سه فیلم برتر راه یافته به مرحله پایانی اسکار 2009 و نامزدهای اسکار....
The three films up for visual effects Oscars in 2009 share one thing in common: an amped up attention to reality.
Although two of the films nominated for Best Visual Effects Oscars star comic book heroes and one is a fantasy, all the filmmakers grounded their vision in reality, and the visual effects studios they hired followed that lead. Reality, according to the consensus of the three nominees we talked with, is the reason “Benjamin Button,” “Dark Knight,” and “Iron Man” climbed to the top of the heap this year.
We asked three of the nominees who supervised CG visual effects for the films, Eric Barba of Digital Domain, Paul Franklin of Double Negative, and Ben Snow of Industrial Light & Magic, why they thought their peers singled out these films, and what trends the films might suggest for the future.
This is the first Oscar nomination for Barba and Franklin, and the third for Snow (“Star Wars –Episode II: Attack of the Clones” and “Pearl Harbor”). In alphabetical order . . .
BENJAMIN BUTTON
For David Fincher’s film, Digital Domain created a digital actor. They modeled, animated, lit, rendered, tracked, and composited a CG version of an aged Brad Pitt using Brad Pitt’s performance as a basis for the animation.
Benjamin has a digital head during every shot in the first 52 minutes of the film; 325 head replacements shots in all. Asylum created several watery environments. Lola “youthenized” Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Matte World Digital created establishing environments and changed existing locations to give the film the correct period details.
Paul Franklin:
“Creating a digital actor that is recognizable as its live action counterpart is a real breakthrough. I think the guys at Digital Domain made a major leap forward in terms of digital humans. It’s all the little things. Setting aside the difficulty of the facial animation and the rendering of the skin and eyes, it’s how they tracked the head onto the shoulders. If you get that wrong, it doesn’t matter how good the rest is. It’s hard, brutal work. Making people younger – the youthification of Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt was also extremely impressive. And, the rest of the visual effects supporting the story, the environments, the time and place were well done. It was a coherent piece of filmmaking.”
Ben Snow:
“The creation of the digital version of the older Brad Pitt was impressive and it was a beautiful film. I think it’s important that the effects are a contributor to a good film. [The digital version] was a challenging thing, and what was great is that ‘Benjamin Button’ needed that effect. I can’t imagine all that aging being done with makeup. I think that single effect broke ground. It showed it could be done in a believable way. That doesn’t mean it will be any easier for the next person. It took a lot of artistry, care, and time at every level, from David Fincher to all the artists. They put a ton of work into it.”
Eric Barba:
“The visual effects community had a warm reception to the work, but our biggest challenge right now is that the average voter in the Academy might see our work as makeup work. ‘Benjamin Button’ is not an effects movie. It’s about how we helped Brad Pitt carry the character of Benjamin from end to end. If the digital character wasn’t human, the movie wouldn’t have succeeded. People say everyone can do it now, but my advice is ‘Don’t try this at home.’ There are so many little things that can go wrong and if anything is not perfect, you lose the illusion. Well, maybe if you have 150 of your closest friends and an incredible facility standing behind you, then yes, you can.”
Paul Franklin:
“You can say, ‘OK, I think I know how they did that,’ but it’s seamless. You really can’t tell when it stops being the digital head and starts being Brad Pitt in makeup, unless you know where to look.”
So, we asked Franklin if he could tell when the switch happened. He answered, slowly, “I think when he leaves the house and goes off to join the crew of the tugboat.”
He was almost right. When we told him the hand-off takes place later, on the tugboat, Franklin laughed, “OK, they had me fooled.”
The Dark Knight
Eric Barba:
The visual effects crews did an amazing job of integrating miniatures and models into the film in a way we haven’t seen before. The digital work didn’t draw attention to itself. It was done to integrate and augment the story. And, I think what [Framestore] tried to push with the two-face character was well done. That was a difficult challenge, but everyone who watches it is amazed that they fit the tone and palette so well. It made that performance and character work.
Ben Snow:
Again, a really interesting story and superb filmmaking. I think the strength of the film was in the way they used a whole range of techniques very well to make compelling images. All the shots were very good, so in the service of such fine filmmaking the whole was very satisfying. I liked that they used a combination of miniatures, practical effects and digital effects. And, the digital effects crew did some lovely work in super high resolution. The award is not just whether you did something new – there have been fantastic innovations in films that otherwise weren’t worthy. The award should also look at artistic achievement. I think it’s fine to use existing techniques if you do it well.
Paul Franklin:
I hope that people will realize how we all used the effects to support the flow of the narrative. Because a lot of the effects were achieved in camera, people think everything is in camera. “Dark Knight” had long sequences in high resolution cinematography and we had to insert completely synthetic shots in the middle of an action sequence. The comparison with reality was brutal. We worked hand in hand with the live action crews who did the cutting-edge practical effects, but the helicopter crash, the scenes with the ferries on the water, and the Batmobile transformations are entirely digital. And, doing work at a minimum of 5.6K resolution required huge investments in new technology and equipment. At the end of the day, we’d like to think we’re there because the Academy recognizes skill and artistry.
