'Independence Day,' a model effort
WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: VOLKER ENGEL
This is the second installment in our series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or a special human soul who ages in reverse. Today, guest contributor Liesl Bradner talks to Engel, a visual effects supervisor who won an Oscar the 1996 film "Independence Day."
Volker Engel, a 43-year-old native of Bremerhaven, Germany, is now working on "2012," the eco-disaster film due this November from director Roland Emmerich. Emmerich was also the director of "Independence Day," and Volker has a favorite scene from that movie that invoved a key symbol of the U.S. presidency...but it's not the one you think.
My most memorable scene was from "Independence Day." Everyone talks to me about the "blowing-up-the-White-House" scene and how much fun that must have been. Personally, the one that is most rewarding and memorable is the Air Force One shot because it was all done "in camera."
It was a small, five-second establishing shot of the plane in the air with the sunset in the background before we cut into the next scene. Nowadays, everyone expects that it was a computer-generated airplane and somebody went up and shot footage of the sky for the background. It was actually a blown-up archive photo with a small model 747 airplane hanging with super-thin fishing wire.
Brad Pitt becomes 'Button': Steve Preeg explains the magic
WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: STEVE PREEG
This is the first installment in our new series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or a special human soul who ages in reverse. Guest contributor Liesl Bradner begins the series today by talking to Steve Preeg, who is nominated for his first Oscar this year for his work as character supervisor on "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
Steve Preeg is an animation supervisor at Digital Domain. He has worked on "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," "King Kong" and "I, Robot" and was key in the creation of Gollum for "The Lord of the Rings" franchise. Right now he's working on the revival of "Tron." His take on "Benjamin Button":
My most memorable scene is from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the one we referred to as "Benjamin’s Secret," where he is under the table with Daisy when they first meet. He's explaining to her how he’s different. A sort of revelation to himself, that he’s hearing people talk that he’s going to die soon but he doesn't know anything about it.
This series of shots is very close up and dialogue driven. It looks to the viewer that it's a 70-year-old man with a 9-year-old girl late at night under a table, and that's rather disturbing. But we had to make it innocent enough that it feels like a 15-year-old that is confused about things and still has to be Brad. We were trying to make a dirty old man feel innocent and do it in computer.
When Benjamin appears in his 80s, 70s and 60s, as in this scene, he is completely computer generated from the neck up. His head is entirely synthetic. They shot the scene on set with a 5-foot-2 body double during principal photography in New Orleans. with a blue hoodie with tracing markers covering his head. Meanwhile we had taken a very realistic-looking cast of Brad’s head that Rick Baker Studios did, a version of what they think he would look like at age 70. It was painted and hair was put in. We took lots of pictures of it and put them in the computer.
We also brought Brad into the studio and used a new "volumetric capture" technology that digitally photographs the entire surface of the face and enables a highly detailed reconstruction in the computer. We used that to capture his expressions while he moved his face in a lot of different positions, which gave us accurate geometry for the way his skin and muscles moved over his bones. That process gave us a digital library of everything Brad's face could do....
