Golden Compass: First Flop to win VFX Oscar in Nearly a Decade

Visual Effect Academy Awards™ are not much different from any other category in at least one respect: great performances in films that underperform at the box office tend to be overlooked. I and many others thought that Transformers had this year’s visual effects Oscar™ all sewn up not only because the work was amazing - not just the amazingly complex 3D animation but some really fantastic compositing. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (on which this author contributed a few shots) was clearly not going to win as that would break an Oscar taboo: the repeat winner (since Pirates 2 took a statue only last year).

And yet, nearly as much of a long-shot seemed to be The Golden Compass simply because the film was a flop, and Hollywood is allergic to losing money (despite many examples to the contrary) - this despite that many in the visual effects community believe it contained the most ground-breaking work, raising the bar for complex interactions between computer generated creatures (realistic looking daemons, the animals representing the soul/anima of the human characters) and recreating grand scenes of steam-punk London and Oxford and grand vistas of the Arctic. Not since What Dreams May Come has a vfx film lost money at the box office and taken the statue.

Perhaps Hollywood’s love of giving the prize to anyone but ILM - who along with the 49ers were the bay area force no one could beat in the 80’s and early 90’s - trumped the box office vote. However it happened, a great visual effects film (albeit a failed re-telling of one of the best novels of the past decade) won.

Adobe’s Magic 3D Lens

Check out this video in which Adobe engineers debut some much rumored hardware designed to interface with a future version of Photoshop (and, perhaps, other of our favorite Adobe apps?) to provide persective and depth of field in post.

Not only is it a stunning demo, such a lens might not require mechanical controls for changing focus or aperture; the lenses are the fixed focus type found in your point and shoot camera.

It’s possible to recreate depth of field in post, or do without it entirely, Gregg Toland-style (but since we all know that DOF is crucial to a cinematic look, that ability may be more useful for 3D artists who need that kind of image fidelity).

Adobe has vastly increased its investment in research and development so this is hardly the last innovation we’re likely to see, particularly in cases where the proof of concept comes from academia.

Recreating 1970’s San Francisco: Contrasting Approaches

Every day that I cycle from my home into the Presidio I pass through the intersection of Washington and Cherry streets, site of a murder that is the centerpiece of David Fincher’s film Zodiac, a film that fabulously recreated the San Francisco of the 1970’s. Last weekend I cruised Castro Street (not what you’re thinking when you read that) to witness its own fabulous 1970’s makeover for Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk, about San Francisco’s most famous murder of that era.

There is great irony here: the corner of Washington and Cherry has the timeless quality that goes with old-money upper class neighborhoods, yet Fincher chose not to shoot there at all, instead painstaking recreating the neighborhood as 3D matte paintings and shooting the taxi driver murder in front of a green screen. These allowed them to add period details that perhaps no non-local filmgoer could notice, such as that the street trees would have been 35 years younger - this for a scene that takes place at night.

Castro Street, meanwhile, is as different from its 1970’s self as any vibrant commercial tourist destination would be, and yet for Milk, the filmmakers are going back in time using set decoration: redoing the storefronts that have changed hands (you have to hand it to Rossi’s Deli for appearing virtually unchanged in 30 years) and repainting the Castro Theater, the cinema that is the neighborhood’s visual centerpiece. Hilariously, they have taken the level of detail right down to the real estate listings (in the window depicted below).

In an era when even a romantic comedy has 2-300 digital visual effects shots, what’s up? I’d like to hear your suggestions in the comments, but I think it’s mostly a question of taste, or even what you might call comfort zone.

Yes, the director of Se7en and Fight Club can afford have an artist or two spend a year of their lives working on one effects shot, a time-lapse of the TransAmerica Pyramid being constructed, even though it’s tangential to the storyline at best, so you could follow the money and simply say that Zodiac was a bigger budget film. But locations aren’t cheap, especially in high-end coastal cities.

So this is really a study in contrasts. Fincher makes an investigative drama and can’t help but insert almost-unreal effects and even motion graphics into the story (at one point the letters from the Zodiac killer occur as three dimensional projections all around the offices of the Chronicle). Van Sant, on the other hand, is an old-school actor-centered independent filmmaker, just the kind who really hates green screens and handing over key shots to digital artists. I don’t doubt there will be effects shots in Milk, but it looks like the heavy lifting is happening in “pre,” not post.

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