Cinesite grants powers to the modern-day witches of Practical Magic
by Ron Magid
As we all know, trying to control one's love life can lead to various kinds of insanity. In director Griffin Dunne's black comedy Practical Magic, shot by Andrew Dunn, BSC, witchy sisters Gillian and Sally (Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock) discover just how crazy love can get when they decide to use their supernatural powers to attract Mr. Right. The gods don't take kindly to this breach of the natural order, however, and murder and mayhem ensue.
In an effects sense, the title Practical Magic is deceptive. In fact, very little magic was created practically by physical effects supervisor Burt Dalton (although he did engineer a subtle gag wherein a candle lights up as Bullock blows on it). Instead, the production relied primarily upon the digital craft of Cinesite Los Angeles to infuse the tale with the requisite paranormal edge. Leading the way was visual effects supervisor Jay Riddle, who previously had served as computer graphics supervisor on Star Trek VI at Industrial Light & Magic, and on Cliffhanger at Boss Film. He also supervised Digital Domain's work on Snow Covered, a Grand Prix winner at the 1993 Cannes Commercial Festival, before going to work for Phil Tippett, for whom he lit and integrated thousands of CG bugs on Starship Troopers. Finally, Riddle's quest for the perfect effects home landed him at Cinesite, a facility looking to remake itself.
"We're trying to evolve the company from being strictly a 2-D compositing and film-salvage company — removing dirt, rods, wires and whatnot — to a firm that does more 3-D work," Riddle explains, citing the kind of recent contributions Cinesite London has made to large-scale extravaganzas such as Lost in Space. "But we don't want to be just a digital facility either; we want to bring in more of the traditional areas and augment what we're doing in digital. While we now have to farm out miniature work, we'd like to have closer ties to that stuff ourselves. We're investing in a new facility with additional space where we can have all that, because our current location is filled with people working on computers."
Ironically, Practical Magic does not precisely fit the model of Cinesite's new direction. "Practical Magic is a fairly traditional show," Riddle admits. "It has a lot of 2-D work and a lot of greenscreen, but there is some interesting 3-D work going on, which evolved through the process of doing the show itself."
The concept of effects evolving during the course of production is not a new one, but it's becoming more of a challenge in the digital age, as filmmakers come to realize they can fix almost anything in post — for a price. "It's always interesting to have that kind of evolution while you're doing a show, because it can end up taking you someplace you never thought you could go before," Riddle observes. "Practical Magic started out as 40 effects shots, but we increased to about 120 shots. There were some ideas that weren't necessarily scripted that Griffin wanted to see; I don't think he really knew a lot of these things off the bat or when we were shooting the plates. When the director has a moment of inspiration on the set, it's sometimes harder for him to clearly communicate what he wants under the pressures of the first unit, when everybody's standing around waiting to shoot Nicole Kidman or Sandra Bullock. He trusted that we'd be able to give him what he wanted later. And at that point, we're really collaborating."
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