Interview: Jake Morrison on the Special Effects in “Ant-Man”

Posted on December 5, 2015 at 3:35 pm

Jake Morrison is the guy behind the visual effects for Marvel movies like “Thor” and “The Avengers” and for Ant-Man, which is out on DVD December 8, 2015. He’s already working on the next “Thor” movie.

It was a lot of fun to talk to him about what went on behind the scenes. “The interesting thing about the way that Marvel approaches this stuff is that each of the films is distinct in the sense that they are superhero films but they are often a different genre. Like Captain America: The Winter Soldier is very much a political thriller and then Ant Man is a heist film at its heart. I’m like ‘Cool, we get to make a heist movie.’ So then you go through and you start looking at all the heist movies and the visual language used in ‘Oceans 11’ going way back and then because it’s a superhero film on top of that, you then get to go and mine all of that stuff. I would definitely say that the movies each one of them is very different when I starting a movie at Marvel you almost throw with the rulebook that established on the last one and you start again from scratch because they really put story first and character first and then the logistic specs to come up with the technologies to be able to make it.”

Morrison looked at the way shrinking and tiny humans had been portrayed in films going back to the 1950’s. “My main research was going back and watching ‘Incredible Shrinking Man’ and ‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘Darby O’Gill and The Little People,’ ‘Fantastic Voyage,’ ‘lnnerSpace’ ‘Honey I Shrunk The Kids,’ and ‘The Borrowers.’ These films don’t come out that often but they have been coming out over a very long time. ‘Incredible Shrinking Man’ was 1957 whereas ‘The Borrowers’ was 1997 so there is a big spread on these things. And the interesting thing about the shrinking films is each one of them the pioneered the new technology so that they could show that the audience something they hadn’t really seen before. The key for the shrinking films is always to bring people along, take them on a ride, that’s always clear, to show them a world that they are familiar in a perspective that they hadn’t seen it before. Like in ‘Incredible Shrinking Man’ they do incredible split negatives where they built two sets and that they do the math and put the cameras at the right place so he looks small when he’s interacting with a normal size actress. That was groundbreaking at the time. ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and ‘Darby O’Gill and The Little People’ used forced perspective. The challenge now is that the audience is so incredibly sophisticated and has seen so many things and believes that we can do a lot of stuff but is very suspicious of being tricked as well. All of the technology that we’ve got currently at our disposal push that forward and sort of glue it into the traditional filmmaking tool set which was to say that we built all the mini sets for real and shot them all for real and lit them for real and then glued all that stuff into the latest technology so we could then put in all the dramatic camera moves and film these action sequences the filmmakers wanted to. It’s sort of a great balance of being able to do all the stuff at the same time.”

One of the highlights of the film is a serious superhero fight that takes place on a toy train set. “For starters, it is a real bedroom, a set that was built and then we let loose our team, a lot of people for ten full days just literally with still cameras just taking pictures of everything. We call that ‘hosing it down.’ They would basically go through and shoot unbelievable levels of details to get literally the carpet threads, so that when he’s running through the carpet and he’s actually pushing carpet threads out of the way, they would actually go and shoot to that level of detail so we can see the individual makeup of the fibers in the carpet. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of images we shot for this. We had everything lit properly so you could really see what it should look like. We had a dedicated macro unit which was effectively a team of 25 people that ran for 40 days alongside principal photography who literally would shoot motion picture photography and then we do these stills and then we would scan with a little prop scanner down to this tiny level of detail and then effectively you’ve got all that stuff harvested. You have got real sets that were really built by the art department, really lit by the director of photography and then you take all that stuff and then we reassembled that entire room in the computer. We can take virtual cameras and express any shot in any language that the filmmakers would like. It’s kind of unique to say we studied films like ‘Unstoppable,’ you know the Tony Scott film, and so we would intentionally use lenses that would be used in a real full-scale action movie. So you are intentionally doing wide lenses close to people or you are doing long lenses far away as if in this sort of chase vehicle following the train. We are using framing that you would use on a full-scale epic but then at the same you’ve got all this crazy details. Like Thomas the Tank Engine has fingerprints on it. Kids’ toys are not pristine. Kids kick those things around, so let’s get these layers of realism in there. And so we started building up all these layers of stuff and shmutz and oily, greasy fingerprints and scuff on the paint. It’s just this layer of realism that you have to build in there before then on top of it you tell this impossible story. If you look at it, we have actually got helicopter shots in there, the shots where we literally fly the helicopter over the train that’s coming towards us and for those even though that’s sort of virtual helicopter it feels like it is only actually traveling about 12 inches or 15 inches in the real room, we actually went back to helicopter footage that we shot in other movies and we ran those real helicopter plates through an analysis and extracted like the real footage. Because when you are in the helicopter, the pilot is fighting the wind, the wind is pushing the helicopter to the right and he’s pushing the helicopter back to the left, the director of photography who is in the helicopter, he’s trying to lock on the target but there is a little bit of drift and there are these little zooms that they do to try to hold up the things. So all that stuff is actually real; we just applied it to the virtual world.”

