RETRO EFFECTS IN A DIGITAL AGE

By TREVOR HOGG

In the digital age, where photorealism is achievable virtually and is getting further refined with machine learning, the visual effects industry finds itself being viewed as a double-edged sword. When used properly, visual effects are interwoven into a cinematic vision that could not be achieved otherwise and, when deployed badly, an instrument of laziness. This perception has been accentuated by the global depository of human knowledge and ignorance known as the Internet. In the middle of all this is a question of whether there is an actual trend of filmmakers favoring practical effects, or is it simply a marketing ploy taking advantage of public opinion?

“Like with any new technology, people went a bit overboard with CGI. CGI is powerful, but it can have some limits,” states director Denis Villeneuve who has created everything from a talking fish in Maelström, a spider in a closet in Enemy, a sandworm ride in Dune: Part Two and a traffic-congested highway in Sicario. “It’s all about the talents of the artists you’re working with. I’m not the only one. Many filmmakers realize it’s a balance, and the more you can capture in-camera, the better. A great visual effects supervisor will tell you the same. The pendulum is going more towards the center, in the right way, between what you can capture in-camera and what you can improve with CGI. If it was up to me, there would be no behind-the-scenes. I feel like you spend years trying to create magic, specifically with CGI, which is so delicate and fragile that it can quickly look silly. So much work has been done to make it look real that I’m always sad when we show behind the curtain.” Villeneuve is not entirely against the idea of unmasking the illusion as it helps to inform and inspire the legendary filmmakers of tomorrow. “When I was a kid, I read Cinefex and was excited to know how the movie had been made, but it was a specialized publication. It wasn’t wide-open clips that can be seen by millions. It was something that if you were a dedicated nerd who wanted to know about it, you had to dig for the information, but now it is spread all over the place.”

“There is this need for directors or studios to diminish the visual effects departments and put forth, ‘We did it all in camera,’” notes Bryan Grill, Production VFX Supervisor for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, “when we all know that’s not the case. You put your best foot forward to do stunts and practical effects, but there’s always something in there that needs some clean-up or enhancement. It has been this juxtaposition. You’ve had superhero movies, which are nothing but visual effects, environments and multi-dimensions. It’s overbearing. Then you have the other side, which is traditional filmmaking.” Along with Eddie Murphy reprising his role of the quick-witted rogue detective named Axel Foley for the fourth time, an effort was made to recapture the 1980s roots of the franchise. “What always stuck with me about the original Beverly Hills Cop was the opening scene where the truck is barreling down, hitting car after car. One of my other favorite movies from that era was The Blues Brothers, with all of the police cars hitting each other and falling off the bridges. It was a carnage of special effects. That’s what they wanted to bring into this version as well, and they damaged a lot of cars! There were at least 20 more cars that didn’t make the edit that got destroyed. The filmmakers went all out to relive and show the next generation of that type of movie.”

“There is a trend in the marketing of these films where audiences seem to want to crave an authentic experience, so they’re emphasizing the practical aspects even if most of what you’re watching has been digitally replaced in post,” remarks Paul Franklin, Senior VFX Supervisor at DNEG. “If you think back 30 years when Jurassic Park came out, that film was marketed on the fact that they had computer-generated dinosaurs in it for the first time. Those of us in the visual effects world who are familiar with that film know that the majority of the dinosaurs that we saw on the screen were Stan Winston’s animatronics that were created practically. If that film was being released today, it would be all of this stuff about Stan Winston building these dinosaurs as animatronics.” That being said, practical effects aspirations do exist. “There are a lot of filmmakers who have seen the success of Interstellar, The Dark Knight movies and recently Oppenheimer, and the way that Christopher Nolan leans into the practical aspect of what he does. They’re going, ‘That’s an effective way to tell your story.’ A lot of filmmakers aspire to that. Whether there are so many of them who can pull it off is a different thing because it turns out to be quite difficult to do that balancing act. I got lucky and worked with Chris for 10 years, and he is a genius filmmaker. I don’t know if there is anybody else quite like him. Steven Spielberg in the days when he was making films such as Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park; he’s a filmmaker who knew the value of doing things practically, which is why he would always want to work with Stan Winston. You look back at E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it still holds up because they used state-of-the-art animatronics and practical effects at the time.”

“For a good decade or more, there was this ability for visual effects teams to provide directors and producers with shots that were extraordinary in their ability to break some of the traditional filmmaking rules and to move away from some of the things that made cinema look the way it had for the decades before that,” notes Ryan Tudhope, Production VFX Supervisor on Top Gun: Maverick. “That created a bit of a look and, just like anything, looks come and go. One thing, if you think about it, over the course of all of filmmaking, is that every single shot of every single movie has one thing in common, which is that it was shot through a camera. Then came along the digital ability to create digital cameras and shots. That freed us up for a long time to be able to do things with those cameras that had never been done before. When I think about it in terms of what I’m trying to do, it is to recognize what that camera means to the artform and to honor that by trying to design a shot that appreciates what the camera can do and should do, how it visualizes the world, and how the audience sees the film or shot or whatever the action might be through that limitation. When you don’t respect that, it can be visually stunning and impressive shots, but the audience immediately knows that it’s not real.”

