by Ron Magid
All the Worlds A Stage | Effecting Alien Automatons
Effecting Alien Automatons
by Ron Magid
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| Capt. Everton (Donald Sutherland) has a close encounter with Goliath, a grotesque biomechanical creation, in Virus. Director John Bruno sought to infuse the fantastic film with a sense of realism by making extensive use of full-scale animatronic creatures. However, the Goliath rig proved to be too heavy to achieve certain movements, so the beast was also rendered as a CG creation by Tippett Studio. |
John Bruno may be the only effects artist in history to willingly sacrifice two Academy Awards in order to become a feature-film director. After earning an Oscar for his work on James Cameron's CGI breakthrough movie The Abyss, Bruno began researching and designing the visual effects for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Before that film began shooting, however, Bruno left the project to pursue a directing gig on a personal project of his, a classic Western. When that production went south, Bruno resumed his thriving visual-effects career at Boss Film, picking up subsequent Oscar nominations for Batman Returns and Cliffhanger before reteaming with Cameron for True Lies, which netted Bruno yet another Academy nomination.
Interestingly, Universal Studios and producer Gale Anne Hurd approached Bruno with the prospect of directing Virus just before he was to start prepping Titanic with Cameron. "At that time, I was the visual effects supervisor on Titanic," Bruno recalls, "and I got a call from Jim saying, 'Next weekend, we're going to Halifax Nova Scotia, but you can't tell a soul where you're going — not Universal, not Gale, no one.' I just 'disappeared' and ended up with Jim, his brother Mike, Al Giddings and Louis Abernathy for 31 days in the North Atlantic, during which time 12 dives were made on the Titanic." Bruno himself was aboard for two of the 12,378' descents — joining an elite group of only 35 living souls who have visited the ship since she sank in 1912.
"All of our time was spent working scenes through and talking about what kind of effects would be needed," Bruno recalls, "and Jim kept asking me, 'Are you going to do Virus or are you going to do Titanic?'
After reworking the Virus screenplay — largely a matter of incorporating many his personal experiences of diving on the Titanic wreck and working on a Russian research vessel — Bruno pitched a revised version of the project to Universal. After they accepted his ideas, Bruno quickly replaced himself on Titanic with friend Rob Legato, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Pure action-adventure entertainment, Virus is based on the popular Dark Horse Comics title of the same name, which tells the tale of an electrical alien entity that destroys the Mir space station and is accidentally beamed onto a Russian research ship at sea. There, the energy force takes over the vessel's robotics lab to build machines that build even bigger and deadlier machines to combat what it thinks to be the titular infection: mankind.
Virus quickly became an unusually complex production due to the film's extensive effects work. In the end, though, Bruno's picture succeeds on its own terms and boasts Academy Award-level effects, the deft handiwork of such diverse outfits as Visionart, Fantasy II and Tippett Studio, with some extensive practical robotics provided by both Steve Johnson's company, XFX, and All Effects.
Bruno assigned Gene Warren Jr.'s Burbank, California-based Fantasy II (The Terminator, The Beast) to build the models and handle the myriad shots involving the film's Vladislav Volkov satellite-tracking ship, as well as the tugboat that brings our heroes face to face with the extraterrestrial terror aboard the decidedly Russian spy vessel. Once again, Cameron's presence was eerily felt: the Volkov was actually cannibalized from the remains of the double-hulled Benthic Explorer miniature used in The Abyss. "In order to copy the full-scale Volkov — which was actually the redressed U.S.S. Vandenburg — we reconverted the 42' Benthic hull by adding another 5'10"," Warren explains. "We built everything above the hull and, in fact, reworked the hull, but we had the basic structure."
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| Kelly (Jamie Lee Curtis) is menaced by the cybernetic creature. |
Per his general preference (and that of his father before him), Warren and his sons filmed all of Virus's miniature ships in-camera, or, in the case of the Volkov, partly on location. "I'm always in favor of getting as much right there as you can — within reason," Warren states. "The opening shots of the movie, with the Volkov at sea silhouetted by the sun, was our miniature. We shot that sequence on the ocean in January of 1997. Those were the first cameras rolling on the movie, two months before principal started.
"We transported the Volkov model and a large crane down to San Pedro and put them on a 150' barge, then spent the weekend detailing and dressing the model. The barge left San Pedro at sundown for an all-night trip up the coast to Paradise Cove. John, the crew, and I left in the middle of the night from Marina Del Rey to meet it about an hour before sun up. Then we put the thing in the water and rigged 15 marine batteries to run the 160 very hot, powerful quartz lights on the ship. There were actually four people inside it — one pyro guy and three of our people — to turn the lights on and all of that stuff. We put some side-mover propellers, which are used for docking boats, on the model, and those props kept it turned in the right perspective and put the sun where we wanted it to backlight the different shots."