Another challenge was making insects appealing, even adorable. “That was something from the very beginning that Kevin told us he wanted to make sure, about. We found one particular ant which is called the Saharan Silver and it has this beautiful coat. There is no other way to describe it. They are hairy, but what they have done to survive in the Saharan extreme temperatures they’ve developed almost like a heat shield but when you are close to it looks almost like the brushed coat of an Arabian stallion. I no other way to describe it but when you step back a little bit it actually almost looks like a beautiful polished metal. So that was the ant for us and we modeled the four different types of ant on that as a basis just to give them a little sheen and made them look prettier and then in terms of character, it’s a really good opportunity for the animators. I know our animation team really enjoyed working on this stuff because you’ve got the Bullet ants which are big bruisers, about the size of a truck to Ant Man when he is half an inch tall and these things are like an inch and an inch and quarter long. They are actually really spiny. Their movements are a very sort of aggressive start stop motion. We referred to them as the Ray Winstones of insects. Then you go all the way down to the little things, the crazy ants which are about the same size as a puppy would be for Ant-Man when he is down at that size. So we felt if we could inject maybe five or ten percent of puppy in there, so they are really playful, that would work. And it’s a very, very fine line to be able to do this to make sure it’s real or but also not too cartoony. I mean it’s a balance we work really hard at.”

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Behind the Scenes Special Effects

Interview: Roque Banos, Composer of “In the Heart of the Sea”

Posted on December 2, 2015 at 3:32 pm

Roque Baños composed the haunting score for Ron Howard’s new film, “In the Heart of the Sea,” based on the real-life whaling expedition that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “I got involved at the very beginning of the shooting,” he told me in an interview. “My first conversation with Ron was before he started to shoot. We talked about many things of course but the most important words were like, ‘Roque, the music in this movie was going to be more than 50 percent of it.’ The music for him is another character of the movie. He treated us as another actor and we had conversations about emotions, the power represented on the whale. He wanted also a dramatic but also a very, very modern sound;, you didn’t want like an old school classic score.” There is one moment in the film where a sailor plays a genuine 18th century song on his guitar, but the score is not based on historical themes.

To convey the peril and passion of the story, Baños used a wide variety of instruments, from ethnic flutes to touch on the force of nature and the low sound, ancestral sound of the didgeridoo to represent the whale. There is an electric cello and orchestral guitars, “but the most unusual one was the percussion. I didn’t want to use the traditional percussion on the action scene. I wanted to use something special so then I asked Ron Howard if I could have everything they used from the ship for the shooting. Then they brought me everything that they had on the ship, even the sails, the sails, ropes, and hull, so we spent two days of recording a pallette of sounds that come from the ship. The whole ship was an instrument. So every percussion you hear on the music comes from the ship that we are seeing the picture. So another one that I will tell you, I was recording the sounds from nature like air, like water, the flow of water, the sound of the sea.” Putting all of those sounds together required a lot of mixing. “The whole thing was a like huge experiment. I didn’t know at the beginning how it was going to come out. I think there is always a way to combine extremely different instruments. I also created a big library of sounds so then I convert them into notes so then it could be used as music.”

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Interview: Shepherd Frankel, Production Designer for “Ant-Man”

Posted on November 30, 2015 at 3:59 pm

Shepherd Frankel is the production designer who created the world of “Ant-Man,” the Marvel film about the teeny little superhero named Scott Lang and played by Paul Rudd. It will be released on DVD/Blu-Ray December 8, 2015. I loved the design of the film, and it was an honor to get to ask him about it.

