Cinefex Weekly Update | Issue 37

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Article by Barbara Robertson

Could a woman have a child only in her imagination? The possibility is about as alien as the opposite notion -- that a young mother could forget her child. In Columbia Pictures' The Forgotten, directed by Joseph Ruben, Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) grieves for a child she's certain died in a plane crash... or is she certain? Was there a son? Her psychiatrist tells her that 8-year-old Sam never existed. And she can find nothing to prove he did.

Fortunately, Telly bumps into a man in the same dilemma. Together, she and Ash Correll (Dominic West) search for the truth. Could they be the victims of an otherworldly government conspiracy, and who is that mysterious man (Linus Roache) who seems to be everywhere? The suspense builds with the help of visual effects supervised by Sony Pictures Imagesworks' Carey Villegas.

Effects were produced at Imageworks, The Orphanage and New Deal Studios. The Orphanage created digital doubles; New Deal built miniatures; Imageworks handled the rest, and put it all together. "The director of photography, Anastas N. Michos used a handheld camera a lot and had a stylized treatment that was very realistic," Villegas said. "The effects needed to be seamless."

The first effect is a car crash. The camera looks through a car's side window, past Telly in the passenger seat, as a Suburban crashes into the passenger door -- not so hard that she is injured, but hard enough to turn the glass into a spider web. Moore was filmed in a car with greenscreen outside the windows; the greenscreen was replaced at Imageworks by a live-action background plate. The glass was cracked digitally.

"The trick to the effect was the way we shot the background plate," said Villegas. The crash was filmed in reverse in a series of plates, starting with the two cars in the end position at the intersection, with the Surburban then backing up. It worked, but only with clever manipulation of the tiled series in post. "We did extensive work in Flame to make it feel realistic. We had to do a lot of speed changes."

The Forgotten shifts gears as Telly and Ash desperately search for answers and government agents try to stop them. While hiding out in a small cabin, the two capture an NSA agent (Tim Kang) and tie him to a chair. When Ash threatens the agent, he agrees to talk -- but whispers, "They're listening." At that moment, the roof of the cabin explodes outward and the agent is sucked up into the sky. "Nothing in the film has hinted that something like this would happen," said Villegas. "That's the point of the shot. It's such a tight shot, you don't know what happens. One moment he's there. Three or four frames later, he's gone."

The full-size cabin interior was matched by New Deal Studios with a quarter-scale miniature. Moore and West were shot against greenscreen, as was Kang -- separately -- tied to a chair. "To get the blowing-up effect without using pyrotechnics," Villegas explained, "we hung the miniature upside down 20 feet in the air on a sound stage, pulled it straight to the ground, and let gravity do the rest." To give the miniature more heft, they shot it from above at 48 frames a second, and then, as with the car, reversed the result.

The next person sucked off the earth is Detective Ann Pope (Alfre Woodard) who is investigating Telly's claims that someone took her son. Just as Ann starts to tell Telly she believes her, Ann is sucked out over the ocean. "The shot sounds silly when you talk about it," admitted Villegas, "but in the context of the movie, it works."

As cameras rolled, Woodard mimed being pulled backwards. The Orphanage then created and animated a CG character to match, and Imageworks blended the digital double into the plate. Using The Orphanage's digital doubles composited by Imageworks, the trick would be repeated in later scenes as two more people are sucked off the planet, one during a freefall from a 13-story office building, the other from an airplane hangar during the film's climax.

For the end sequence, inside the hangar, the 'mysterious man' screams at Telly, and in his rage, shows his true face -- a face created at Imageworks using Flame to warp and morph the image. His scream is so powerful it shatters windows. "We couldn't break glass with actors in the building, so it was all done with composites," said Villegas.

Imageworks added CG glass to the first-unit shots and a hazy atmosphere -- since the air cannons used to break real glass for later shots in the hangar had filled the air with steam and smoke. The digital effects were created with Houdini and Imageworks' SPLAT renderer. SPLAT's painter's algorithm shortened rendering times for the complex smoky volumes.

Like the cabin, the hangar explodes outward. The shot was accomplished with another New Deal miniature. "The hangar was huge -- 400 feet long, with a ceiling 30 to 40 feet tall," said Villegas, "so we used a 1/6-scale version -- but it was still too large to hang. Fortunately, we had to blow up only a corner." To pull off the roof, the crew took the miniature outside and rigged it with cables and air rams. "These shots, like the cabin shots, start on a character and follow the character up. So we shot it with a Vistavision camera on its side. That gave us more height to create a virtual tilt and pan move later."

With just 98 visual effects shots, The Forgotten hardly qualifies as an effects-driven film; however, seamless effects were critical for story points throughout the thriller, and made impossible events possible.

"It's an intriguing story," concluded Villegas. "If you buy the ending, you will think the experience was worthwhile."

