From depicting dinosaurs and the Ice Age to a massive tidal wave and idyllic neighborhood, the leading VFX and animation company helped create and then seamlessly move between scenes, shot from a stationary camera, spanning millions of years, in Robert Zemeckis’ latest film.
Conventional wisdom is not something that filmmaker Robert Zemeckis routinely follows as he pushes the boundaries of technology and cinematic language to pursue his creative vision. Based on the graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire, Here chronicles the entire history of a plot of land from primeval to contemporary times. The various storylines are intercut with each other from a singular camera perspective that doesn’t change until the concluding shot. Frequent Zemeckis collaborator Kevin Baillie brought DNEG on as the main visual effects vendor with tasks ranging from creating the Dinosaur/Ice Age sequence and a massive tidal wave to a photoreal CG neighborhood environment and an AI tool to assist with the scene transitions from era to era.
Setting everything in motion is the four-minute opening sequence that showcases roaming dinosaurs, the meteorite shower that led to their extinction, the Ice Age that engulfed the entire planet, and the renewal of life that followed. “That shot was the one we started the project with, and it could have been the last one we finalled,” states Alexander Seaman, VFX Supervisor, DNEG. “It sums up the broader design aspects of cinematography that we had to continue through the whole show and also the minutia of detail that we needed to think about. The fact that it’s telling a story over such a long period of time was a challenge enough. Having cinematography where the camera [does not move or shift focus] while still trying to tell something that’s exciting and dramatic was another challenge in itself.”
The first step in producing the sequence was to assemble an animatic. “It’s made up of about five to six substories which were split into subshots that had appropriate names such as Ice Age and Dino,” explains Seaman. “We worked on the subshots independently, bringing them all up to the same level, and stitched them together so we could talk to editorial; that went back and forth through the year we were working on it. We did quite a few iterations to make sure you’re passing through the right period of time over the right amount of time. As a colleague of mine echoed to me recently, one of the biggest challenges of a static camera is everything has to move all the time in the shot. You have to have bugs crawling on branches. You always have to have your eye wanting to go somewhere. The idea is if you saw the shot five or six times you could still find something to concentrate on and go, ‘I haven’t seen that before.’”
Development of the scene transitions took place in post-production, in particular for the moments that take place in the interior of the house that gets built on the plot of land. “Originally, they started out wanting to have everything morph inside the room or maybe a stool appears for a brief instance, or a TV set changes in the background,” remarks Martine Bertrand, Senior Researcher of AI, DNEG. “You see some intermediate states of the room as you’re traversing these different time periods.” Crafting manual transitions would take forever, so the decision was made to develop an AI tool to assist. “Generative AI had come out just months before that and these tools were not as evolved as they are today,” Bertrand says. “We had to generate these intermediate states that still looked like a room, but a slightly different one, because it evolves over time. There was no set recipe to achieve this.”
“I set out on a few months long journey experimenting with the code and tools, and interacting with Johnny Gibson [VFX Supervisor, DNEG] trying to establish this visual language,” he continues. “Initially it was jaunty. Everything was jumping all over the place. As time went on, by mastering the various parts of these technologies that were available to us, the tool came together. We understood how to create a melting type of transition and string this together with refinement passes to get a more realistic feel and look to the image.” Custom tools were constructed inside Nuke in collaboration with the visual effects artists to generate the transitions quickly. According to Bertrand, “When the tool came to fruition, we were able to generate hundreds of transitions per day and select those that were interesting to us rather than have one transition in two or three weeks. Then we art directed and modified them. By experimenting, the artists discovered that there were other uses and that triggered an avalanche of possible solutions for various shows.”