Shooting the almost 48', 1/11-scale Volkov miniature was like filming a small yacht. "We shot most of the daytime stuff using Kodak's 5298 with an 85 and maybe a 3.0 ND filter," Warren recalls. "That gave us more stop when we were shooting the miniatures in daytime. We wanted more depth of field with the water in the foreground, and the 98 enabled us to stop down and still keep everything sharp. The entire daytime opening sequence was shot handheld from boats alongside the barge, including all those explosions. I operated one of the Mitchell 600s, as did both of my sons, Gene Warren III and Chris Warren. John Huneck, an old friend who got his first job in the business in the late Sixties from my father, picked up the fourth camera. We did it all in a seat-of-our-pants, guerrilla style, and we got some nice, gritty, realistic footage. It doesn't look too controlled."
Control was an issue while shooting the destruction of one of the Volkov's dish antennas, which occurs when the alien force beams down from the Mir. It was pyro on the high seas. "All those exterior shots at the beginning of the movie — with the explosions on the top when it gets zapped — that was all shot out there, all in-camera," Warren says proudly. The rest of the miniature shoot, involving the Volkov model and a 1/6-scale tugboat and barge that Fantasy II's modelers built from scratch, then moved into a water tank that Warren had specially constructed for Virus. "The production hoped we could use Falls Lake, but the action needed to take place in a Class 5 hurricane, and I didn't think we could create the huge waves there that John wanted," recalls Warren. "Falls Lake is so big that all of the wind machines, lights, cameras and other equipment have to go on barges. There's also a 10 p.m. curfew — it just demands unwarranted time and expense. I was convinced that we could build a tank tailored to create the giant storm that John wanted and still be cost-efficient. We made it the right size for what we were doing, and it was very user-friendly. It measured 104' by 100' and was 20' at its deepest point, with a 38'-tall concrete dumptank at one end that made huge, 6' waves. When we dumped the water, it hit the back wall and then came back, so we got 20 to 30 seconds of what lookedlike real ocean swells. If we'd put a full-scale boat in there, the waves would have looked 6' high, but we were working at 1/6 scale, with a 171/2' tugboat and a 26' barge, so we had the equivalent of 30' waves. We were in the water, out of the water, flying overhead on camera rigs for months and months, and it was nearly all night work.
"I'm happy with the results," Warren continues. "It's probably the best miniature ships-in-a-storm scenes ever done. There have been a couple of good shots before, but these are sequences. It doesn't look like a tank, even when we put actors in there. We shot Billy Baldwin and Jamie Lee Curtis waiting to be rescued by the helicopter, and they looked as if they were in 3' swells. That was the last footage shot for the movie — a year and a half after we had shot the very first frames!"
In-between, Fantasy II also handled the motion-control photography of the ill-fated Mir, a miniature constructed by Mike Joyce at Acme Models and finished by Warren's crew. Visionart supplied a 3-D Earth and CG starfield background and took care of all the 2-D compositing using Silicon Grail's Chalice system. Visionart also took on the unenviable task of designing and creating the electrical entity that destroys the space station. "We were trying to create something different, bizarre-looking, elegant and interesting to watch," Bruno reveals. "It became this electrical being, 500 to 600' across, that smashes into the Mir."
As with Fantasy II's work, Visionart had to finish their job in January of 1997. Of primary concern was the design and execution of the alien energy entity. Bruno recounts, "I described it to them as a multi-layered expansion of the energy ribbon seen in Star Trek: Generations, but it couldn't really look like that, so I asked them to suggest some ideas with illustrations."
Recalls Visionart head Josh Rose, "Luckily, we have a brilliant art director and traditional artist, Robert Tom, who did several depictions based on John's descriptions. Then John picked two of Robert's designs, which our 3-D supervisor, Todd Boice, blended together to come up with the entity, this living, breathing, evil electrical life-form."
Bruno wanted the entity to appear virtually imperceptible in the distance, then head toward the Mir with frightening velocity and a sense of malevolent purpose, almost like a living creature. "John wanted it to look like an outer-space phenomena that still resembled a life-form," Rose confirms. "Its core was a 3-D model, but all of its textures were created out of particle systems. We knew we couldn't get the consistency of shape and motion we wanted purely with particles, so we chose to build and render all of the textures out of particles and then apply them to the 3-D model that gave us our basic structure and animation. But our renderer only rendered the part of the model that was covered by opaque or semi-opaque particles, so the fact that the edges are very unclear, and constantly moving and shifting, was actually a byproduct of the render. We then did the usual compositing tricks to make it look smokier, and added some arcing electricity inside. That electrical animation was set up as a random animation cycle inside Prisms, and a rough low-res model of the Mir became an attractor for those lightning bolts and particle debris. As our entity model was covering the Mir, lightning would strike the space station. It also left a trail of particles surrounding it, which got sucked back up into the entity. We also did all of the arcing effects when the entity first comes aboard the Volkov, assumes the form of arcing energy and kills a couple of people."
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| Director John Bruno (center) confers with actor Sherman Augustus, XFX animatronic-design supervisor Eric Fiedler and BioAlexi supervisor Dave Snyder |
"It's a life-form that we don't understand, but it's visually cool," Bruno remarks. "It makes sense that it travels around the ship by electrical means, gets into the computer, figures out ones and zeros and learns everything about us and our planet. It then comes up with a dictionary definition for what these things are that are trying to kill it, which is 'virus' — it thinks we are a virus."
