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Behind the invisible environment, crowd and clean-up VFX in the Angelina Jolie film.Maria visual effects supervisor Juan Cristbal Hurtado was working away in his office a couple of years ago when he received a text from director Pablo Larran (who he had worked on the film El Conde with). Pablo asked me if I had a European passport, Hurtado recalls. I said, No, should I have one? Then, it was silence for two weeks. Then Pablo rang again and said, Im doing this film and I have some questions about how to do the audiences in the theaters. Can it be done?What Larran was asking Hurtado about was filling a range of opera theaters for his biopic on opera singer Maria Callas (played by Angelina Jolie), which largely takes place in 1970s Paris, just before her death. While Hurtado knew that digital crowds could certainly be achieved, he was also aware from past experience with the director that Larran would likely want to move the camera significantly, and perhaps even go handheld, in the theater shots.Crafting crowdsHurtado had relied on visual effects studio PFX for some scenes that involved a moving camera on El Conde. He had also seen their work on the frenetic basketball sequencesmany of which were filmed with a camera operator on rollerbladesin Winning Time. I asked PFX if they could do moving crowd shots for Maria and they were of course up for it, says Hurtado. These opera scenes would be shot in real opera houses, including Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy. That meant there would be limited time to film scenes, and crowd plates. We only had four hours to film at alla Scala, notes Hurtado, which meant we would not have time to film crowds the old-school way, which is to have extras and shoot tiles and then move them along and shoot more tiles. Not only that, that method only tends to work for static shots, not moving ones.Instead, Hurtado partnered with PFX visual effects supervisor Jindich ervenka to conceive of a crowd solution, one that would accommodate filming moving shots on Steadicam, Technocrane and handheld, and in varying formats including 35mm, 16mm, 8mm and digital. It was also an approach that allowed for several different opera house venues to be filled with crowds, sometimes upwards of 1,800 individuals, while also matching to real extras that could be filmed, all wearing period clothing, care of costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. The other thing was, adds Hurtado, in these opera house shots, you can see the faces of the people. A football or soccer stadium is super-big, and if youre doing crowds there you dont always see the detail on the faces. But here we did, plus all the details on their tuxedos and costumes and accessories.Ultimately, a 3D crowd replication approach was decided upon, where, alongside environment work for the opera houses achieved with the aid of Lidar scans, lightning reference, texture and photogrammetry, PFX built the crowd assets to populate each theater. 3D crowd assets meant that the camera could move in any direction. This process began with scans of around 80 extras in Budapest with a 125 camera array of Nikon D5300 cameras provided by Budapest based company DIGIC. ZBrush and Maya were used to clean and process the data from scans, with animation of the crowd assets achieved via motion capture data and keyframe animation, and then a crowd system developed by PFX was built in Houdini, and rendered in V-Ray. Final compositing was handled in Nuke. One particular challenge was to figure out the right kind of crowd movement for the opera attendees. One thing we had to work out was fan waving, says Hurtado. The extras had fans, and also those very recognizable eyeglasses with the binoculars. Luckily, they are intended to be opera-goers, so they didnt stand and wave and cheer like other crowd spectators.Making a 1970s ParisIn order to deliver an appropriate period settingpredominantly 1977 ParisHurtado worked directly with production designer Guy Hendrix. The walls of his production office were full with imagery of the time period. Especially of cars of the period, and just everything that made up the color palette of the film. In general, exteriors were filmed mainly in Paris and Budapest, standing in for Paris. It would be up to visual effects to remove the many modern day artifacts that existed in the plates, from traffic to buildings, pedestrians and even graffiti, and to add in the period-correct environments with matte painting and set extensions. It was a matter of figuring out whats modern and what is not modern, observes Hurtado. Paris is very tricky in that sense because many things that you think might be modern are not so modern.A scouting phase involved filming several city plates in Paris with only a small visual effects unit. The idea here was to provide imagery for the creation of matte paintings, as well as photo and texture reference, HDRIs and photogrammetry captures of streets and buildings. I created a document, explains Hurtado, where I would take pictures of where the camera would shoot on Paris or Budapest, marking out how clean it should be, or Id do a quick Photoshop of changes or potential set extensions & DMPs. The intention was to not have any big surprises when we got to the main shoot. A sequence taking place in Place Vendme in Paris was typical of the environment visual effects work. It involved significant clean-up of modern street poles and parking entrances, as well as re-lighting of the surrounding buildings and a matte painting to augment a part of the background street. I love doing that stuff, marvels Hurtado. There was a lot of sitting down and drawing and imagining what it was like in the 70s.Indeed, invisible clean-up VFX work made up several shots in the film, including even for a yacht. We shot inside the actual Christina O, the original Aristotle Onassis yacht, discusses Hurtado. Nowadays, because of security reasons and safety protocols, it has all these fire sprockets and fire alarms in the ceilings, about every two meters. Theres this sequence where theyre playing roulette and we had to clean up the ceiling, all through moving hands and smoking. We really were looking to go for every detail that we could. For scenes that were filmed in Budapest to appear as if they were filmed in Paris, Hurtado mentions that the Hungarian city of course has many European-style buildings and architectural qualities that resemble Paris streets. Sometimes, however, there were more obvious eastern European or Austro-Hungarian influences on the environments, wherein the visual effects team would make augmentations.Also, notes Hurtado, it doesnt matter the city you are in, there are many modern things like antennas, wires, modern traffic lights, street poles and bicycle lanes where they paint the lane yellow or red. It was a challenge to replace and erase all those things, especially with actors walking across frame followed by a steady cam.An array of VFX challengesFour VFX studios carried out the work on Maria: PFX, Automatik, Control and Panolab. They would be responsible for crafting 390 visual effects shots. An additional challenge they faced was dealing with a range of formats: 35mm (Arri LT Camera), 16mm (ARRI 16, Bolex H16, Aaton LTR Super 16), 8mm (Braun Nizo and Kodak), digital (ARRI ALEXA 35); and with an array of lenses: primarily Cooke S4 lenses and Ultra Baltar refurbished lenses, an ARRI Ultra Prime 10mm, among others. All this was carry on with the aid of Natalia Blajeroff, the post production supervisor for the film.Like any visual effects production, this involved mapping lenses and dealing with various ingests for the different formats. Some of the 8mm and 16mm film frames were the trickiest to deal with, says Hurtado, in terms of floating stock, and grain. Pablo loves the images with texture. If we were working on something that was next to a shot done on 8mm, but had been filmed on 35mm, we would do things to match the 8mm.Oftentimes, this work on different stocks was done to match key photographs of Maria Callas in flashbacks from the 1940s up to 1970s. Here, too, visual effects aided in minor beauty enhancement to the practical hair and make-up effects.All the while, Hurtados mantra was to allow the director to always shoot in a free-form manner, and that the VFX shots would match this. I always aimed to give him something where he could play freely. He could do whatever he wants, move the camera, and it wouldnt be an issue.The post The visual effects you may not have noticed in Maria appeared first on befores & afters.
