Trixter handling the most. There was also Ghost in Copenhagen, and Rise Effects in Berlin came in at the end."
Townsends' job was to be the production supervisor available to the vendors, working with their internal supervisors on behalf of the director. "I spent a few weeks in Chicago getting to know the show, to ease the process and act as the conduit to Glass.
For six to seven months we would present to Glass in CineSync sessions, who would then present to James. For the last couple of months, I was in LA at Warner Brothers where I worked with Glass finishing things up. It was a fantastic experience, but it was exhausting."
Townsend found he quite enjoyed working with the vendors who had some VFX and feature experience but hadn't experienced the peculiarities of Hollyweird, a process he had experienced many times. Townsend, by comparison, hadn't experienced the pros and cons of small FX houses. "It was a great learning experience for them, hopefully, for what I was able to give them- but also for me, to see how small companies approach things and how they tackle challenges that we all face in VFX. My experience was at ILM for eleven years and I'm used to the big machine, so it was quite enlightening to see how things were different at a smaller company." He began to realize that his ?team' was often a single person, and how there was no support staff like he was accustomed to.
"You realize with a small company you don't need the support as you do in a large company, where a huge support staff is required to keep the machine running. It's absolutely required, it's part of the efficiency, but it also means there is this huge overhead that you carry. With a small company where there are only 20 or so people, one person can handle it.
The people that are there are actually producing the work that is up on the screen, everyone you talk to is an artist in some form." By working directly with the artists instead of a chain of command, Townsend found work could be turned around quickly.
The key digital elements added were the chain with a knife often followed by a motion trail. Pixomondo handled the blood, all the matte paintings, set extensions, and blood hits for 185 shots. The chain was designed to have a flowing animalistic movement. McTeigue wanted to make it almost creature-like, a non-breathing character with a swirling cognitive movement implying Raizo could control it with his thoughts as well as his actions. "We talked about serpents," said Townsend.
"We wanted sexy, simplistic, stylized curves, but trying to get those throughout the sequence was a challenge, trying to make it work with the stunt guys as they would fall or roll or dodge, and the reactions of Rain moving what was usually a practical rope in the air. We would have to match the chain to his hand movements."
The practical stand-in rope was held between two hands, hanging slack. "Often it was just that. Sometimes he would have a little extension to the rope with some weight on it.
He would hold the chain, usually in the left hand, and it's wrapped around his knuckles as he uses it as almost a lasso with his right hand." But they were also concerned about safety, so Rain mimed some of the performance, "and what he didn't mime we painted out and put in a CG chain to work with his actions." The chain was built and animated in Maya, and rendered in RenderMan and composited in Shake.
The project had a graphic novel artist creating the storyboard, who used red speed lines to indicate the blood. But that wasn't what blood would actually do. The fluid, because of centrifugal force, would fly away, it wouldn't trail the sword, but the stylized look meant it had to make it stay in the arc of the sword. To resolve this, they added geometry behind the sword that drags it into shape.