“We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too,” believes Aaron Weintraub, VFX Supervisor at MPC. “The highest compliment we can ever be paid is if people have no idea that we did anything – that’s what we strive for. What we do is stagecraft. We’re trying to fool the audience into thinking that something is completely real and was there in front of the camera; they recorded it, and that’s what you get to see on the screen. If we have done it correctly, nobody knows.” Real-life examples are the starting point. Weintraub explains, “Everything that we do is looking at photographs and film footage and trying to replicate how the light and surfaces react. We’re nothing without reference of the real world, if the real world and photorealism is our goal.” Technology is the means to the end. “Every iteration and every step that we take with the technology is something new that the audience may not ever have seen before. Reacting to the newness is part of saying that the technology is driving it, but it’s a story that we’re trying to tell that we couldn’t do in the past.” Reality can provide a sense of spontaneity to animation. Weintraub notes, “There are mistakes and happy accidents that can happen when you shoot real stuff that you might not get otherwise. When we did Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which was stop-motion animation, one of the guiding principles of the animation was to try to anticipate all of those weird little accidents that if you were shooting this live-action and put those into the animation. In advance of shooting the stop-motion, the animators would shoot these little videos of their clips to see what would happen.”

“It’s a stylistic thing. When we’re talking about the marriage of practical, what’s shot on set and where we come into play, either augmenting or completely replacing it in some cases, there is always this desire to maintain this visual characteristic that is inherent in practical shooting,” observes Robin Hackl, Co-Founder and Visual Effects Supervisor at Image Engine. “It’s being art-directed and driven by the DP, lighting director and the director himself, and they have hands on the physicality of that being on set and getting that look. It’s always that apprehension almost of committing fully to CG and leaving it to the hands of the visual effects vendors and artists, even things that they are implementing in practical set photography, like virtual sets that give a higher degree of reality to the lighting of the characters. From the feedback that I’ve gotten from the people on set, the actors in particular react well to virtual production in the sense that they have something tangible to react to and see, to be part of that little world, which is sometimes hard for them to wrap their heads around. What is that emotion tied around that environment they’re in? It heightens that. Of course, it’s not all done that way. The Mandalorian is all over the place, from on-set photography to giant bluescreens and virtual production. The Mandalorian is a good example of aesthetic. The creators wanted to retain as much as possible the flavor and vibe of the original Star Wars films. There were a lot of optical effects done back in the early days and stop-motion that was live in-camera, for the most part they tried to shoot everything in-camera the best they could then augment it. It’s a real harkening back to that era.”

“It’s more about having a good dialogue with the people you are working with and making sure that they understand how to get the best out of the tools they’re using,” states Glen Pratt, Production VFX Supervisor on Barbie. “If I’m blunt, it’s often because bad choices are made. If you allow all the crafts that are involved in filmmaking the time that they say [they need], you get a good result, whether it be building a set, creating pyrotechnic explosions, then equally whatever aspects of visual effects you’re adding into that.”

Open communication is important. “Greta Gerwig hadn’t done visual effects before, so I sat down early with her and talked through various sets of tools that we have at our disposal. I could tell she was overwhelmed by some of those things. But it’s honing it down to that is just a step in the process of how we will eventually get to the end result. That comes with experience. The more that you work with bringing visual effects into it, the more well-versed the director becomes with the language. A lot of the time, they don’t want to know that level of detail. They only want to know that you have their back and you can do this for them.” Barbie Land was an artificial environment, but the same photorealistic principles applied. “We captured everything so we could recreate whether it be the actual stages themselves or miniature models, and often we embellished them further on what was there to ground it, make it feel like it belongs in that world and had a cohesive, insistent aesthetic running through it.”

“Personally, when the conditions and the type of effect to be achieved allow me to use the practical, I jump at it,” remarks Mathieu Dupuis, VFX Supervisor at Rodeo FX. “We’re fortunate to have a studio at our disposal here at Rodeo FX, and I can’t imagine executing some of the large-scale effects on our recent projects without the support of practical effects. I’m not just talking about blood splattering on a greenscreen or crowd duplication, which, by the way, is always highly effective. Being able to rebuild scaled-down set pieces [painted green] to capture the precise interaction of, say, glass breaking on a table or to recreate an organic dream effect by filming floating debris in macro within an aquarium allows us to achieve quick, cost-effective results that are both efficient and innovative. There’s also the advantage of avoiding endless discussions with clients by capturing how a flag moves in the wind or how a plate shatters. There’s no need to imagine or convince anyone how these elements would behave because we’ve captured them in real life. There’s nothing more authentic than reality, right!?”

“It’s a stylistic thing. When we’re talking about the marriage of practical, what’s shot on set and where we come into play, either augmenting or completely replacing it in some cases, there is always this desire to maintain this visual characteristic that is inherent in practical shooting.”

—Robin Hackl, Co-Founder and Visual Effects Supervisor, Image Engine