Look What Has 3D Environments

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from the film by simply clicking the image.

Visual effects supervisor Rob Legato oversaw 225 shots on Robert De Niro's drama about the birth of the CIA, The Good Shepherd, while simultaneously working on Martin Scorsese's The Departed. But the former required 3D environments. "I was the 2nd unit director and cameraman for both films, but had to completely alter my style to fit... the directors, directors of photography and the filmic style of the movies, often switching gears on the same day," Legato explains.

De Niro, Legato says, uses a very traditional way by shooting 2nd unit sequences and vfx shots based on original discussions, which would not really change during the post process. "We would really only reshoot if we technically or artistically missed the point."

The Good Shepherd opening is a swooping shot that blends into live action, ending up focused on the characters. Legato combined it with stock footage, added grain and scratches, giving the feeling of watching old newsreel footage that becomes the real footage. Legato also created a bombed out Berlin containing around 12 shot sequences of destruction. They started with one street in New York that was partially built to look like Berlin, and for nearly each shot fleshed out the street and added the background. "We photographed images to put on 3D cards, then manipulated them to flesh out the shots."

The most difficult to pull off was a digital recreation of a locust attack. It was the hardest to shoot, with the actors and extras reacting to millions of virtual bugs. Often the actors aren't looking in the right spot or react as desired. Legato had less than a day for that shot, when normally you would have scheduled perhaps three or four. CafeFX did the locust work for The Good Shepherd. New Deal Studios (under the supervision of Matt Gratzner) did the models and created the composites. Legato used New Deal Studio's stage. Legato worked with top compositors Brian Battles and Stephen Lawes along with visual effects editor Adam Gerstel.

These days saving production costs are on everyone's mind. It's cheaper to shoot in an area that is close by to your stage where you can shoot for a couple of days rather than traveling half way around the world to get the same effect. "You want to believe the legitimacy of what you are looking at," Legato suggests. "We were trying to keep it under the top, make it less showy so you don't notice it. You just feel the scene so you don't sense the trick that was involved."

Meanwhile, Blood Diamond supposedly takes place in Sierra Leone, but was mostly shot in eastern South Africa and Mozambique. The advisor, Sorious Somura, lived with the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) for two years until he feared for his life, and then escaped. "He filmed all these horrible things," confides vfx supervisor Jeff Okun. "He was our guiding light on this." Okun felt an obligation to make the film live up to Somura's expectations "because it was that kind of a story."

Due to the style of the Ed Zwick-directed film, dp Eduardo Serra decided on a handheld camera with varying shutter speeds and openings, burnt out exposures, to be shot POV. The goal was to try and put the viewer into the actual scene. Tracking environments into the shots or stabilizing them was the biggest challenge.

An added difficulty was Serra shot 5279 most of the time, but sometimes pushed it two stops to get a blown out, grungy look. At other times, he went for smooth classic camera moves. He would often use 5274 or a film stock that was rated at a lower ASA instead of the 200. For all the vfx bluescreen shots, they used 5218. "The first day we got that back it was quite a shock because he had pushed it two stops without telling me. We got this giant grain, and grain was what he was after. I promised I could match anything he could do and just integrate it from then on, and we could just shoot the blue screens at the stop it was rated." That was what they did, but that first shot was pretty challenging because it couldn't be reshot. "Grain the size of footballs so no way to pull a clean matte. It was roto hell!"

One of the tricks Okun used to tie in the vfx, since they couldn't LIDAR their environments, was to use a GPS system that they could track back later to reconstruct a topographical map.

They started out with only 79 shots, but knew from Okun's original breakdown they would have 450, so they were prepared budget wise to handle a large amount. "We made the producer, Kevin De La Noy, aware of this, so any time someone came in under budget he could slide some excess funds our way." At the end of the day, they wound up with a little more than 325 shots, and actually came in under budget.

The biggest CG environment was the refugee camp, done by Syd Dutton and Illusion Arts, which, with a population of a million, is supposed to be the second largest refugee camp in Africa. But they only had 100 extras when they shot it, so Okun used his own brilliant grassroots scheme. He set up a greenscreen at the exit where the extras go to get dressed, and as they would come out he would have them run through some actions, to build up a library of stills to use for textures on CG people.

Serra is from Portugal and France, and Okun's grips were from Dragon Grips in South Africa. Special effects coordinator Neil Corbould and stunt coordinator Paul Jennings were from the U.K. The camera crew was half from Germany and half from England, and the assistants were all South Africans. "It was the making for a huge disaster, but to our surprise, we found these guys were tops in their fields, better than anyone I've worked with before, especially the grips," Okun enthuses. "They were amazing. It made the job not only doable, but we did things and got shots that would be deemed impossible."

Renee Dunlop has worked in film, games and multimedia since 1993. She currently works at Sony Pictures in Culver City, California, and freelances as a Maya lighting digital artist and as a writer for several trade publications.