With a 300 shot total, the film Into the Woods doesn't qualify as a visual effects blockbuster, but shot count doesn't tell the whole story.Almost every shot was a different approach and a different effect, says Christian Irles, visual effects supervisor at The Moving Picture Company (MPC), which was the main vendor on the show. Our studio is a big machine, and we specialize in doing complex sequences, but usually we can set a benchmark with a few shots and the others follow. With Into the Woods, we had lots of small sequences, and each had a particular challenge. It almost felt like working in commercials. We were constantly on our toes.
Directed by Rob Marshall, the Disney adaptation of a Broadway musical twists several fairy-tales into a modern fantasy. The all-star cast includes Meryl Streep as a witch, Emily Blunt as a baker's wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Chris Pine as Cinderella's Prince.
MPC extended environments, added CG characters, and sparked the film with magical effects.
Gnarly Woods
Marshall shot the film on a large set at Shepperton Studios and in various locations in the UK. At Shepperton, the production unit provided a stylized forest with gnarly rooted trees the crew matched and re-created for the exterior locations.
For the plates shot at Shepperton, we went with a 2.5D approach, Irles says. If they had shot the same part of the set, we would have built a 3D extension, but every shot was in a different part of the forest.
Thus, the artists matchmoved the plates, painted shot-specific trees in Adobe's Photoshop, and projected the artwork onto geometry in The Foundry's Nuke. To provide continuity for shots such as these with those filmed on location, MPC incorporated the stylized trees into the natural forest.
We did a full-CG version of the forest, and it looked pretty, but it wasn't what Rob [Marshall] had in mind, Irles says. So, it was better to stick with principal photography and use 2.5D projections with some 3D trees. But, it made our life harder because we had to blend between plates.
In addition to the on-set and on-location CG forest extensions, the crew extended and destroyed geometry. First, Rapunzel's tower, which the production crew filmed at Waverley Abbey in Farnham, Surrey.
On location they had the bottom half and scaffolding for the upper [part], so we knew where our CG tower would be, and they knew how to frame the shots, Irles says. As we built the extension, the director asked for some nice little tweaks to the castle, so we crooked the iconic pointy roof at an angle, like a witch's hat.
During the same sequence, the crew collapsed a CG tower on the king's castle, which the production unit filmed at Dover Castle in Kent. Although it's the largest castle in England, it doesn't have a fairy-tale tower. So for shots at the beginning of the sequence, MPC artists topped the castle with a tall, medieval tower based on the original architecture.
Then, about midway through the sequence, a giant climbs down a beanstalk, tromps around looking for Jack, turns the kingdom into rubble with each footstep, and the tower collapses.
We modeled the tower in [Autodesk's] Maya using [Pixologic's] ZBrush for displacement textures, Irles says. Then for the destruction, we used a combination of techniques. Kali, our rigid- and soft-body dynamics solver, collapsed the main tower. We added iterations of little brick pieces for scale, and generated smoke with [Scanline's] Flowline.
MPC artists also created a few all-CG shots, some for a sequence involving Jack and the beanstalk, and others for a sequence in which Rapunzel is trapped on an island surrounded by snake-infested waters.
CG Characters
In the film, as Jack travels down a beanstalk, he hears the lout shout, and looks up to see a giant. It's a full-CG shot.
The point of view is from Jack, Irles says. So getting the scale was difficult. We got the weight right to make sure the giant felt like a big person. Then we used lighting and compositing to make it look like he was maybe a kilometer away. We had wind blowing and clouds.
As for the beanstalk, although MPC Vancouver had created a beanstalk for Jack and the Giant Killer (see Growing a Giant Fantasy, CGW, March/April 2013), the crew on this film needed to match a prop.
We followed the set piece, but pushed it, Irles says. We could see seams from the plastic mold, so we changed that, changed the way the leaves connected, and the wetness. It was more work tidying up the real piece than it would have been to do look dev on a CG beanstalk. And, ultimately, they replaced the prop with the more realistic-looking CG version.
Similarly, the visual effects artists replaced most of the animatronic snakes threatening Rapunzel with CG snakes, which looked more menacing. The water surrounding Rapunzel's island was a mixture of real and CG water.
We decided to keep the water in the plates, then when we added our snakes, we used CG ripples, Irles says. When Rapunzel jumps in the water, the splashes are a combination of CG and live action.
In addition to the giant and the snakes, the MPC artists built and animated a CG cow, a magical thicket, and flock of blackbirds.
The most important were the blackbirds, Irles says. They are the characters Cinderella communicates with, so they appear multiple times. Because the birds get really close to camera, we had to build proper hero birds. And, they had to be photoreal in terms of movement.
That was true even though the blackbirds were doing fairy-tale actions. For example, early in the film when Cinderella's stepmother spills a pot of lentil soup on the floor, it's the blackbirds, summoned by Cinderella, that clean up the lentils.
At MPC, animators looked at reference of real birds pe
