American Cinematographer - January 2000 - 96

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had

to brighten the characters and
objects in the frame, as well as the
air itself. "The healing effect looks
like a sort of a liquid light flowing
from Coffey's mouth into the mouth
of the person he's curing," says ILM
CG supervisor Carl Frederick.

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that moved
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program just went through that
whole volume, added it all up and
got a final illumination value for the

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room.

ran a

program

interior of that room."

Darabont insisted that the

time, but because it's

before

on Mouse Hunt, so he quite
naturally hired them to help out with

effects in Green Mile that

some

involved
several

a

POP handled

mouse.

effects,

including subtly
enhancing shots of a live-action
mouse. One of the most demanding
involved digitally manipulating the
mouse so that it appeared to roll
across the floor on a spool. "So many
things are changing in that shot," says
POP
digital effects supervisor
Lawrence

Littleton, "and it's all

happening while the

camera moves

and racks focus."

Rhythm & Hues created
mouse

a

CG

when the real "stunt rodents"

couldn't

physically perform certain
required actions, but those instances
were surprisingly rare. "As it turned
out, the mice was exceptionally welltrained, and

we

didn't have to do

much at all," Gibson says. "Most
our
energy went into different

very

healing glow had to appear organic
and constantly evolving. This dictum
forced ILM's artists to brighten the
characters and other objects in the
scene during the compositing stage.
"Adding light was difficult because
we're talking about an artificial appli¬
cation of light to pre-existing
elements, and we didn't really have
those elements," Frederick explains.
"Sometimes we could paint light into
the scene and then 'grow' that bright¬
ness over

(What Dreams May Come, Three
Kings) had worked with Gibson

essen¬

tially a 2-D effect, it's hard to get any
dimensionality. It's fairly difficult to
paint the effect of light over an arbi¬
trarily-shaped surface and make it
look [like] something that you can
believe in. In order to light those
objects, we therefore had to either
replace them or create a threedimensional representation of them
and then light that. We then used that
as a
guide, or actually blended high¬
lights from our 3-D representation
right into the overall lighting."
Both Rhythm & Hues (Babe,
End of Days) and the artists at POP

of

kinds of effects."
POP contributed the film's

final effect, a shot
three
Hanks's
to

featuring a series of
depicting Tom
character aging from young

dissolves

old. The shot also details his evolv¬

ing relationship with the mouse. "It's
a
single shot of the character walking
towards the

camera

frames, and it's
and

in about 1,989

more

than

a

minute

half long," explains

compositor
Michael Degtjarewsky. "We shot the
plates and matched the sets. It's a very
beautiful, poignant piece of the film
a

which reveals that the

mouse

lives

as

long as the old man does."
Perhaps the greatest difficulty
The Green Mile presented to all
concerned was maintaining that deli¬
cate balance between fantasy and
reality. Sometimes just the effect of an
effect, no matter the quality, can
knock

a

film off that fine line. As

Darabont notes, "Sometimes you

realize, 'Hey, I really don't need that
shot, do I?' You can sometimes leave

things

a bit more to the
if the effect is not there."

imagination
M
American Cinematographer - January 2000

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2000
