One thing director Dunne made absolutely clear from the outset was that he wanted to steer away from any of the clichés audiences associate with witchcraft. Consequently, there are no lightning bolts shooting from fingertips, but rather a sense of 'Was it magic, or not?' An excellent case in point is a scene in which Sally (Bullock) summons her lover, detective Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) to come back to her, using an ordinary leaf as her magic talisman. When she drops the leaf from the top of a house, "it just sort of drops like nothing's happened," Riddle says. "All of a sudden, a gust of wind seems to catch it and loft it up, back and forth, lilting like a leaf does. It then flies away from her toward a beautiful moon in the sky. To create that effect, we shot Sandra on top of the house on location, dropping a real leaf out of frame. Then we created a 3-D computer-generated leaf that matched the real one and animated it so it took off in an interesting way that looked as if it had been caught by the wind. The idea was to make the audience wonder, 'Well, did she make that happen, or did she happen to drop the leaf at the right moment when the wind would catch it?' All of the magic in the film borders on that kind of reality."
"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,"
— visual effects superior Jay Riddle on the Future of
Cinesite Los AngelesAlthough much of Cinesite's work involved wire removal and greenscreen composites, two scenes in particular demanded the utmost effort and some new techniques to make them leap off the screen. The first sequence occurs in the middle of the film. After Sally murders Gillian's abusive lover, Jimmy Angeron (Goron Visnick of Welcome to Sarajevo), the witches bring him back to life. However, he's still so nasty that they kill him again, and Jimmy ends up as a wandering, tormented soul who eventually possesses Gillian. As luck would have it, detective Hallet, who is investigating the murder, comes calling when Jimmy has taken over Gillian's body. Hallet's presence causes Jimmy to emerge from Gillian and leads to a confrontation between the detective and the spirit.
The initial step was to make Visnick's body to appear to push out of Kidman's as she lies writhing on a bed. Ultimately, the effect was achieved by layering Visnick's image over Kidman's, but the real trick was making their actions sync up believably. This demanded not only some careful compositing, morphing and transition work from Cinesite, but also some excellent miming skills on Visnick's part. Riddle recalls, "We first shot Nicole writhing around in bed on-set. Goron, who's an incredibly physical actor, was then able to help us in a lot of ways by studying what Nicole had done and doing a really great job of matching his movements to hers as we shot him against greenscreen. This is exactly the kind of shot we always dread, trying to get two actors who aren't going to be shot together to sync up in any conceivable way. There aren't that many actors who could do it as well as Goron managed to, with very little preparation, so it was a dream for us to find someone with that much control of his body who could also give a great performance.
"Even so, it was very difficult," Riddle continues. "Although the basis worked pretty well from the beginning, we still had to do a lot of matching and moving things around to line him up with her movements, to the point where he rips out of her body. We wanted to use action to our advantage, rather than dwelling on each moment, so we tried to choreograph enough abrupt moments into what Nicole was doing, which we used to help bring out parts of Jimmy's body."
In terms of visualizing this sequence and others, the Avid Film Composer system proved to be a huge help to both Cinesite and the filmmakers. Working under supervising editor Beth Kling, editor Craig McKay used the Avid to temp-composite the greenscreen and live-action elements in order to work out the timings, aided by assistant editors Gary Levy and Michelle Harrison. "For the sequence where Jimmy is possessing Gillian, we often had shots with three elements put together: Jimmy shot against greenscreen, Gillian shot on set, and an empty plate," Harrison says. "The Avid allowed us to do a scratch version of that shot. We could blend the elements together and see what the shot was ultimately going to look like. We picked the greenscreen take we wanted and the take it would be composited over, and mapped that superimposition out in detail very easily on the Avid in order to cut the shot. We then gave that information to the visual effects house, where they composited the elements for real. Being able to do that work on the Avid certainly facilitated the interaction with the effects artists, because we could map it out, run it over to Cinesite and actually show that cut to the effects people."
But timing wasn't everything. Dunne insisted that he didn't want the effect to look like the Alien chest-burster. "The film is rated PG-13, so we couldn't make it too grotesque, with graphic gore," Riddle says. "Nicole is also wearing clothes in the scene, which was another challenge. How do you get rid of her clothes, especially at the point where her body starts to sort of disintegrate and he pushes his way out? We ended up using a combination of 2-D tricks, very heavily layered with all kinds of blurring and textures to mess up Goron's image and make him look as if he was inside a translucent jelly that was coming out of her. It's a fancy morph-type transition. I hate to characterize it as that, because it almost belittles it. The term 'morph' is just too simplistic these days. We did a lot of handwork to create this very layered, textured effect with a magical quality."
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