Easy Company Medic Eugene Roe

Post Industry - Oct. 5, 2001

Easy Company Medic Eugene Roe: Band Of Brothers in the News: Post Industry - Oct. 5, 2001

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By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.245.234.95 - 209.245.234.95) on Wednesday, October 10, 2001 - 11:16 am:

The VFX of Band of Brothers, Part I
By Catherine Feeny
October 05, 2001

With executive producers like Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, Band of Brothers is the type of project that visual effects supervisors jump at -- even if it is a ten-episode commitment. Producers Tony To, Gene Kelly and Bruce Richmond approached Angus Bickerton with an offer at the end of 1999 on the reccommendation of post supervisor Bruce Everett. Bickerton climbed on board officially in January 2000.

Going to Cinesite for the major digital effects, Bickerton combined mattes, miniatures and computer generated imagery to help create World War II in the hardboiled style of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. He worked with eight different directors, helping to maintain stylistic continuity while allowing for artistic freedom. He also kept and eye on the footage as it went through Cinesite's brand new digital lab. "If it was a good composite, it survived all of the tortures of grading," Bickerton said. He spoke with VFXPro about the unique challenges of working on a mini-series and producing shots that survived the digital lab.
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Did you work directly with Steven Spielberg?

We saw a reasonable amount of Steven Spielberg in pre-production. Then in the first couple of weeks of shooting he was very involved in the whole process. He was particularly involved with early rushes where he wanted to put a stamp on the visual style of the series. Then as he moved into his own productions like A.I., we saw less of him. We didn't see him during post. It was Tom Hanks that we saw at regular intervals throughout the whole production.

What was that visual style?

It was openly agreed that we were going to take a lead from Saving Private Ryan. Janusz Kaminski created the visual style in-camera by flashing the stock or having it pre-flashed, taking the coatings off the lenses, the use of smoke on the set and selectively pushing his film stocks and using the ENR process at the labs. We agreed that what we would do is shoot clean negatives and try to get that look in a digital lab.

Why did you make that decision?

Because we had 10 hours of programming and it was recognized from the producers' experience doing programs like From the Earth to the Moon that the project would evolve during the course of the series. So three episodes in, they might have changed the way they approached the look and if we shot cleanly in the beginning, we wouldn't have committed to shooting scenes the wrong way. The only thing that we did do practically during the shoot was close down the shutter angle of the camera, which reduces motion blur and gives a staccato look to the action. That is something you can't replicate in a digital lab.

Did you do that on all of the footage?

No, it was used carefully. Joel Ransom set out experimenting with 45- and 90-degree shutter angles. Their effect is a lot less apparent on video rushes. The video softens the effect. Once you project the images, however, it is much harder on the eye. At first, when you see a piece of film photographed with a small shutter out of context, the strobe is very hard on the eye.

Is that related to changing the film speed?

Yes. The shutter rotates 360 degrees for every film frame. Normally it would be open for half of the cycle, for 180 degrees of the 360-degree rotation, and then the shutter would close, as the film advances, for the next 180 degrees. So the shutter closes and the film advances and then it opens again. By closing down the shutter so that it is only open for 45-degrees of the cycle it means you are reducing the exposure time and therefore you are reducing motion blur, particularly on hand-held actions and explosions. When you don't get that motion blur it makes the action very hard, and you can pick out the particles in the explosions.

Another key ingredient of the Saving Private Ryan look that Steven Spielberg insisted upon was the use of Clairmont Camera's Image Shaker on the front of the lens. It bolts on to the matte box bars and basically it acts as a flexible, liquid filled lens. Two motors at 90-degrees to each other pull and distort the lens, which refracts and thus offsets the image. It also softens the image slightly and you can get a little bit of diffraction going on where it offsets the colors. So combine all of these things -- hand held camera with an Image Shaker and the 45-degree shutter --and it gives you a very staccato, violent image.

Does the lens shake happen in relation to motion that is going on around the camera or does it happen independently?