Sharing that dealing with destruction and dinosaurs was fun, Seamon notes, “The tricky thing when doing stuff like that is not to reference other CG projects. You have to start looking as best you can at reality, history, and museums for the dinosaurs. It was a popular set of shots for the artists to work on, but it was very complex work.” He goes on to say that the macro level of destruction is where real difficulty occurs, such as with leaves and branches, as Baillie wanted to art direct a specific simulation in a particular way. “Normally, that is not too much trouble, but when you have a shot that is 6,000 – 7,000 frames long and want to art direct a piece of the explosion to do something specific halfway through, it becomes unpredictable, and you don’t know what’s going to happen with the other half of the shot. We had to develop tools to effectively art direct effects simulations but then pick up again or start and stop them in a way that would allow art direction in the middle section instead of letting it simulate as you normally would on a 100-frame shot.” Snow and ice were the most complex elemental effects. “Because of the screen space and the distance in the volume, we kept having to art direct it as well as having the whole simulation run over a large number of frames,” Seamon says. “Ice has a difficult lighting model, where it reflects, sparkles and has different states of look depending on whether it’s snow or crystalized.”
A significant environmental component was the transforming neighborhood seen outside the living room windows, which contextualized the era being portrayed. “Most of that was put together from the production art department,” states Gibson. “In the cases where we knew there were going to be digital replacements, we wanted to make sure to have the right color temperature from the lighting, so we didn’t have to change the foreground that much. In terms of time periods, cars were parked in the background, houses had been destroyed or newly built, how much dirt and grime had been built up over the years, what weather systems are there, and what lighting is there, all of that was meticulously planned out before virtual production because of the interactive lighting scenario.”
For the final shot, the camera moves outside to reveal the exterior of the house along with the rest of the neighborhood. “The design and conceit were the camera starts in the house and for the first time begins to move,” remarks Seaman. “It was meant to be so subtle that you don’t notice it at first and then it surprises the audience because it’s a heartfelt moment. What was difficult was trying to keep the feeling of that heartfelt moment through the course of the shot. We had to do that in a way that settled on a peaceful happy well-maintained neighborhood that echoes the family that we’ve been watching. That in itself is not difficult. But when it’s an entirely CG shot, now we’re talking levels of difficulty. Kevin Baillie actually captured that shot in a neighborhood in Los Angeles, which became an essential piece of the kit for us to be able to deliver a photoreal shot. Once we established the camera move, the look of the composition became an exercise of adding layers and layers. It’s like the dino shot. If you look at the shot five or six times you still wouldn’t see all of the little stories that are happening. Down the street there is a woman pushing a baby, someone is sweeping leaves, and the hummingbird comes into the shot. You start to think, ‘What about all of these other people?’”
Throughout the film, the hummingbird is considered to be the spirit animal that appears in different eras. “Most birds have a feather system,” notes Gibson. “But the problem with feathers on a hummingbird is that the feathers are moving so quickly that subframe motions won’t suffice. That subframe information needs to be encoded into the entire arc of the wing motion so you have that impression of that figure eight infinity look of the path of the wing. I wouldn’t say that the feather system was unique, but how much we had to make it exposed to a digital camera was.”
Once the camera began to move, transitioning seamlessly from inside the house to the outside via the window was especially tricky. “We didn’t have the glass when we shot it,” reveals Gibson. “We weren’t sure where the edges of the pane were because there was no guide there for the camera operator. We were divorced from the camera track before we approached the glass and that caused so many problems inside of the room.” Extensive reconstruction had to be done digitally. “Three quarters of the way through it's an entirely CG room,” states Seaman. “Mostly real actors but not completely.” A de-aged Robin Wright created by Metaphysic was composited into the close-up shot of her responding to Tom Hanks, saying, “Time sure flies.” “As Robin is delivering her line, ‘Sure does,’ She is aging to the next scene,” remarks Gibson. “It's an amazing morph goal to try to capture someone’s performance while they’re changing their shape. This was massaged for weeks, much longer than we expected it to go because of necessity. Our compositing supervisor, Ivelina Dobreva, basically owned comping the shot and kept iterating. It took a lot of patience.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