The entity strikes back by building ever-more-destructive machines and endowing them with its own alien intelligence. The genius behind all of the malevolent machines was Bruno's old Boss Film colleague Steve Johnson, whose company, XFX (Species, Eraser), created an ever-changing armada of nine radio-controlled and puppeted droids. "They were built to look like things from nature — lobsters, crabs, spiders, and even a dog droid," Bruno says. "We also had a flying droid that looked exactly like the cover of the Virus comic book, so it would be reminiscent of the source material. We had crab legs for lunch one day, and I said, 'Let's save all those parts and re-dress some of these droids!' Everything was used and re-used and re-used again.
"I wanted full-sized creatures so our actors could react directly to them," Bruno reasons. "The first time they saw one was when a robot came smashing through the wall of a corridor in front of them. We had blood and meat hanging all over it, and [actress] Joanna Pakula was really upset by the look of the thing. Donald Sutherland said he was so upset that he needed to be by himself for a little while. Our actors weren't reacting to a wad of tape on top of a wooden stick that said 'monster here' — they were reacting to real things."
Helping to add an edge of reality was Australian director of photography David Eggby, ACS, whose credits include the cult-classic Mad Max, as well as the effects-heavy Dragonheart (See AC June 1996).
Meanwhile, Johnson continued to recycle droids for the next level of their evolution, the biomechanoids, which utilized parts and pieces of the Volkov's ill-fated crew. "Steve did some excellent work on what we called the 'BioAlexi,' the Russian captain who gets modified," Bruno explains. "He's a full-on hydraulic puppet. That broke down into the bio-spine — a puppet of the head and neck of the BioAlexi — which was manually operated from under a table. Also, for the scene in which Donald Sutherland's character gets converted, we created the 'BioBob' by putting a mechanical casting of Sutherland's head on the BioAlexi body. That was re-dressed again with a video-camera head, in order to make what I called the 'Dr. Mengele' droid."
In the bizarre nightmare Bruno has devised, little droids busy themselves making 'biomechanoids,' which, in turn, combine to create larger droids. At the top of the evolutionary chain is the ultimate robotic inquisitor, 'Goliath.' The film climaxes with a life-or-death struggle between the remnants of the salvage tug's crew and the formidable Goliath-series robot, an ungodly assimilation of flesh and metal poised on four legs with multiple, lethal arms. "What we're talking about is a mobile home for the creature," Bruno observes wryly, "a fighting machine that would weigh X amount of tons. When [writer] Dennis Feldman and I were forging the script, we knew the alien force would find things like elephants and insects in the biological files, and since heavy four-legged creatures are more stable and insects have multiple arms, this thing became a giant combination of an elephant and a mantis. It has four legs, two big hydraulic arms and two small claw-pincer arms, plus sort of a Swiss-Army-knife chest with all kinds of things on it, such as mandibles, little drills and knives. It's got a Nazi stormtrooper helmet for a head, with eight videocamera lenses and little spikes that come out of its face. It's all melded together from things that are on the ship, and it's protected by body-armor plating."
Goliath was constructed as a puppet/animatronic action prop by Eric Allard's All Effects (Short Circuit, Alien Resurrection). Measuring a staggering 12' x 12' and weighing several tons, the prop was too heavy to be effectively puppeteered from beneath the elevated sets. Bruno made an emergency call to his friend and former ILM co-worker, animation maestro Phil Tippett, who was wrapping up Starship Troopers and was heavily involved in My Favorite Martian. Tippett agreed to animate more than 50 shots for Goliath's climactic rampage.
Modeling the complex prop in the computer was a logistical nightmare for Tippet Studio. "Craig Hayes took over the responsibility of matching it, bit by bit," Tippett says. "The modelmakers under his direction disassembled the original Goliath prop and scanned the pieces into the computer. It took nearly 15 weeks to put the model together and get the texture maps worked out. It was just a huge model; there were 982 pieces with a lot of articulation."
Tippett's animators, under the supervision of Tom Schelesny, brought the lumbering behemoth to life using a combination of keyframe and DID animation. Both techniques yielded convincing animation suggesting real weight, scale and unbridled rage. "Since we had the full-scale prop, we looked at it and said, 'That's around 4,000 pounds, so what weighs that much?' A really big truck," Tippett relates. "Then it was a matter of manifesting that in the pantomime and making sure it had that feeling of power as it was lashing out. Another huge component is all of the cool lighting tricks that Julie Newdoll, our supervising technical director, was able to work in. The compositing department, headed by Zoe Peck, also contributed a tremendous amount of work, adding big arcs of electricity zapping off of Goliath."
The result is one of the finest CG creations since the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park; Goliath is a truly remarkable capper to a hair-raising directorial debut. "I was impressed by how well Phil's people matched the prop and the lighting," Bruno says proudly, "I called and told him I wanted to nominate him for President of the United States, but he declined."
© 1999 ASC