IRON MAN
Director Jon Favreau convinced audiences that gazillionaire weapons manufacturer and playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) could change from a bad boy into a superhero who could put on a homemade metal suit and fly. Visual effects supervised by John Nelson rocketed that idea into an Oscar nomination.
Stan Winston Studio built Iron Man’s Mark I, II and III, and the top of Iron Monger’s suit with real metal. The Embassy created a digital version of the clunky Mark I. Industrial Light & Magic created the digital Mark II and III suits, fit Downey Jr. into his digital suit one part at a time, and made him fly.
ILM also created a digital Iron Monger suit, built Stark’s clifftop mansion and his industrial complex. The Orphanage devised a state of the art heads up display, helped out with shots during a rescue sequence, and fired cluster missiles into a mountain.
Eric Barba:
“I remember watching this and thinking, ‘Wow. This is really great work.’ The effects work was designed and executed extremely well and it’s so much fun to watch. I think my favorite shot was [ILM’s] building of the Iron Man suit because of the design and complexity. That took a lot of thought and it was nicely done. There was so much attention to detail in this film to make everything so seamless. Amazing work.
Paul Franklin:
It was a fantastic action movie, a brilliant comic book adaptation, and the visual effects are integral to storytelling. The achievement is that they make it seem quite plausible that Robert Downey Jr. is able to suit up in this metal suit and fly around, that this man transforms into a man-machine and is capable of extraordinary things.
You buy into it all even though if you analyzed it you’d know he’d be strawberry jam inside. It looks real the whole time. And, you can’t tell when he goes from the practical Stan Winston suit to the digital suit. The only time you know for sure that the suit must be digital is when he’s flying through the air.”
Ben Snow:
“Robert Downey Jr. was Tony Stark, but the suit was Iron Man. The visual effects were vital to the film. I think we broke new ground with the digital costuming; our metals were seamless enough that people didn’t know they were looking at a computer graphics creation. We had to stretch our technology to make the brushed metal surfaces believable so we could cut back and forth with the real costumes and have them side by side in the shots. We had to develop new tracking tools for the digital costuming. And we had to channel Robert Downey Jr.’s performance through the suit. I’m proud of ‘Iron Man.’ I think it added something to the superhero genre.”
LOOKING FORWARD
Paul Franklin:
“The first thing that comes to mind when I think about all three films is that they had A-list directors engaging with the visual effects process. Visual effects have largely been in a genre ghetto of action and fantasy movies. ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Dark Knight’ are genre fantasy films, but they both have an immediacy and grittiness that pushes them into the mainstream.
“There’s been kind of a backlash against digital effects because people think they go away from reality. But we didn’t see that with ‘Iron Man.’ It enhanced and extended reality. I think the in-camera motion capture they used, the iMocap process, will increasingly become a standard way of working; people will develop their own versions. And, in the case of ‘Dark Knight,’ the standard of visual reality we achieved will take other directors to places they previously thought they couldn’t go.
“‘Benjamin Button’ sets a new standard for digital actors and opens the possibility for actors of any age to play actors of any other age. Hollywood has been looking for that for a long time. Maintaining the continuity of character through the underlying performance of Brad Pitt takes storytelling into a place that was impossible before. And, I think we’ll also see a lot more of making people younger in the future, although perhaps not for the right reasons.”
Eric Barba:
“I remember when I first saw a dinosaur walk. I was sitting with fellow CG artists and our jaws dropped. We were blown away. From that moment on, all of a sudden everyone in the business said, ‘We’ve seen it. It’s believable. We can make dinosaurs.’ That’s what happens when someone does something to a wow level. Everyone goes, ‘Well, we can do that.’ My team isn’t the only team doing digital humans. Several facilities are doing tests. We compare notes. Digital humans are around the corner.”
“I think Batman [‘Dark Knight’] and ‘Iron Man’ are the best superhero movies we’ve seen to date. Before, I never felt the effects shots in superhero movies were seamlessly integrated. You go into these movies checking reality at the door, so when you see a man in a suit flying, you know he doesn’t exist and the CG shots would take you out of the moment. But, Iron Man and Batman were so well executed, you didn’t lose the sense that there’s a man inside the metal suit or that Batman is a guy being dragged down the street. Those films have taken the genre to the next level. The studios captured the actor’s essence. You felt for the person inside the costume. The weight of the animation makes it feel like that’s a guy in a suit. He still has superhero quality, but there’s a grounding in reality. I think that’s the trend to watch.”
Ben Snow:
“I feel that all of the films were going for realism and seamlessness. Certainly the face stuff for Benjamin Button. With the work on Batman [‘Dark Knight’] and ‘Iron Man,’ there was a reality there, too. I think there has been some complacency about pushing for reality all the time. But, I like reality-based stuff. I like the magic trick; I like to fool the audience and we’re getting better at it, at image-based capture, image-based lighting, motion capture. We’re getting better at capturing realism and turning that into tools, and at learning to use the good parts of those tools. And, as it gets easier to make the damn thing look real, as we learn to master these reality-based tools, we have more time to light beautifully, to spend the time that a director of photography can. We can go beyond making the surface look real. We can light it beautifully. We can spend more time on artistry. And, that will allow us to improve the art.
پیروز باشید
اسکار 2009 (جلوهای ویژه)
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