Eddie Murphy takes on spookier family fare with Haunted Mansion. All images © Walt Disney Pictures.

You’d have to be living in a cave to be unaware of one of the most enduring attractions ever built for Disney’s theme parks — The Haunted Mansion. With its ghosts and spooky talking heads inside crystal balls, The Haunted Mansion now arrives as a movie in time for the holidays, with Eddie Murphy in the lead. This year has already witnessed the first blockbuster film based on another Disney attraction, Pirates of the Caribbean. But visual effects supervisor Jay Redd of Sony Imageworks believes The Haunted Mansion goes for a closer take on the original theme park ride. “There actually IS a story to the ride,” observes Redd. “We worked really hard to stay true to that — and to the ride’s mix of goofy and creepy stuff. But at the same time, we had to update it so it doesn’t look like it’s from the ‘60s.”

Redd, who has worked at Sony Imageworks since 1996, previously collaborated with The Haunted Mansion director Rob Minkoff on both Stuart Little movies. While those movies involved the creation of 3D computer-animated stars, Minkoff’s latest effort, says Redd, “is definitely more of a live-action film than anything else Rob has done.”

Sony Imageworks visual effects supervisor Jay Redd.

A ‘Lively’ Approach
Promos for The Haunted Mansion tout the appearances of “999 Ghosts,” so a key visual effects decision involved how to create enough spirits to suggest such a cast. Redd recalls, “When we originally looked at the script, we started thinking about going a purely CG route on the ghosts. But our schedule didn’t offer us years to do the work, and we wanted to recreate some scenes from the ride. So we thought that having human beings behind the ghosts would make things a little more lively.”

The decision to have live actors play the ghosts led directly to a strategy that combined motion-control and bluescreen photography. The most dramatic example was a large cemetery sequence, which was shot on a set created by production designer John Myhre (this year’s Oscar winner for Chicago) at Sable Ranch in Santa Clarita, California. The motion-control gear used to capture the background plates of the cemetery was provided by Santa Monica, California-based Camera Control, and Redd notes, “They ended up shooting dozens of shots. It was all realtime motion-control, which was the only way to do this movie.”

Two months later, Redd had about 30 actors standing on a huge 360-degree bluescreen stage. “It was 120 feet wide and 35 feet tall, with 50 feet of motion-control track,” he recalls. “It was very elaborate.” The plan was to film the actors using the same motion-control move that was used on the cemetery background, enabling Imageworks to composite the elements seamlessly together. In reality, artifacts such as vibration interfere with the repeatability of a move. This is especially true when the camera is moving quickly, as it often was during filming. Redd expected Imageworks’ digital team would stabilize these plates later on.

The vfx wizards used a combination of old school tricks and new technology to turn live human into ethereal ghosts.