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Filed under: Visual Effects •

Invictus: “The Largest Rotoscoping Job of All Time”

Massive Pipe

Of course, the stadium/crowd work involved a lot more than just roto work—unique, believable crowds filled with rugby fans had to be built. Owens and his collaborators, including CIS visual effects supervisor Geoffrey Hancock, are particularly proud of the Massive crowd simulation pipeline they designed to achieve this end. Once again, they suggest that their approach helps take the art and science of crowd sims just a bit further down the road than it was previously. As with most high-end crowd work in Hollywood these days, the rugby crowds started with New Zealand’s Massive Software—a tool launched to prominence with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and also used in Cameron’s “Avatar.” However, in the case of “Invictus,” filmmakers blended their Massive pipe with their Houdini and Maya pipes to make the process just a bit more powerful, according to Owens and Hancock. Owens, in fact, insists they took the concept “to a whole other level of complexity of character movement, demographics, and costumes, among other things.”

Hancock explains that end result was built around the production’s desire to take advantage of each software tool’s individual strength inside a single pipe.

“Massive is an excellent motion choreography and simulation tool, but it can be cumbersome to make extensive animation changes late in the pipeline,” says Hancock. “Houdini has an excellent non-destructive procedural architecture, and Maya is a great modeling and rigging package. What we did was write a custom plug-in in-house that allows Houdini to communicate with Massive. That way, our thousands of motion-capture clips could be edited and controlled in Massive, saved into pre-simulated caches for various emotions, and then passed into Houdini for easier control and quicker iterations in layout—mixing and matching all the demographics, appearances, and emotional responses of individuals and groups. This system allowed for late in the pipeline changes to be made to any aspect of a character without lengthy re-simulations required.”

Digital Makeup

Owens emphasizes that Eastwood’s willingness to turn to his digital effects unit for such solutions didn’t end with the stadiums and crowds in “Invictus.” He points out that Eastwood, during the making of his last film—“Gran Torino”—stumbled into the joys of digital makeup and prosthetics and was a full-blown convert by the time “Invictus” rolled around. Indeed, Owens points out that films like “Gran Torino,” which had about 100 digital effects shots, and “Invictus”—neither of which has, or wants to have, any sort of a visual effects’ profile as far as movie-goers are concerned—have played important roles in evolving Eastwood’s thinking about problem solving in post more efficiently, without sacrificing the advantages and comfort of his straightforward production approach.

In the case of “Gran Torino,” it all started with a cut-up hand and simple tears rolling down the cheeks of the character played by Eastwood. Owens’ digital solutions for these requirements satisfied Eastwood so much that he decided to liberally employ them in “Invictus” to show physical wear and tear, cuts, bruises, blood, and grass stains all over the faces and bodies of the film’s rugby players.

On “Invictus,” this work was dubbed “the blood and guts effect,” according to Hancock. It was a much bigger job than on “Gran Torino,” of course, and required extensive tracking work since the players are constantly moving and interacting, but Owens feels the solution “worked great” for Eastwood. To hear Owens discuss the evolution of the technique and its importance as a new tool in the Eastwood filmmaking arsenal, click below:

Digital Acquisition?

Eastwood has also joined the digital intermediate express in recent years, starting with “Flags of Our Fathers,” and also utilized prosumer-level HD cameras for that project to capture POV shots illustrating the chaos of battle. (You can read my Millimeter magazine coverage of that project and those developments here.) Eastwood’s colleagues, including Owens and cinematographer Tom Stern, tell me he has had them routinely testing digital camera of various flavors for the last couple of years as part of an ongoing investigation into when, if ever, the ultimate traditionalist will dive into all-digital filmmaking. Eastwood is greatly attracted, they say, to the notion of using small, light-weight systems while eliminating the need for frequent reloads, since those two concepts fit his rapid-fire production philosophy nicely. On the other hand, as Eastwood’s recent successes illustrate, things are working just fine for the filmmaker, and so, he has not made the move … yet.

Owens, for one, thinks it is only a matter of time before Eastwood does give digital acquisition a go, however,

“Absolutely—we’ve already sampled just about every kind of camera that exists, consumer and professional,” says Owens. “We shot (those combat scenes in ‘Flags of our Fathers’) 25p PAL and got some amazing angles and shots. So we’ve been exploring that stuff for several years now. Film is just so familiar to Clint and (Tom Stern)—it’s a no-brainer they can make great movies with it. But if it were the right project, and Clint sees it becoming easier to shoot digitally, then in that case, I have no doubt he’ll do it eventually.”

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