There is a control that allows you to set the amount of shake. You can't cut it in immediately, you have to ramp it up very quickly. It is under the discretion of the DP or the camera operator to dial it in as the action happens. Usually the shaker would be ramped up to time with a pyro event on set.

What was pre-production like?

For Tony To and Tom Hanks, pre-production started with research around Europe, scouting locations and such, from as early as August or September of 1999. I started a few days before January 2000. Although Tom Hanks and Erik Bork had produced a series bible outlining the key events and people, the scripts weren't all solidified right at the beginning so we were working with the scripts that we had and even they were evolving.

How many scripts were finished?

We had about five out of the ten scripts. We did know about key episodes however, like episode two, which was at the beginning of the series' shooting schedules and had our biggest effects requirement -- the nighttime parachute drop into Normandy. So we got that storyboarded very early on. That went through two to three storyboard revisions before we went ahead with anything.

Were all of the episodes storyboarded?

We had an excellent storyboard artist called John Greaves who actually worked on Saving Private Ryan. It varied from episode to episode. We did try to storyboard effects, particularly for episodes one and two. But we had fewer story boards towards the end.

As you got in to the rhythm or as you had less time?

A bit of both.

The next big sequence for VFX after episode two was episode four, which includes the next drop into Europe as part of operation market garden. That was a parachute drop into Holland and was almost completely un-storyboarded. Working with the director on that episode, David Nutter, we agreed that we should try to shoot it as documentary-style as possible.

CG-parachute drop

Was the parachute drop in episode four less complicated than the parachute drop in episode two?

It was one of the sequences that kind of caught us a little bit. We thought it was going to be three or four shots and it ended up becoming a 30-shot sequence. We knew that we could only do two practical parachute drops in the field that we chose for them to land in at any one time. They were set up by special effects supervisor Joss Williams and his crew. Each prachute had a lorry-based 100-foot crane from which we hung a hoop. The parachutes were attached to the hoop by slip rings that were released electronically. The parachutes and the stuntmen or actor then dropped from the hoop by means of a controlled descender cable.

There were in reality, hundreds of them dropping into the field and we only had two. Even then, use of the rigs is contingent upon the weather, and the wind particularly. If you have strong cross winds, it becomes a little dangerous. For the two or three days that we shot the landing we had strong cross winds. So we only did drops from about 20 feet up. We added everything else.

Those were done primarily in CG?

We covered it two ways; I was a little nervous about whether the CG would quite cut it, particularly with the cloth dynamics of the parachutes. So I contracted mattes and miniatures to build a 1:3 scale trooper and parachute. We dropped him on a stage against bluescreen. It was almost a carbon copy of Joss Williams' rig, built in one-third scale -- we even mimicked the ring with the release system, which was rigged to the ceiling of the stage. Apart from extreme foreground, if you see a parachute landing in the sequence it is a miniature, because landing was a much more complex cloth dynamic than we wanted to get into with CG.

To fill out all the numbers in the air, we went CG. As we got closer to camera, we were worried about CG figures on the bottom of the parachutes so we also shot a stuntman hanging from straps against bluescreen. We shot him from a variety of different angles so we could attach him to the bottom of our bluescreen or CG parachutes, and have a real soldier matted on.

So it was a mix. There were three parts in there. We tried to mix and match it to make it as confusing to the eye as possible. Cinesite did a fantastic job of compositing and CG animation.

Did you find that you had to act as a monitor when you were working with the different directors to keep the visual style consistent?

We set out with this Saving Private Ryan-style as a broad guide, but each episode was allowed to be its own entity and each director was encouraged to introduce his own style. The style was particularly different for episodes six and seven, which were mainly studio-based.

Tony Pratt looked at a film made in 1949 called Battleground, which is also about the battles around Bastogne and the 101st airborne division's part in them. It is a remarkable black and white film directed by William Wellman. It's all shot in a studio with real ice for snow and refrigerated stages.