Marvel's Ant-Man Ant-Man/Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) Photo Credit: Zade Rosenthal © Marvel 2015 — Marvel’s Ant-Man
Ant-Man/Scott Lang (Paul Rudd)
Photo Credit: Zade Rosenthal
© Marvel 2015

So when you come into a movie like this are you more excited or terrified at the idea that you’re going to have to create a world where somebody is the size of an ant?

I used to say, “If you’re not scared going go to work every day you are going to need to find a new job,” meaning there is an exhilaration to being nervous at the task of doing an amazing job. I definitely felt that on a day-to-day basis on “Ant-Man” but it wasn’t fear. It was more like wanting to make sure that we could take advantage of every opportunity in the script and in the Marvel cinematic universe, to bring this film into its most receivable and exceptional form. And I do feel like we did, it’s almost like I never wanted to let any rock be uncovered. I would say that this film was definitely the most fun I have had making a movie.

And I think you can see that on the screen. It was a testament to the filmmakers, the Director, Marvel, our producers and the environment that they created. When I saw it for the first time I was tickled at the visual journey that we were on which was a byproduct of many different departments and everyone’s effort. I thought it was an exceptionally fun visual journey we just went on and I felt like literally creatively — like wow! I’m happy, I just felt like I ate a great meal. So I was nervous but only nervous about wanting to make sure we fulfilled all of the opportunities and possibilities that were implied and that we came up with as a result of investing in the story and the characters.

There were two very different and very character-defining settings in the film, the house that Hank Pym, the Michael Douglas character, lived in and the lab owned by the movie’s villain, Darren Cross, played by Corey Stoll.

Hank Pym is a retired scientist and he needed to be in an older house. We wanted the house to be quintessential San Francisco. So we found a location and we ended up painting the entire thing and building a huge gate around outside so Scott could jump over it. This house was in San Francisco and the color was tied into the color palette of Michael Douglas. It felt like it was from another time. The entire inside of that house, the main story, the top story and the basement were all built on stage in Atlanta. And also the back of the house where Scott jumps off and breaks in at the window where he came up in the yard through the ground, we built that outside in Atlanta.

So basically the idea was you want it to feel like, “Oh there is some old guy living in this house.” When you meet him Scott doesn’t know he is Hank Pym, the genius. We think of him as this old guy whose house shows that his work had kind of taken over his house and it was loved and nurtured at one point but it has seen better days and it has a little clutter and so you see it and think, “What’s going on here? What’s the backstory?” And then when you go downstairs in the basement it’s like “What the heck is this?” There is a vault and a high-tech wall and a gym that was the best of its time in the 70s and that’s where Ant-Man trained.

So the challenge there was that the space had two meanings, one as we first see it but two the surprise that “Wow, this is the place that Hank Pym developed the technology for the Ant-Man suit in this secure vaulted world.” Then you counter that with the laboratory which was this mid-century old building which is where Hank Pym went after he retired the Ant-Man suit.

But then there is the lab, in contrast. The story that Darren Cross had taken over that lab and pushed Hank Pym out of his own company and created this tactical laboratory that was always like a machine, the casino that you kind of felt like you were being devoured by you are being devoured by the technology of the architecture of this building. The way Darren Cross kind of like chew you up and spit you out and like it needed be so obviously Hank Pym warmer colors, brown, wood, a Victorian home and then Darren Cross, metal and blue and glass and icy and steel and cold. So you needed two characters in one. And one of the fun things is that Hank Pym’s labs in 1970, what did that place look like and it is basement that thing was so much fun to do that in juxtaposition to Cross technology, like the future walls and the future lab.

What was the biggest challenge you had in indicating the scale as Ant-Man shrinks down?

We had to think about everything two times. First was the usual “Okay, we’re doing all these sets and the movie takes place in this like a regular world of like a Victorian home or a jail, or tenement housing and then we go to these labs,” and you’re like, “Okay that’s cool.” But then we see those spaces again when he shrinks down. So we did a lot of math in the beginning, meaning like if Scott shrinks down to this size what does the environment look like to him? And the way I lay out a set is all based on the scale and relationship of character to environment and the way the camera is going to perceive that. So when you shrink someone down and suddenly a one or two foot tile for an ant-size person is basically 400 feet. So that tile has to create interesting cinematic obstacles and depth. We were constantly thinking about how it exists for someone an inch tall in an environment that we already designed full-scale?

