A collection of visual effects houses converge to render unique realms of paradise and purgatory for What Dreams May Come.
by Ron Magid
Bringing director Vincent Ward's inspired vision of the afterlife to the screen for What Dreams May Come demanded the utmost from a cadre of visual effects houses, including Mass.Illusions (subsequently rechristened Manex Visual Effects), Pacific Ocean Post (POP), Digital Domain, Illusion Arts, CIS and Cinema Production Services, Inc. However, in attempting to portray metaphysical ideas as broad and undefined as Heaven and Hell, Ward and his equally ambitious effects crew were probably doomed to hit some bumps on their path to nirvana. Ward had previously suffered while trying to personally tackle too many tasks during production of his last film, the effects-heavy Map of the Human Heart. This time, however, he vowed that things would be different, and brought in an expert to oversee the complex creation of Dreams.
Visual effects producer/supervisor Ellen M. Somers served as Boss Film's head of production for eight years (where she originally met Ward during his brief tenure on Alien3), and as Warner Digital's vice-president of production. Somers was planning to take some time off after the closure of Warner Digital when she was persuaded to join the Dreams production in March 1997 to evaluate and design the visual effects that would be required for the film's completion.
Somers's unique title reflects her work with the individual effects supervisor at each respective house involved in the production. Her role, however, expanded beyond keeping Dreams' CGI/miniature effects on time and budget to ensure that they remained true to Ward's vision.
The film's entire effects package had already been awarded to Mass.Illusions (Judge Dredd), which was being bankrolled by mini-major outfit Cinergi. But in April of 1997, on the eve of production, Cinergi was sold to Disney, and the company then backed out of Mass. Illusions in September. Suddenly, Somers had to bring in other effects houses to save the picture before cameras started rolling. "When Cinergi backed out of Mass.Illusions, we had two weeks to figure out what to do," Somers recalls. "Unfortunately, their new investor [The Manex Group] was not ready to take on the responsibilities of this project, so we basically four-walled Mass.Illusions from last September. We brought in equipment and finished staffing the other half of the personnel that was required. Due to their financial situation, Mass.Illusions wasn't able to dive into the job, and we slipped a month or two in research and development on what was already a very ambitious schedule to start with. It quickly became apparent that the volume of work was going to be larger than they could handle, so the job got broken down even further."
"Ellen found some very good people to deliver 50 percent of the images we needed, people we would never have thought of, including POP and Digital Domain," Ward recalls. "Also, because of her history of working with heavily art-directed material, she has a really good eye for what makes shots work, particularly in terms of perspective and matte issues. She gets it, she's very patient, and she doesn't give up — I was very lucky to be able to work with her."
Quite literally, Somers attempted to divide the work along Biblical lines. POP took over 118 shots spanning the Victorian landscapes of Marie's World, Bridge City, the astounding Venetian Library, the ship graveyard and the inverted cathedral. The tabletop miniatures for the Hellish environments were built by Mike Joyce's Cinema Production Service, Inc. Digital Domain took on 54 shots, ranging from character animation to reconstructing an entire poppy-laden landscape. "Initially, we broke it up into a Heaven/Hell situation, barring a sequence or two," Somers says. "There was a stylistic issue, and the ability to keep creative continuity was of great concern."
Mass.Illusions' contribution entailed visualizing all of the Painted World — particularly the "painted" effects, some 44 shots depicting a wild, floral landscape of running pigment — which serves as Chris Nielsen's gateway to the afterlife. POP supported this work by compositing the painted backgrounds with the foreground actors. A critical matter for the artists was that this sequence had to evoke a strong response, lest audiences tune out of the film before its emotional one-two punch could ever connect.
Ward felt that the afterlife should be both familiar and alien. He explains, "As a painter, I've experimented with a certain color range, a little bit like oil-paint-meets-stained-glass, and I thought that if ever there was a film which would suit that color palette, this one would. My concept for paradise was this stained glass-style series of oil paintings, ranging from the German romanticism of Casper David Friedrich to the dark palette of Monet, with other late 19th-century artists and styles thrown in as well."
It wasn't simply artistry that drew Ward to the German romantic movement; its philosophy also provided some stimulus. "They believed that nature was more powerful than man," Ward says. "We created a paradise that's not tame, a place of roaring winds and twisted trees and steep mountains and mist. Chris's paradise is actually kind of a personal Hell — incredibly beautiful, but quite lonely, because he's there without the person he loves."
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