'The Last Mimzy': Magical Reality VFX

The Orphanage created 70% of the vfx shots for The Last Mimzy. Its work included Emma's hand and the exquisite cocoon structures. Courtesy of The Orphanage. All images © 2007 New Line Cinema.

The Last Mimzy (opening March 23 from New Line Cinema), based on the 1943 short story Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett, tells the story of two children who discover a mysterious container on a beach. Inside the container, they find an eclectic group of small objects, each one casting a spell of fascination over the kids. As they play with their newly discovered "toys," the children start to develop exceptional mental abilities. The key to this wonder lies inside Mimzy, a stuffed rabbit that is one of the "toys"...

Often presented by the filmmaking team as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for our time, the movie required extensive visual effects work, and a huge conceptual design effort. A veteran of such large-scale productions as Batman Forever, Broken Arrow and Spider-Man 2, visual effects supervisor Eric Durst decided to split the 335 vfx shots among 10 different vendors.

"We had so much design work to do for each one of these shots," Durst explains. "A lot of them featured concepts that were tough to nail down visually: the crystal card, the wormhole, the energy field that we called 'cocoon', the crystal bridge... Basically, we had an endless amount of options for each of these concepts, and no real life reference whatsoever. So, most of the time, it wasn't a matter of vendor firepower, but a matter of a particular team having the time to think these concepts through and develop them. By having some vendors focus on one particular aspect -- or shot -- of the movie, I could maximize the design effort. Altogether, it was definitely not a 2,000 shot show, but every single shot necessitated great care and attention to get it right. For this reason, the movie required a lot more work than its actual vfx shot count would suggest..."

Vfx supervisor Eric Durst explains that a lot of the featured concepts were tough to nail down visually because they had no real life reference for them. The vendors had to think the concepts through and develop them. Courtesy of The Orphanage.

The Orphanage, in fact, did 70% of the shots. Supervised by Stu Maschwitz, "Their work mainly centered around the 'toys' and visualizing their powers and abilities. A variety of organic effects were designed and developed by the team. These effects range from exquisite cocoon structures, Emma's hand and face breaking up into thousands of pieces when it enters the 'cocoon,' sugar rising up from a bowl and becoming a storm cloud, to the enhanced vision that Noah has once he has been taught to see by the 'toys.' There were several metaphysical concepts embedded within these powers and abilities, and it was essential to integrate the effect to the storytelling, so these abstract principles could become tangible. This is a skill that The Orphanage excelled at. The team there also did matte painting work for Norander's Lab, establishing the scope and size of the future environment, along with extensive particle work for the Meadow sequence and the visualizing of the graphic anchor of the movie, an ancient mandala.

"On the beach of their vacation home, Noah starts to hear enhanced sounds in the world around him. He then learns how to control spiders with his enhanced audio knowledge. Rising Sun Pictures (under the supervision of Tony Clark) did a terrific job in animating unique spider movements on a sunlit web, as well as building a web in the form of a supernatural bridge. It only was a handful of shots, but they required an enormous amount of time to get right. I selected RSP for these shots because of the wonderful work that they did on Charlotte in Charlotte's Web.

Based on its work on Charlotte in Charlotte's Web, Rising Sun Pictures animated unique spider movements on a sunlit web. Courtesy of RSP. 

"At the end of the film, we see several cyborgs shed their alien armor to reveal two young and innocent kids beneath. In CG, Technicolor Toronto (headed by visual effects producer Persis Reynolds) built on top of the practical rigs and animated this 'Transformer-like' transition.

"EdenFX (under the supervision of Fred Pienkos) did work mainly in two sections: the visualization of the complex electronics inside Mimzy, and adding thousands of flowers to augment the Meadow landscape.

"Ameoba Proteus (under the supervision of Dan Schrecker & Jeremy Dawson) did the graphics of Emma's brain scan, showing how her evolvement was well beyond that of other children. Ameoba also assisted in some conceptual work for the formation of the generator in Noah's bedroom.