Episode six and seven deal with the same story set in the cold winter of 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, which means we had to cover everything with snow. That gets financially prohibitive when you have to do large areas. So we used a combination of approaches. We used some locations and we opted to do all of the deep interiors of the woods around Bastone on a remarkable set that was made by the art department on the 146 hangar at Hatfield. This hangar was where British Aerospace had made their last aircraft at the factory. It is bigger than any stage that I've worked on in the U.K. It is 250-feet square by 45-feet high.

The camera style changed again for episode seven. In fact, the director David Frankel pushed for doing almost the reverse of what was done on Saving Private Ryan; instead of closing the shutter down and getting staccato and non-motion blurred images, he pushed for under-cranking the camera with as wide a shutter as possible. If you shoot at 12 FPS with a wide shutter you get a very motion-blurred image. Then when you correct the speed to normal frame rate by double printing the frames you get a slightly jumpy, but heavily motion-blurred image.

So in response to your question about whether I was the monitor of style, I wasn't, really. I went along with each director's style and made sure that we matched it with the effects. We started out with a house style and we changed it slightly for each episode. What we did have to watch over really was the final look of the whole series after digital lab. Very generally speaking this involved a 30- to 40-percent desaturation of all images and then Luke Rainey, the grader, did a whole series of pushing and pulling of the highlights and the shadows to give it that really gritty look that you saw in Saving Private Ryan.

The thing that concerned me was that I didn't know how the grading was going to go when I was doing the effects. It was a good test of quality, actually. If an effect had anything slightly wrong with it, it would show up as the image was pushed and pulled in grading.

Have you worked with digital grading before?

No, I pushed heavily for it in the beginning. This is my first experience with it.

Would you do it again?

I would. I pushed for it in the beginning, because traditionally working with laboratories I have always been a little upset that you worked long and hard on the effects, and the grading process at the end always seemed to be very loose and rushed. The labs and DPs bemoan the lack of time, too. For me that often means that you work hard to make an effect cut into a sequence, but it goes out on a different negative and it looks different in the final film. You would work so hard on it and it wouldn't even match the final sequence. I thought a digital lab had to be the way to go for the ultimate control.

The truth of the matter is, digital lab gives you endless possibilities, that's the great thing about it but that's the downside of it as well. I had to be even more alert. The positive side was that I was still around as the grading was going on. So if there was a problem with the shot they would call me in and I would say, 'Why don't you do this,' or, 'Oh dear, we better go back and do it again.' So it was good to be able to involved in the final grading.

Is the digital lab the reason that you went with Cinesite or had you worked with them before?

I went with Cinesite because I had worked with them before. Really, the post-production and digital lab site was set up by Bruce Everett, the post-production supervisor. The producers knew that I wanted to go with Cinesite for effects for some of it at least, and therefore it made good sense to go with them if we were going to do something like D-lab.

Cinesite, headed up by Courtney Vanderslice, really pushed the boat out in setting up the facility and HBO and post-production stuck their necks out in going with Cinesite, because it was an untested facility at the beginning. It was set up purely for this production. Everyone is sort of starting to entertain the idea of digital lab, but this was a custom built set-up that was initiated in the beginning of the production and we went through all its teething problems throughout the production. It worked fluidly by the end. So HBO really stuck their neck out going that route and Cinesite really stuck their neck out agreeing to set it up and make it work.

Doesn't Computer Film Company have something similar?

Computer Film Company has their own system and there is a company based in Copenhagen with a set-up over here called Digital Film Lab. They all have slightly different approaches. There are pros and cons of each set-up. I am not quite so sure of CFC's process, but Cinesite's is designed to keep the Cineon format throughout and it is the optimum film D-lab set-up. It was differently configured for Band of Brothers because we knew we were really finaling on HD, but it's been designed for film range and film resolution work.

Had you worked with HD before?

I haven't shot anything on HD. We only really finished on HD, but the series was entirely photographed on 35 mm. We did premiere episode two at Normandy and have been holding screenings here recently for the crew from a 24P HD master using a digital light projector. It's quite remarkable, the quality is fantastic. Most people think they are looking at film. As long as it's projected by one of the new digital light projectors everyone thinks it looks like film.