Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man boasts the closest thing to a digital (albeit sometimes invisible) human yet, courtesy of Sony Pictures Imageworks and Tippett Studios, the same team responsible for the Academy Award-nominated effects in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
SPI visual effects supervisor Scott Anderson, who won an Academy Award for Babe, oversaw Hollow Man’s complex invisibility work, and also served as the picture’s second-unit director. Anderson prepared by studying the sleight-of-hand that special-effects wizard John P. Fulton, ASC brought to Universal Studios’ classic Invisible Man films of the 1930s and ’40s. "There’s so much that’s been done with invisible men through the history of film, and some of the original stuff was just brilliant for its time," enthuses Anderson, who was the lead animator and compositor on the more recent Memoirs of An Invisible Man (see AC Dec. ’91). "I don’t know if we quite pay homage to what went before; we were more focused on making everything in this film believable making the science interesting, entertaining and beautiful, while also making the necessary moments of threat very real."
Research and development on Hollow Man began in July of 1998. Anderson and his Imageworks team of more than 250 quickly realized that in order to create an invisible man onscreen, they were going to have to build a completely digital human from the inside out. "Everything on the human body ties to the skeleton, so we started there," Anderson says. "The first six months were oriented toward building a generic human for testing, and once Kevin was cast, we went tuned our model to Kevin’s body. We actually worked with medical consultants and physiologists on this show, and we were able to show them things they’ve never seen. We’re not only working with the surface characteristics of human form and animation, we’re also getting down and dirty and showing it to you layer by layer."
Audiences will experience those layers during Caine’s transition from visibility to invisibility. "’Evaporating’ is a simple way of describing it," Anderson offers. "One of the first things we do in the film is get into the process of how invisibility happens, and it’s a magical, beautiful piece of visual exploration. Unless you’ve performed autopsies, you’ll probably see a lot more than you imagined. No one has experienced a dynamic, sentient being from the inside out, but you’re going to see an awful lot of that in Hollow Man."
"The Transformation," as Anderson and his team call it, is the most complex effect of its kind ever. "The film explores the transformation almost like a scientific study," he says, "but in the end, it’s still entertainment. We’ve pushed far into the visually amazing realm, and we tried to avoid [the usual methods]. Rule Number One from Paul was ’No dissolves,’ which was tough, because you can do very complex work that in the end still looks like a dissolve. We pushed a whole artistic and technical aesthetic, in that we would erode or grow material based on a functional or structural basis.
"On the other hand," he adds, "we didn’t want it to look like animation, either, so we spent a lot of time studying and evaluating the human form and then tool-writing to make the transformation look organic. In the film, it’s a chemical process that causes Caine to become invisible. That’s a sound, visual, scientific concept, and I think when people see it, they won’t say, ’Oh, that’s a cool effect,’ but, ’Yes, that’s what happens to the human body when you inject this chemical into it.’"
Although Maya software running on Silicon Graphics workstations was Imageworks’ program of choice, the transition sequence relied primarily on proprietary software. "It’s an amazingly complex process of using essentially surrogate objects to drive in-house software that’s been developed just for this project," Anderson says. "We’ve taken the best of medical science, applied it to what we need to do, and used off-the-shelf software to control the process, but the process itself is entirely proprietary. We’ve written huge bodies of software to help with everything from the removal and integration of Caine into the film to the control animation and structure of the human forms. There were scores of technicians, artists, animators, technical directors and shader writers pulling the strings behind the transformation, and everything was animated and controlled by humans who worked very, very hard."