"Giant Killer Robots (under the supervision of John Vegher & Peter Oberdorfer) just did one shot, but it was a huge one! This is where Noah has a dream of building a bridge that connects to distant parts of the universe. After several attempts using a more traditional structure surface, we decided that the bridge should be made of crystals. This linked the idea of a key 'toy' -- the Crystal Card -- to the Bridge, and really tied together a number of story points. The animation was created in Maya and the shot was composited in After Effects.

Tony Clark and his crew at RSP used Maya to create all the webs and spiders, which included building a web in the form of a supernatural bridge. Making the interaction between the spiders and the web was the trickiest part. Courtesy of RSP. 

"Amalgamated Pixel's largest sequence (overseen by exec producer Michael Morreale) was where Noah uses his powers of sound to summon a large number of cockroaches to cover a surveillance camera.

"Tweak Films (under the supervision of Seth Rosenthal) animated Emma's tears landing on Mimzy, capturing the DNA that gets sent back to the future. Also created was a sequence where Emma jumps with some newfound abilities.

"Andrew (Weisblum of FIDI FX) did work in a bus sequence, where he put reflections of a PSP monitor in Noah's glasses.

"Digital Backlot (under the supervision of Robert Stromberg) added futuristic city structures that were embedded in the distant mountains and in the foreground of the Meadow sequences."

Superpowers

Soon after discovering the toys, Noah starts to develop unique audio abilities. He tests his new power on a group of spiders on a beach, learning to control their behavior. All webs and spiders were created in Maya at Rising Sun Pictures. The web was first modeled as polygons, then the polygon edges were converted into dynamic curves (Maya hair). The wind in the web was simulated using layers of noise. As on Charlotte's Web, the trickiest aspect of the project was to create believable interaction between the spiders and the web. This was achieved using custom deformers that would deform the web based on the spider's weight, and stick the web threads to the spider feet when needed. Finally, the web was converted into RIB geometries by Maya's Liquid, and then rendered in 3Delight RenderMan, using an improved Charlotte's Web shader. RSP employed boujou for tracking, Hype for distortion and Shake for compositing.

Rising Sun Pictures also had the delicate task of covering the science teacher's butt with a digital pair of leopard-skin undershorts when one shot turned out to be too "revealing"...

The first evidence of the unusual nature of the "toys" occurs when Noah starts to focus on the crystal card. As he concentrates on the artifact, he notices that he is able to manipulate the crystal patterns embedded within the object. After much research and design work, the crystal animation was based on mandala patterns. Mandalas soon became a graphic anchor for all the ethereal effects in the movie.

To create the animation of the complex mandala-shaped patterns forming and deforming, The Orphanage employed a hybrid technique using Houdini for animation and Brazil 2 for rendering. "The idea of a set of rules driving the card to 'solve' like a puzzle into the mandala shape was very important," says vfx supervisor Maschwitz. "The individual shards had to know to cut themselves off when they bumped into another shard in order to maintain the organic look. Brazil's ray tracing was instrumental for the crystalline look. We camera-projected the scene onto match-moved geometry, so the shards inside the card could reflect the set and actors. The glows and reflections were all composited in 32-bit floating point in Adobe After Effects 7." Alex Prichard was the compositing supervisor.

Giant Killer Robots did only one shot, where Noah has a dream of building a bridge that crosses space and time. After several tries using traditional structure surfaces, the bridge was eventually made of crystals. Courtesy of GKR. 

A Mandala-Shaped Cocoon

When the toys are all put together in a circle, the artifacts start to spin, which in turn generates a mandala-shaped energy field. "We called it the cocoon," Maschwitz recalls. "It was created in Houdini. One single system created both the 'orbital' energy around the spinners, and could then evolved that into the cocoon itself, along with the 'fountain" effect that linked the spinners to the cocoon. You could actually trace the path of any one strand of energy from a spinner up into the cocoon. It's almost like a 3D 'spirograph' -- the way a skilled Houdini artist can sculpt with pure math is a perfect match to our need for subtle effects. We wanted the animation to feel like it had an underlying logic and structure. The cocoon is basically thousands of very fine hoops driven by a set of complex rules and rendered in Mantra." A similar mandala-based animation was used for the climax of the movie, when the cocoon turns out to be a time machine that is about to take off.