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Compiled by Joe Fordham

MGM-Sony: Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Sony Corporation and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced on Thursday, September 23, that their agreement has been finalized and, for the princely sum of $4.85 billion, Sony has acquired MGM. The acquisition will take full effect mid-2005 and will give Sony's Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment more than 4,000 MGM and UA titles for potential DVD release.
Bunyan and Babe: THR reports Jim Rygiel, who won three Oscars for supervising visual effects on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films, will make his directorial debut with this independently financed feature film for Exodus Film Group. The story is described as a live-action family adventure based on the legend of the giant-sized lumberjack and his blue ox, Babe, and will follow Bunyan's attempts to rescue Babe from a nefarious circus owner. Eddie Griffin will reportedly supply the voice of the computer-generated ox, which will be animated by Venice, California, animation studio ElectroAge.
Alexander: Variety reports Warner Brothers is delaying the release of filmmaker Oliver Stone's historical epic, about the young Macedonian warlord Alexander the Great, retargeting the film from November 5 to November 24. The delay was attributed to the fact that Stone is still editing his three-hour epic and reportedly wished to avoid marketing his film during the brouhaha of the November 2 elections. The delay also allows Alexander to avoid a face-off with the mighty Pixar's superhero comedy, The Incredibles, which opens November 5.
Farenheit 451: Latinoreview.com has posted an interview with screenwriter and filmmaker Frank Darabont, in which Darabont notes that his screenplay adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 science fiction novel -- about a futuristic society with a fascist ban on all printed literature -- is nearing completion. The interview also includes details about a project the director has been attempting to mount -- and personally direct -- for the past ten years, based on The Mist, a short story by Stephen King about monsters laying siege to a shopping mall. Click here for the full interview.
2046: Click here to access imagery from a French language website for Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai's upcoming science fiction film from Block 2 Pictures, Paradis Films, Classic SRI, Shanghai Film Group Productions and Jet Tone Films. Tony Leung, Li Gong and Ziyi Zhang star in a typically ravishing Wong Kar-Wai vision of the future that looks like Metropolis on acid. The story, written by Wong Kar-Wai, concerns a writer who loses himself in an imaginary future world, which people access by train to revisit lost memories. IMDb reports the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will be released in the U.K. on October 15, though no U.S. release has yet been listed. BUF Compagnie provided visual effects.
Doom: The Hollywood Reporter states British actress Rosamund Pike has joined the cast of Universal Pictures' upcoming video game adaptation, Doom, joining Karl Urban and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson for director Andrzej Bartkowiak, and producers Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and John Wells. Dave Callaham has supplied the screenplay. IMDb reports that Kit West will oversee special effects and John Farhat is the visual effects supervisor.
Zoom's Academy: Variety reports Tim Allen will star as a washed-up superhero called back into service in this Revolution Studios comedy to be directed by Peter Hewitt. The screenplay has been written by Adam Rifkin and rewritten by Jordan Roberts, based on Jason Lethcoe's graphic novel Zoom's Academy for the Super Gifted. Production is scheduled to start in late spring, 2005.
Abominable: Click here to view a trailer for this horror film written and directed by Ryan Schifrin, son of composer Lalo Schifrin, and featuring Matt McCoy, Jeffrey Combs and Dee Wallace-Stone tangling with a large, hairy beast in the woods. Christien Tinsley provided special makeup and creature design. IMDb indicates this will be a 2004 release.
Incident at Loch Ness: This amusing 'mockumentary' -- a sort of Spinal Tap meets The X-Files -- was screened recently in Los Angeles, with writer/director/producer Zak Penn, Werner Herzog and director of photography John Bailey on hand to speak about the film. Black Box Digital and KNB EFX's had a hand in the film's mysterious creatures. Indiewire.com reports the film was the top grossing independent film in its opening week, taking in $13,313 the first weekend, showing on only two screens -- one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The film will open in additional markets soon.
The Polar Express: IGNFilmforce.net offers a two-part story recounting the international press junket preview screening of this film adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's children's picture book. The junket, held at the Warner Brothers backlot on September 22, included a Q&A with filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and Polar Express star Tom Hanks. Click here for Part One, and here for Part Two. The film opens November 10. Look for the full behind-the-scenes story in the December issue of Cinefex.
The War of the Worlds: Star Wars veteran modelmaker Lorne Peterson, participating recently in an online chatroom for StarWars.com, indicated there will be plenty of miniatures in Steven Spielberg's upcoming H.G. Wells film. The Jersey Journal, meanwhile, has also indicated here that an East Coast shoot -- in Bayonne, New Jersey, not far from the Grover's Mill setting of Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation -- is also imminent.
Flight of the Dead: Variety reports this Lions Gate Films production will shoot at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin, Germany. The screenplay, by Gary Parker and Tom Lavangnino, with rewrites by Dunning and Lorenzo Ozouri, concerns the transport of two zombies who wreak havoc on board an airplane while being airlifted back to their place of origin. The film is a coproduction of producer Marco Mehlitz, the German Film Fund and Cinerenta.
Isis: Variety reports Kelsey Gammer's Paramount-based Gramnet Productions has acquired this action-adventure property from screenwriter Ali Russell about a young girl who discovers a bracelet that once belonged to Egyptian goddess Isis, inherits the bracelet's powers and awakens an evil force. Egyptian mythology indicates the goddess' powers included the ability to resurrect the dead and conjure serpents by mixing spittle and sand.
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith: AICN reports actor Gary Oldman has stepped down from his role performing the voice of bad guy General Grievous in George Lucas' upcoming Star Wars film, and John Rhys-Davies will be providing his sonorous tones, instead.
USC Game Research Lab: Per The Hollywood Reporter, the University of Southern California held a grand opening for its new Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. The new lab will explore the connection between cinematic storytelling and interactive media through the research and development of new concepts, designs, game play and other aspects of interactive entertainment. Luminaries on hand for the opening included Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, both of whom predicted that the two industries would find much in common. Spielberg is quoted: "The real indicator is going to be when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17. Then you know there's been a real shift in the tectonic plates of this industry."
GoreZone: THR reports Starlog Publication's long-running horror journal, Fangoria magazine, has partnered with home video distributor Bedford Entertainment and Hart Sharp Video to create the label Fangoria Presents: GoreZone. The label's first release will be a little ditty called The Last Horror Movie, described as 'a disturbing portrait of a wedding photographer turned serial killer.' The title will be available for retail December 9.