Digital FilmWorks (DFW) is a Los Angeles-based full-service visual effects facility specializing in digital compositing and film scanning and recording. The facility has among its film credits "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Brokedown Palace," "Hope Floats," "Great Expectations," "Selena," and many others. DFW has been a long-time user of Nothing Real's Shake software and most recently used Shake version 2.1 to produce several large shots for the Twentieth Century Fox motion picture, "Anna and The King," starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat. DFW's next project is "Red Planet," starring Val Kilmer.

According to Marco Paolini, senior visual effects artist at Digital Film Works, the facility's work on the film included the panoramic opening visual effects sequence of the boat harbor, comprised of approximately 1336 frames, other harbor-related shots as well as multiple shots of bridges exploding at the end of the film.

Click on image to see full size (2mb) Before and after scene from 'Anna and the King' Copyright c 1999 Fox 2000 All Rights Reserved

 

In the opening sequence, roughly 55 seconds in length, the shot required DFW to recreate a modern day boat harbor in Malaysia to resemble a harbor from the 1860's, the period in which the film takes place

In the original camera shot of the harbor there is a giant swooping camera move that follows along the docks and shoreline that portrays everyday modern life including small boats in the foreground as well as several large modern day ships in dock.

"The main compositing challenge was to be able to match the camera motion and believably create new elements including ships, a shoreline, water, sky, smoke and other elements against a moving foreground,"said Paolini. "Match moving is always a challenge - especially in this case when we were dealing with quite a bit of lens distortion."

Various elements of Nothing Real's Shake software were used by DFW to meet the compositing demands of the film.

The Shake "pin cushion tool" was used to reduce camera lens distortion, vital to DFW's ability to integrate new elements so that they could accurately match the distortion of the original photography. "Without the Shake pin cushion tool we would not have been able to do the shot," said Paolini. "There are some other tools out there for reducing distortion but of all the different tools, the pin cushion node in Shake worked exactly the way we needed it to work."

Paolini adds that there were many elements that comprised the opening scene. "Our 3D artist Ed Quirk looked through period books to match the look of the sails and the overall look of boats from the 1860's. In the original shot there were only two period boats. The rest of the boats in the shot, about one hundred, were all computer generated. The boats have wind blowing in their sails, the boats are all moving, and the water was replaced as well. In addition, the shoreline in the film was painted with old period houses."

In the first part of the scene DFW used Primatte to create the matte to remove the sky and background. Following, DFW used the Shake "quick shape" node for the necessary clean up work. The effects work also required considerable color correction on the computer generated boats and the recreated sky.

"The sky was pieced together from multiple still plate images of clouds. Because there was so much movement in the camera a big sky plate was required. The multiple cloud images were first placed together in Shake and separately color corrected afterwards," added Paolini. "Other software was then employed to do the motion tracking in order to analyze the motion of the particular shot. The tracking data was taken into Shake and the motion applied to the CG boats, sky and shoreline, so that all the elements appeared to be moving in the same fashion as the original photography."

The bridge shots and the bridge explosion sequences required DFW to orchestrate a number of intricate elements to make the explosions appear more dynamic. Additional explosions were added and a main character from the film was shot against green screen to make it seem as though he was on the bridge, and then blown off of it during the explosion.

"I first stabilized the background shot, used Primatte for the green screen and then added the additional explosions into the scene. The only thing missing at this point was some 'good' shaking to coincide with the explosions," said Paolini. "We used the 'camera Shake' function within Shake to simulate the shaking of the explosion which did the trick! The overall effect seamlessly integrated all of these elements as if they were photographed as one."

In the other bridge shots, DFW took images from various sources and added them together. The original bridge from Malaysia did not have water underneath and its pillars were not tall enough. This required DFW to add water underneath as well as extend the height of the bridge. The final bridge shots are a blend of streams from the mountains of California, a miniature bridge constructed and filmed at the Van Nuys, Calif. airport and the original bridge and mountains from Malaysia.

"It's just amazing to be able to mix together images from so many different places. There was a lot of color correction and changing of sizes and heights involved. We are pleased it came together so well!"

"When Shake first came out a couple of years ago, we quickly adopted it as an all-around utility for playback, image conversion and color wedging. As Shake has progressed to Version 2, it's new tools have allowed us to use it for the majority of our compositing tasks. It's quality, speed and feature set have become indispensable for us in our day-to-day operations."

Other Films with the usage of SHAKE include: