Creating A-Team Mayhem
"There are a couple of shots where we have a full-CG stunt double coming out of the sewer and magnetically attaching himself to the underside of the convoy truck. They fight the baddies on the truck and a big fire fight ensues and they're being chased by the limo with the gun hanging out it. The tunnel is full-CG and mixes with the Vista backgrounds because the original tunnel didn't work as planned.
"The truck crashes through some barricades that are CG and into the river. They shot a real truck crashing into the water in Vancouver and we added the cargo container and two digi doubles of Face [Bradley Cooper] and Hannibal [Liam Neeson] hanging on the outside the container. When it impacts the water, the airbags inflate and the cargo container floats, which is all-CG as well. We had to rotoscope the truck and extract that because it was the only usable part from the plate and then we recreated a concrete embankment. The plane shoots up the limo and it explodes, requiring more CG destruction and pyrotechnics, including a digi-double for the gunner collapsed bridge and broken up road.
"We had one shot of the container hitting the water but the perspective was from underwater, so we had to do some water simulation bubbles and the airbags impacting. It was a tricky balance to find the storytelling point, which was to find the airbags going off vs. the clarity of the water and the realism of that."
Digital Domain used Maya, RenderMan, Houdini and its proprietary fluid sim system.
Prime Focus created particle-driven tracer fire, CG rockets, missiles and residual smoke. A number of aftermath elements were also generated, including water impact and rock debris CG simulations. Another sequence required the creation of a fully digital Bell 205 helicopter to replace the practical element in several shots. Prime Focus designed the helicopter to appear completely photo real. A fully rigged digi-double of B. A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) was also inserted into this sequence along with rigged digi-doubles of other A-Team members. Matte paintings and synthetic skies completed the scene where practical photography would have been too challenging to capture.
The Prime Focus software toolkit included the proprietary Krakatoa for high-volume particle rendering, 3ds Max for 3D modeling, Fusion for compositing and V-Ray for rendering.
In one scene, Prime Focus was supposed to feature a single missile bound ended up creating 16 more. That's The A-Team for you.
Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.
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from... is not object so 'whom' isn't correct. It must be 'who'.
Thank you for the comprehension.
It was too hard to read this article. Please simplify it. Your goal is getting more and more readers not less, so make it easy and attractive to read.
This article is useless for someone whom knows little about CG.
Minor correction:
"The fluid sim software Weta used is our new proprietary fluid solver, Niad. "
The fluid/dynamics software Weta used is actually called Naiad, and was in fact developed by Exotic Matter, not Weta. (However, Weta is in possession of a site-license of Naiad). See exoticmatter dot com
Minor correction:
"The FX team used its new rigid solver system written in- house called bullet to simulate smaller debris coming out of the flying containers," Williams continues.
The rigid body system called Bullet is an open source engine, not written in-house by Weta. It was confirmed by another Weta employee that they used the open source Bullet engine for the A-Team. See bulletphysics.org
To have a better understanding how each shot was constructed gives the viewer an appreciation of the work that goes into a movie. Until my son was in the business I never understood the hours upon hours that it takes so the viewer can see a 20 sec shot. This article helps us understand that it is the human mind that creates the illusion that everything we see is real. It would be nice to do show how some of the shots are created especially the overlays like in the tank scene.
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