So I was always building set within set, the real set and then the macro set and we always shot the macro environment on the actual environment. I never built like an oversized spoon or fork or cup, everything was shot within camera of the original size set. Sometimes we would rebuild it if the schedule required us to have the macro set ready when the first unit was on the original set but ultimately we built these environments for us to capture the digital assets for visual effects, who would then have Scott and Ant Man running through these environment at that scale. It was a combination scientific and creative kind of solutions which was only achievable by virtue of new technology and Frazier lenses and various ways to capture things with cameras these days. We could not have done these like 10 or 15 years ago.

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Interview: “Shaun the Sheep” Co-Writer/Director Richard Starzak

Posted on November 23, 2015 at 3:51 pm

Richard Starzak and Mark Burton wrote and directed the adorable “Shaun the Sheep,” and it was a lot of fun to talk to him about making a stop-motion animation movie with no words. The DVD/Blu-Ray, which will be available November 24, 2015, has a behind-the-scenes featurette showing Starzak and Burton acting out some of the movements for the animators “to get the timing right for comedy” and working with actor Justin Fletcher on recording some of the non-verbal sounds. The idea of having the mouths of the sheep go off to the side of their snouts came from one of the storyboard artists “just to indicate that the character was smiling and we thought it was funny so we kept it there. Some people think it looks very strange and some people kind of don’t worry about it.”

The vehicles in the film are as individual as the human and animal characters. “We tried to give everything a bit of personality.”

It is a painstaking, very slow process to move each of the characters very slightly, take a picture, and then move it again. “We aim for about two seconds per animator a day so in a week we’re expected to do about ten seconds on average. That’s times sixteen animators so it would be two or three minutes of animation during the week…We use mainly the live action video to time how long we need for any particular shot. It’s a bit of jigsaw puzzle. You have to fit the film into a certain amount of time but it’s kind of trial and error. We shoot and then we might adjust them after we have shot them, we might take the odd frame out here and there, we’ll double up the odd frame so it is constantly being reassessed. I suppose the film ended up a few minutes longer than we intended but that’s fine; the timing was worthwhile so we were happy with that.”

Working without dialogue was liberating. “Strangely, yes, it makes life in some ways more difficult but also really focuses you on the story. We kind of have a lot of evidence particularly when children watch the film, they really concentrate on the film as they do on the television episodes because it requires all the attention but they get more immersed in it as a result. So I found it very liberating because it’s a very pure way of making a film. It’s very cinematic. I can’t wait to make another one really, I love the idea of not using dialogue.”

One of the challenges is directing the voice talent on recording the various sounds that the characters make. “They are noises but they are still very crucial to get the right tone so it’s a question of the voice talent that we use actually understanding and getting the tone right so they can watch and understand how to enhance and how to make any shot or movement more understandable. It’s a lot of trial and error. And it’s very strange standing there saying, ‘Can you put a little more despair into that squeak?’ or ‘Can you make that squeak slightly lighter?'” It’s a process but we get there in the end. We put up the storyboards against a temporary track of grunts and squeaks and then we invite the voice artist to lay down some sounds for us and after the process is finished we refine them and we get them in again to see if they can improve on what we’ve already got.”

Starzak was influenced by silent film masters like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. “When I first started the series I always had Buster Keaton in mind because there is not a lot that you can do with Shaun’s face. He has just got eyes and occasionally a mouth but there’s not a lot to express with so I’ve got a picture of Buster Keaton on the door on the way into the studio to remind people what we’re trying to do. We watched a lot of funny comedies. Jacques Tati films are very clever in including a lot of ideas in the same shot and playing out the shots obviously with sounds but no dialogue which is kind of what we were aiming for.”

The most complicated scene in the film takes place in a restaurant, where the sheep are disguised as humans. “It’s almost a comedy of manners. We had to stage four characters sitting around the table then there was another table with two characters plus there was the waitress and the maître d’ and everything was quite complicated. The most fun thing to do was the hospital scene.”

Exclusive Clip — Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas

Posted on November 4, 2015 at 2:42 pm

Our favorite elf is back! And we are thrilled to have an exclusive clip. Jim Parsons (“Big Bang Theory”) takes over the role of Buddy in this animated version to the family favorite, “Elf,” with songs from the hit Broadway musical. We are delighted to have an exclusive behind the scenes clip.