A Seamless Blend of CG and Cinematography
DIVE’s reputation as well as location in Pennsylvania, close to where much of the film was shot, proved well suited to take on the challenge of crafting the film’s environment. VFX Supervisor Mark Forker is known for his preference for meticulous photography over CG techniques, which meshed perfectly with Director Hillcoat’s quest, supported by searing performances of the lead actors, to create visually true footage of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalypse.
It’s exactly the type of job that I like in the sense that it’s not some surreal or sci-fi world that we’re trying to create-it’s instead based on history or imagined reality, how it would have or could have been. The biggest compliment to the type of work in The Road is that it doesn’t look like a digital effect; it looks photographic.
The work was to seamlessly blend our work with photography. One of the nice things is that we have our own DI facility, so we have a colorist on hand. As a result, John [Hillcoat] was able to edit the film from our facility. So, before we got too far with the visual effects, he had already done a DI on a lot of the scenes and sat with a colorist. We had the luxury of having a very good idea of where he was going with the film.
Did Hillcoat have a firm vision from the get-go?
I think he had a very good idea. I would not say “firm” because he was easily excited and influenced by something he would see as we were working-we were continually exchanging photographic references up until the very end. We took 6 months off and went back and did a little more work after that. Even in that next go-round he would send me photographs he found online or in the papers and I would send him back our work, maybe worked up in Photoshop, to say this is where we’re going with this. So there was a lot of immediacy in our back-and-forth.
We were mostly looking at real disasters. We would look at hurricane footage, oil spill disasters, photography of Chernobyl and nuclear site disasters and at certain areas over in India and China where ships go to die.
One thing that became more of an emphasis after we stopped shooting and started to put the film together was the influence of weather. Hillcoat came to think of the weather as more of a player. The world was already ash-colored and sunless anyway, so it made sense to incorporate constant rain and hurricanes and lightning and earthquakes. He wanted the idea that those kinds of extreme weather events were more frequent everywhere, as opposed to now when they occur once in a while. He wanted it to feel like it was happening a little bit everywhere all the time. There are quite a few scenes where you have the suggestions of thunder or a weather event in the background.
It seems like the weather could provide more movement, since there are often only two characters on the screen.
Yeah, John and I had talked early on about how sparse everything is. The characters don’t have names; you don’t have all the vehicles that you would normally have in a movie. The main three characters in the film are the man, the boy and the environment. Basically the environment acts as a character and the man and the boy are living their lives-judging which way to go-in accordance with this character.
That was a big responsibility for us, especially if not everything went as planned in photography. We started out with 60 visual effects and ended up with about 240. That’s an evolution of expanding on certain scenes and a lot of that expansion had to do with weather not cooperating. We shot in the dead of winter to get the worst weather we possibly could, but the spring came early. We started to get a couple blue sky days with trees in the distance starting to blossom. We had to get rid of all that stuff; it was just not allowed in the film.
That’s the opposite of most projects…
Absolutely. We’re on location and, if the sun came out, everyone was depressed. Because we knew we were going to work extra hard, first on the set and then later trying to get rid of the evidence.
How familiar were you with McCarthy’s book?
As soon as I heard I was going to work on it, I did read the book. It was definitely a source of inspiration. You come away with it anyway, with such a sense of place and that’s what we set about creating.
How major of a visual reference was the book?
It was a combination of referring to the book occasionally, but then when you’re making a film, it is a new type of art and so I would be more likely to go to John and talk about what the film was going to be, even though John was absolutely insistent that this film wasn’t just a take on the book-he wanted it to be like the book. He knew that there were millions of people who had read the book and were going to have a lot of questions about consistency. Also, John was very close to Cormac McCarthy. He read the manuscript of the book before it went to publication. It was very important that Cormac give his stamp of approval every step along the way.
What was behind the idea of adding American flags to some of the houses?
That’s a sign of what John was thinking. He traveled all over PA and other cities and I think as he spent more time scouting these small towns in PA, he was surprised that even in very hard up communities, everyone had the flag in their window. He thought, that’s got to be a part of this film. Even after everything’s gone, some of these flags would still survive.
What were some of the tools you used?
I did all my concept work in Photoshop. In house, we used Nuke as a compositing tool. Maya as a 3D tool, then an assortment of smaller tools for tracking.
Overall, it’s not the giant long list of VFX tools that might be used on something with more 3D or character work. One of the things that John enjoyed about my philosophy was I will always shoot something before making it 3D. If it’s possible to shoot the smoke or the skeletal remains, I will take that route. Sure, we could make all that stuff in 3D and never get our hands dirty, but I’d rather opt for the photographic over the CG solution.
[Ed note: check out the full list of tools below.]
Did your emphasis on photographic solutions end up simplifying the finishing process?
Definitely. This was a big matte painting and compositing job. We were creating environments, supplementing snow and removing green and sky replacements…removing fingers on people. So it didn’t have a lot of the stuff that other VFX projects have.
Was there any work to make characters look thinner or more haggard?
No. As a matter of fact, there were only two shots in the entire film where any kind of digital makeup was done and they were actually the opposite-they wanted to use one shot of the boy in an earlier part of the film and his face was too dirty. So we cleaned up his face for that shot.
– Apple Shake
– Qube! Render Farm
– Autodesk Maya
– Adobe Photoshop
Sections: Business
Did you enjoy this article? Sign up to receive the StudioDaily Fix eletter containing the latest stories, including news, videos, interviews, reviews and more.
Leave a Reply