American Cinematographer - September 1997 - 43

Forpervisor
The Game,
visual
effects
su¬ Digital Post Adds Suspense to The Game
Kevin
Haug
(whose
credits include Madonna's Bedtime

Story and Michael Jackson's Scream
music videos) relied on 525 Post
Production in Los Angeles and

Command Post of Toronto.
Of particular concern was a
sequence in which Nicholas Van
Orton (Michael Douglas) takes a
nocturnal leap from the roof of a
downtown skyscraper. Haug
worked with 525 Post producer

Jenny Bright and effects artists
Alex Frisch and Geoff McAuliffe to
construct the

sequence, which
opens with an overhead view of
Van Orton on the building's roof.
Frisch explains, "We began our
work on this shot with a 3-D com¬

puter model depicting the roof,
building and atrium in order to get
the composition and perspective
right. We then worked with Kevin
to decide

which elements

were

needed."
The roof element with

Douglas was shot on stage; the sky¬
scraper facade and the atrium be¬
low were miniatures built by Acme
Models; and the street

was

filmed

in downtown Los

Angeles. A 2-D
matte painting of the surrounding
neighborhood (done by McAuliffe
in Photoshop on a Macintosh) and
wisps of fog (filmed separately
against black and composited in)
help tie the shot together.
After the film elements
were scanned at EFilm at 2K 10-bit
resolution and delivered to 525

Post, all of the color-correction and

image compositing for the scene
was done with Discreet Logic's In¬
ferno software, running on SGI

platforms. Says Frisch, "We began
working with Inferno in 1996, for
the title sequence on The Island of
Dr. Moreau [see AC Sept. '96].
"For each shot in the

se¬

quence, we first worked in a lowres 12-bit format. This allowed us
to work very quickly and make

changes

on

the fly when [director

David] Fincher

substituting the low-res images
with the high-res versions."
When Van Orton leaps
from the building, his plunge is
shown from several angles, all of
which were created by composit¬
ing an actor into cityscape back¬
ground plates. Both Douglas and a
stuntman were filmed hanging
from wires in falling positions to
provide bluescreen elements.
Fincher and cameraman
Harris Savides filmed the plates in
downtown San Francisco. White
sand-filled milk jugs (also called
"Fincher Balls") were tossed from
the roof of a building. The jugs pro¬
vided the effects artists with a

proper witness point - in terms of
velocity and trajectory - onto
which an image of either Douglas
or

the stuntman could be attached.

Ultimately, Van Orton
through the atrium's glass
ceiling and into the lavish ball¬

Bright notes, "All of our
setups from the low-

res

tests

were

processing

saved,

so

was more a

this final

matter of

critical here because the end
result was to produce a negative for
ENR prints. The neg had to be very

stable in terms of contrast and grain
that there would be no image

so

degradation."
Working at 3K 8-bit resolu¬
tion, Rigg reports that the Domino's
ability to sample colors from one
area and automatically re-create
and match them in another

was a

help in his color-correction effects.
He additionally notes that

within - filmed at the Palace
Hotel in San Francisco. "They only
let us remove one small panal in
the ceiling so we could drop a stunt

mation is

through on a wire," says
Haug. "The breaking of the glass

both Fincher and Kevin, because

had to be done in CG."
It was decided to do the

better.' But there are different
versions of bit depth, depending on
which system you use, so it's really

guy

Inferno composite work for these
shots in 4K 12-bit for higher resolu¬
tion. "One consideration was that
we had a lot of detail in this ceil¬

ing," Frisch notes. "Another was
that we were adding the CG bro¬
ken glass, which was [modeled in
Alias/Wavefront and rendered in
TDI] by Richard Baily of Image Sa¬
vant. Fincher was so

impressed
with the quality of 4K that he com¬
pelled us to invest in a new Silicon
Graphics Onyx2 computer so we
could work fast enough."
In Toronto, Command Post7 s

Toybox visual effects department
relied

on

to do

both wire and

Quantel's Domino system

rig removal

merly a member of the Domino de¬
velopment team, "We primarily
used the Domino for very selective

decisions and

quality from scanning to recording
was

room

but the

processing speed was much

rated look.
"The Domino's seamless

the Domino scanner works at 6K
12-bit resolution, "and that infor¬

and some particularly difficult
color correction. Recalls Toybox vi¬
sual effects designer Paul Rigg, for¬

faster."

lights on the [Oakland Bay Bridge]
in the background. I did this with
selective keys, creating a very satu¬

crashes

here. Because
the low-res was 12-bit, we still had
the same control over the colors,
was

shot in the early morning; several
of the shots of the sky were far too
blue. I basically crushed the blacks
in the sky and pumped up the

color-correction. For

example,

shot of a taxi hurtling
into San Francisco Bay, which was
there is

one

September 1997

never reduced in the sys¬
tem, so you're working in the same
file size throughout your work. Bit

depth
many

was a

point of

concern

for

people believe 'more must

mean

impossible to compare different
systems in those terms."
Command Post also runs a
full 35mm lab, which "allows us to
finish a shot, record out - on a

Solitaire II that's

heavily modified
by Quantel and optimized for the
Domino
make a film print in a
few hours, and then see the image
on the big screen that same day. It's
really a luxury for us."
Haug remarks, "The work
-

done at Command Post

was

very

exacting, and one of the reasons we
went there was because they're also
a film lab and
they understand film
color correction. A lot of digital
post houses that work in film don't
really understand it. David was
looking for a way to make his deci¬
sions based on how things would
look on a film print, and the sharp¬
ness of what we could get from the
Domino for those particular shots
was superior."
-

American

David E. Williams

Cinematographer

41
American Cinematographer - September 1997

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