Catching Bullets Full of Red

Randy Goux tells us about the CG mayhem in the latest DC Comics adaptation.

By Bill Desowitz | Monday, October 18, 2010 at 4:20 pm

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld | Site Categories: CG, Films, Visual Effects

Check Out the Trailer and Clips from Red!

The iconic image of Helen Mirren with a machine gun trumps all else. Images by Summit Ent.

Yet another variation on the A-Team opened last weekend with the DC Comics adaptation of Red, in which retired CIA black-ops Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich re-team to find out why a hit's been put on Willis.

CIS Vancouver, under the supervision of Randy Goux, did lot of supporting vfx to amp up the action (Zoic and Radium were major contributors and James Madigan was the overall vfx supervisor), hundreds of bullet holes in cars, walls and glass, a handful of CG shoulder launched rocket-propelled grenades and more bullet holes.

"There's a lot of gunshots in this one, but what makes it different is having Helen Mirren shooting a machine gun," Goux enthuses. "All audiences think that's the coolest thing."

But what separates CIS Vancouver's mayhem on Red are four shots involving -- you guessed it --the bullets. And although CIS Vancouver used Maya for 3D for the 220 shots, it relied heavily on Nuke for compositing, with Abel Milanes serving as CIS comp supervisor and Frederick Hoglin handling the more difficult shots.

Bullets were created in Maya and Nuke was the unsung hero.

"It's changed our production pipeline in that we're finding we're doing a lot more things in Nuke in CG using the power of its 3D capabilities," Goux confirms. "It's a nice little dynamic shift that we're seeing in these kinds of movies where we can get a lot more done in Nuke as far as 3D projections and manipulating 3D models and not having to go back to Maya at all.

In the first sequence, Willis drives in a police car with Mary-Louise Parker. It's a long shot, 15 seconds. The camera is inside the police car, slowly traveling from the back seat looking out the front window to the front dash, looking back out the rear. "This was a greenscreen shoot on a stage, but since it's a one-shot, getting the background plates of the city streets was the trick," Goux continues. "Jim [Madigan] filmed the background by setting up five cameras each offset by 35 degrees to encompass a full 180-degree field of view. It was our job to stitch these plates together seamlessly and match the camera move that was shot on the greenscreen stage."