Much detailed layers from the sky to the clouds to the airplanes went into recreating the aerial dogfights from Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels. All images © 2004 Miramax Films.

When Rob Legato signed on to The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s biopic about Howard Hughes, opening Dec. 17, he knew that the director intended to evoke the 1920s-1940s moviemaking milieu in precise detail. Accuracy was key, since Scorsese has what Legato calls “an encyclopedic knowledge of film history — and Marty HAS every film, too!” His collection includes Hughes’ 1930 World War I drama Hell’s Angels, and a key sequence in The Aviator recreates —within a virtual environment — what Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) went through to capture his film’s famed aerial combat footage. The dogfights that Hughes envisioned were so dangerous — requiring 60 biplanes — that several stunt pilots of that era reportedly refused to do them. Three pilots died during shooting, and Hell’s Angels ended up costing close to $4 million, making it the most expensive film that had yet been made. Legato, who won his visual effects Academy Award for Titanic, remarks, “Hell’s Angels was the Titanic of its day. It was expensive; it didn’t come out on time and Hughes re-shot a lot of it. People were waiting to see if he would fail.”

Accuracy was the priority for Rob Legato’s role as vfx supervisor and second unit director for The Aviator. He studied Hell’s Angels extensively in preparation for the work to be done.

Serving as second unit director as well as visual effects supervisor on The Aviator, Legato prepared by studying Hell’s Angels extensively. “Our job was to film Howard Hughes filming in the midst of this aerial battle.” That meant covering a 360° world — the swooping POVs of land and sky from planes in combat. Legato began by working with digital previsualization supervisor Oliver Hotz, using Kaydara MOCAP software. He recalls, “I took key scenes from Hell’s Angels and in 3D we essentially copied the choreography. I wanted to create the illusion that we were seeing real shots from that movie.” Hell’s Angels had earned an Oscar nomination for best cinematography, and Legato wanted to be faithful to the film’s style.

“We did 20 minutes of previs in less than two months,” he explains. “We did live input, which allowed us to do a shot of a plane flying by in realtime. These shots had the believable hitches — all the things that you get when you do something `live’ that’s difficult to imitate in a totally CG shot. It showed us how we would go from point A to point B and how we could cheat things. If we found out that a particular camera angle would cost $40,000 to actually achieve, we could makeup something else that accomplished the same thing but didn’t cost as much!”

Given Scorsese’s historical predilection, most of the effects in The Aviator were shot in-camera or with matte paintings, “just like a film from that period,” says Legato. But the aerial combat shots required CG models in a 3D virtual environment. Legato was careful to make the shots look like something you would see if you watched actual newsreel footage of the time, and not some impossible CG camera work. “You tend to want to live with the limitations that real life would give you,” he observes.