Oscar's taste runs from scale to stealth
Effects houses get ready, set to impress
Up for competish are: "Cast Away," "X-Men," "Dinosaur," "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "Gladiator," "Hollow Man" and "The Perfect Storm." Once the approximately 200 members of the committee vote, the three nominees will be announced Feb. 13 and the Oscar bestowed March 25.
The contenders' short list mostly comprises films laden with effects, a fact that "X-Men" visual effects supervisor Michael Fink (who is also on the Academy's visual effects branch executive committee) says doesn't necessarily mean that eye-popping is more praiseworthy. Rather, he says, sometimes it's what's gracefully hidden that is the most extraordinary.
"What usually doesn't get recognized are shows with 100 or fewer visual effects shots where sometimes the work is astonishingly good," says Fink, who was nominated for an Oscar for "Batman Returns." "Even in 'X-Men' there were 520 shots, most of which people don't know are even there."
Tom Atkin, executive director of the Visual Effects Society agrees. "It's the only discipline where we get paid to hide our work," he says. "How do you know if we've done a good job because if it's done really well, who can tell?"
Re-creating water
Take Stefen Fangmeier's work on "The Perfect Storm," for instance. Fangmeier, of Industrial Light and Magic, and his crew, accomplished what no visual effects team had been able to do before: They built credible ocean waves and a powerful sea storm out of a computer.
Nominated for an Oscar in 1996 as the visual effects supervisor on "Twister," Fangmeier says his work on Warner Bros.' "The Perfect Storm" was his most challenging to date, as water is one of the most difficult things to capture on film. "Most people have a subconscious understanding of what the movement of water looks like. That's why it was so difficult for us, because we had to get it absolutely right -- the physics of it, the reality of it --because it was the main character of the story."
Not only did Fangmeier and his team contend with how to light water to make it look real, but there were also the issues of ocean spray and foam. "We created a huge amount of data," Fangmeier recalls. "We had about 300 shots for the film, but I think we created as much on disk here as we did for the 2,000 shots in the last 'Star Wars' movie, because the shots themselves were fairly complex."
Lifelike human
While most people have a sense of what the ocean looks like, even more people are expert at how the human body moves. Scott Anderson's task, as the senior visual effects supervisor at Sony Imageworks on "Hollow Man," was to build a digital human whose skin could be stripped away by layers down to his organs and tissues, skeleton and finally to nothing, as the lead character, played by Kevin Bacon, becomes invisible. And, at various stages of this transformation, this digital human had to sit up, run and even grab people.
"What we did was create the illusion of life," says Anderson, who adds that the technology he and his team developed for the film has sparked interest among educators in the medical field. "They're excited about how real and believable what we created was. It's triggered in them the realization that the technology is almost available for their purposes."
Like Fangmeier and his team at ILM, Anderson and the Sony Imageworks unit set sail into uncharted territory. "Imageworks hired a specialty crew of highly technical people, who could handle things like volume rendering and some physiological and modeling aspects that we knew we had to get into," says Anderson, who received an Oscar nom for his work on "Starship Troopers." "We had to build a team around developing that technology because even two years ago when we started, we knew that we had to create software that didn't exist."
Less time, more effects
Building software for a big budget, groundbreaking film is not too unusual, but corralling 12 effects houses to get your shots and make it all look seamless is. To complete Fox's "X-Men" on a truncated schedule, Michael Fink did just that.
The bulk of the visual effects were farmed out to Digital Domain, Cinesite, Kleiser-Walczak, CORE Digital Pictures, PoP and Matte World Digital. But when the studio moved up the release date, Fink was faced with a shortened schedule and requests for more visual effects. "Toward the end when -- between meeting the needs of the editors, the studio, and the director -- they began piling on shots I suddenly found that I had to go outside of my usual circle because people were so inundated with work that they just couldn't take anymore. When we went outside to other houses, it was generally because it was straight-forward image creating shots, compositing, that sort of thing."
Tackling 'Tiger'
For Rob Hodgson, visual effects supervisor for effects house MVFX-LA (formerly CFC) on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," what many people may think to be visual effects were really accomplished on-set, with the help of wires and seminal stunt work. (While the film was thought to be an Oscar contender in the visual effects category, it was not tapped by the Visual Effects Committee, although visual effects supervisors, audiences and critics have praised the film's lyrical blend of story, stunt work and visual effects.)
"People ask if we did the flying across the rooftops, we did none of that," Hodgson says, noting that Hong Kong-based effects house Asia Cine did most of the film's wire removal. About 70 visual effects shots were created for the film, according to Hodgson, for flying and "knives, darts and arrows" sequences, as well as matte paintings to produce the illusion of 1800s China.
Where the work of Hodgson's six-person team, featuring the work of lead compositor Travis Baumann, got a chance to shine were sequences where the action proved too difficult to capture on-set, including the "Moon Pool" sequence. For this shot, Hodgson, who was the visual effects supervisor on "American Beauty," and his team "digitally choreographed" the movement so as not to look out of synch with the rest of the flying scenes. "We were trying to get a gravity-defying feel that was apparent in all of the natural wire work," he says, "and we tried to mimic that digitally."
"What I want to provide are effects that don't look like effects, that fit in with sympathy with the feel of the rest of the movie, Hodgson says. "Obviously, the ideal is that the audience won't notice."
