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In keeping with the diva sequence's color motif, a stunning blue alien, replete with six tentacles protruding from her head, sings before a packed concert hall aboard the cruise ship. Angles looking over the diva's shoulder at the crowd were actually shot on location at London's Covent Garden Royal Opera House, but the reverse angles were shot against greenscreen on a stage at Pinewood Studios. The greenscreen shots were originally supposed to be lock-offs, but when Stetson, Goulekas and Neil arrived on the set, they found that Besson had once again set up dolly tracks.
Mike Bergstrom, who handled the encoding equipment, quickly swapped the head on the production camera with a duplicate encoding head. Goulekas plastered the greenscreen with ping-pong balls for tracking reference points. Meanwhile, Stetson was concerned about the reflective sheen of the diva's costume. "[Makeup artist] Nick Dudman used a material that was very specular and diffractive," Stetson says. "When we looked at the greenscreen element of the diva in this shiny blue suit, we thought, 'Oh God, what are we going to get out of this?'"
Fortunately, Neil had been busily advising his first-unit colleague Arbogast to ensure that the effects team received a solid greenscreen backing. "I convinced Thierry to adjust his lighting in order to improve the possibilities of pulling mattes off this semi-metallic costume," Neil recalls. "He added some sidelight to the stage; he hadn't originally planned to do that, but it helped us to control the green spill from the costume."
The fun really began once Stetson and Goulekas returned to Digital Domain, where the entire background — including a huge picture window framed by giant steel arches, offering a view of the planet Fhloston floating in space — was created as a 2-D digital matte painting. The blue water planet itself was a CG creation, with digitally painted skies and clouds created by art director Ron Gress.
Although Besson and Arbogast shot the diva's performance from the dolly track, Goulekas reports that "Luc pretty much delivered lock-offs with a little bit of camera drift in them, so we figured we didn't have to go with the encoded data, we'd just go traditional 2-D, track the ping-pong markers to get our X and Y translation curves, and then apply them to our CG background."
Despite the apparent ease of lining up the 2-D matte, Goulekas' team was sweating to create the correct perspective for the stage and arches by eye. In a breakthrough concept, Goulekas and compositing supervisor Jonathan Egstad imported the encoded dolly move into Nuke, Digital Domain's proprietary compo-siting software. "Suddenly, all of the tilts, pans and elements looked correct," Goulekas marvels. "There's actually a 3-D tilt on the matte painting of the arches, and the shadows cast by the arches onto the stage were mathematically worked out to move in perspective along with the camera. I'm pretty proud of those; they really involved a lot of three-dimensional thought and built-in camera perspective."
A similar technique helped tie The Fifth Element's most spectacular blend of miniatures, CG models and digital matte paintings together in an awe-inspiring police chase through a futuristic New York City that extends 200 stories above the old city streets and 400 stories below. Both the police cars and their quarry, a beat-up cab belonging to Korben Dallas, are airborne — as are all of the other cars in the scene.
The complexity of creating these squadrons of flying vehicles convinced Karen Goulekas of the need to devise a procedural pipeline that would enable many artists to generate traffic, and to employ the same software in the pre-visualizations her team was doing for Besson. Thus, in theory, the preparatory camera moves could later be translated to the motion-control stage and employed to blend the miniatures, CG models and matte paintings together. "In London, we used Silicon Graphics' Prisms software for the pre-vis," Goulekas says. "It was our first big pre-vis ever at Digital Domain, so initially there was an inclination to do it with a less expensive software package. But I really balked at that idea. Rather than re-creating the pre-vis for real on another software package, Mark wanted the pre-vis to be able to roll right into production. That way, we could cut together the whole sequence with flat-shaded cities in CG; when we got back to Digital Domain, we could send those tapes out to stage so the crew would not only have a camera curve, but also a visual animation of what the shot was supposed to look like."
Beyond establishing camera moves and shot angles, the Prisms pre-visualization helped Stetson and model-shop supervisor Neils Neilson determine the scope of miniature construction. Cunningham set up the software so that he could alter the scale of the buildings without having to re-animate each shot, which enabled Stetson to experiment with various scales until he found the perfect match for the height and width of Digital Domain's motion-control stage. "We modeled the stage environment as well," Stetson explains, "so we could see whether or not our miniature cityscapes would fit into Digital Domain's stage. Then we color-coded the buildings in the pre-vis so we knew when we were past the limits of the stage."
"It was a bounding box," Goulekas adds. "As soon as we got 30' or 40' out from the camera and hit the stage floor, everything that got rendered out turned red, so we automatically knew what was CG or a matte painting or miniature buildings."
Stetson passed drawings and blueprints back and forth to effects art directors Ron Gress and Ira Gilford to get the cityscape designed and into Digital Domain's modelshop, allowing construction to begin before Stetson returned from England. This was a stressful process since Besson and production designer Dan Weil insisted on a retro vision of New York City that would maintain the regimented order of its streets even as it climbed hundreds of stories upward. Some of the structures had to look as if they had been built right on top of older buildings, which would be squared off under reinforced glass cases.
"Luc and Dan saw our cities differently than any director and production designer I've worked with before," says Stetson, "and I've built New York probably six times! One of Dan Weil's earliest statements to me was, 'A Frenchman looks at Manhattan and sees a completely different city structure than a classical European city.' Unlike Paris or London, with their rat's nests of tiny streets, New York doesn't have curves or T-intersections — it's all about the Grid. New York has perspectives to infinity, which corresponded very strongly with Luc Besson's cinematographic style for this picture — center-focused, with one-point perspectives and vanishing points at the crosshairs."
Although to creating streets that seemingly stretched on forever proved difficult, Stetson eventually went with 1/24-scale for Element's New York City (the same scale he had employed for The Hudsucker Proxy and The Shadow). "A scale of 1/24 is about as small as you can get for modern cameras," he says. "We had maybe 24 to 30 miniature buildings and they were quite large — up to 24' tall by 40' deep, which filled Digital Domain's main double stage. We had a few shots that were entirely miniature backgrounds, but most of the time we ended up extending the set very creatively with 2-D matte paintings. There were about five shots in which the cityscape was entirely represented by CG. But there was very little live-action production representation in terms of exterior sets for the city. It was left almost entirely to us."
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