Movies 2.0: Digital Effects Magic Explained

• Another Toxic Train Wreck, Oil Blast Update, Cellphone Fires, More: News Briefs
• The Debut of Technicolor: Time Machine, 1939
• Hi-Def Surround-Sound Setups for Any Budget
• Top 10 F/X Scenes in Movie History
• Digital Hollywood Trailers: Watch the Story

• movies
• Digital Hollywood
• filmmaking
• special effects

Chris Watts has never worked with a wolf before. He and his crew are the designated animal wranglers for a scene in the upcoming movie 300, directed by Zack Snyder. The wolf in question is making an appearance in the epic about Spartan warriors at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Watts and company are trying not only to make the creature stalk through the scene convincingly, but also to capture a particularly menacing shine on its teeth. "If you dipped a popsicle stick in maple syrup, that's the look we want for this fang," Watts says to one of his team.

Fortunately, no one has to lubricate a real-life lupine grin to get the shot Watts wants. In 300, the wolf's cuspids are a purely digital construct, as is every hair on its hide, the rocky canyon the wolf is haunting, the wintry nighttime sky overhead, and virtually every other element of the shot save for the young actor playing the animal's Spartan prey. More than a year after the human element of the scene was shot on a blue screen stage with a stand-in mechanical wolf, Watts, the movie's visual-effects supervisor, is filling in the expansive blanks with staffers at Hybride, a Quebec-based effects facility. "One nice thing about doing this on the computer," Watts says, "is that if you decide, ‘Okay, I like the hair and the eyes and everything else,' you can turn off all the other layers, and just highlight the teeth."

The New Normal
Digital effects such as 300's virtual wolf are remarkable not because they are groundbreaking — the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in cinema dates back to the 2D pixel-vision of a robotic Yul Brynner in 1973's Westworld — but because this technology is now a standard part of the moviemaking toolkit. The impact of digital technology on Hollywood has been gradual but all-encompassing. Today, a movie can be shot, edited and distributed — from camera to theater and beyond — without involving a single frame of film. The transformation is at least as sweeping as the introduction of sound or color in the early 20th century, and it is changing both the business and the art form of cinema. Cinematographers, long resistant to digital image recording, are starting to embrace the use of digital cameras, shooting clean-looking footage that's easier to manipulate than film. Commonly available software allows small special effects shops such as Hybride to render entire virtual worlds and blend them seamlessly with live-action shots. Scenes that would have required elaborate sets 25 years ago can now be shot against a blue or green screen, and the setting can be filled in later — and then tweaked until the director is satisfied.

Visual effects once were labor-intensive novelties generated for impact at key moments in a movie, but digital cameras and powerful software have changed all that. "Effects used to be an issue of process versus product," says John Dykstra, the visual-effects designer on the first two Spider-Man movies. With film, getting the end result the director wanted tended to slightly degrade the quality of the image. Wizards such as Dykstra had to import footage frame by frame into computers for editing and CGI work, then convert the digital product back into film. "Putting effects on film always meant photochemical generational loss," Dykstra says. That's changed. "With digital, we went from being optics mavens to focusing on what illusion tells the story best, because now you can do anything."

There is a powerful recycling effect in Hollywood — as digital techniques for rendering textures such as hair, water and fire are pioneered in films such as Stuart Little and The Perfect Storm, they become part of movieland's collective effects arsenal, eventually being packaged in software such as Autodesk Maya Hair and Maya Fur. Elements and tools — from digital characters and environments to motion-capture techniques that record actors' movements and facial expressions — now are handled routinely, with confidence rather than crossed fingers. Stefen Fangmeier, an alum of George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), sounds matter-of-fact as he discusses the elaborate work he and his crew have done on his directorial debut, an adventure fantasy called Eragon. "Is there a tremendous amount of new technology in this? No," Fangmeier says. "It's the way we're putting it together and applying it to this character. A dragon has never been done like this."