The cocoon turns out to be able to dematerialize anything that enters its field of action. The effect was a particularly tricky one, as it had to look spectacular, but totally harmless for the characters. "This is an example of something that came up with almost every effect on the show -- a decision that CG supervisor Matt Hendershot and I made to use explicit rather than implicit solutions wherever possible," Maschwitz continues. "What that means was that rather than the particles being simulated with a bunch of physics rules, they were instead driven by noise fields and other influences that were 'stateless.' They could be evaluated on any frame without having to run up a simulation from frame one. It meant that we could offer Eric Durst and [director] Bob Shaye any amount of control they wanted over the look, which could even vary across the object. For example, we had to protect Mimzy's eyes and mouth from moving around as much as the other parts of her face, so she didn't look distorted. Houdini offered us this control, and Mantra allowed us to render each particle as individual, shadow casting and receiving objects. It was always a tricky balance to keep this effect beautiful and not creepy. Subtle changes in particle size, light transmission and motion could mean the difference between something magical and something horrific -- and Bob Shaye really plays with that fine line in one scene in particular."

A key aspect of the futuristic technology is the wormhole, another type of energy field in which objects can be teleported to another location... or through time. At The Orphanage, the wormhole was another case of training some simple geometry in Houdini to form complex, organic shapes. Like the cocoon, the appearance of a soft, continuous surface was created by rendering many thousands of fine lines. Additionally, the wormhole took color from the plate underneath and evolved over time, which better sat the effect into the live-action environment.

To create the animation of the complex mandala-shaped patterns forming and deforming, a hybrid technique using Houdini for animation and Brazil 2 was used. Courtesy of The Orphanage.

Across the Universe

In a key shot in the movie, Noah has a dream in which he "sees" how to build a futuristic bridge across space and time. Awarded to Giant Killer Robots, the shot was arguably one of the most complex in the entire movie. CG supervisor Greg Gladstone recalls, "We created a bridge that forms out of 'shifting' crystal. The crystal needed to appear to have many internal facets at different angles, so light would not be evenly reflected/refracted from/through any solid piece of the bridge. The internal structure of the crystal also needed to be able to shift and evolve over time. To achieve the 'internal faces,' we took each solid piece of the bridge, and created a large number of small planes at different angles placed such that they would intersect the bridge. By making these planes visible only when seen through one of the solid piece of the bridge, they appeared to always exist inside. Local rotation was then applied to these faces at times when the internal structure needed to appear to be changing. We created a surface shader with a very high index of refraction and relative incident reflection fall-off that was then applied to everything.

"This all takes place in an environment high above the earth's surface, with part of the earth and the universe beyond in view. The earth was modeled and textured in 3D, and extra fine detail added through projected matte painting. The universe seen in the distance was also a high-resolution matte painting. The final bridge then reflected and refracted itself and the environment it sat in. We used Maya for modeling and animation, mental ray for rendering, and Shake for compositing."

Throughout post-production, Durst and the various teams took great care to ensure that the visual effects never stole the show. "What was challenging about The Last Mimzy was that the effects, while central to the story, were always designed to be understated and subtle," The Orphanage's Maschwitz concludes. "There's almost a common language in 'magical reality' movies of glows, emissions, force fields and the like. We strove to differentiate the Mimzy effects by making them as photographic as possible, and by having them hew to a set of rules and structures based on the mythology of the story. It was a fun challenge to create magical effects that had a photographic reality to them."

Alain Bielik is the founder and editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex. In 2004, he organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.