Using MatchMover Pro, Rainmaker's crew analyzed the data and converted it into a point cloud. Applying the cloud data to the digital models required a lot of custom coding, but in the end created highly accurate results.

A Breakthrough Moment
Using MatchMover Pro, Rainmaker's crew analyzed the data and converted it into a point cloud. Applying the cloud data to the digital models required a lot of custom coding, but in the end created highly accurate results.

"It's like one of those moments of 'Eureka!'" he says. "You suddenly have a model of Will Ferrell that suddenly comes to life and every nuance of his face that you see in the real person is transferred across to the CG model," Breakspear continues. "That's one of the things that's been the holy grail of CG faces."

Rainmaker used HDRI data captured on the set to exactly match the lighting, and added skin texture and subsurface scattering to the models. The one thing the technology still cannot capture is eye movement, which had to be done separately using digital photography and filmed footage as reference.

For compositing, Rainmaker used one team to rotoscope out the doubles' faces and another to do the tracking. To make things easier, the doubles wore wigs that matched Heder and Ferrell's hair so that in almost every shot only the face and neck had to be replaced.

Aside from face replacement shots, Rainmaker also altered the background stadium so the L.A. Sports Arena would look like three different facilities in different cities, complete with crowds.

Through the Pipeline
Completing the shots began with giving the performance capture footage to editorial and asking them to choose expressions for each shot. Simple faces were tested and approved, and running the data through the pipe took anywhere from a week to three weeks, then went off to lighting and was finessed until finished. The average shoot took on average a month to complete.

Breakspear suggests it was a battle to convince people that this process was preferable to simpler 2D effects, but directors Speck and Gordon immediately knew this was the way to go to ensure the final result had the grace and speed of real figure skating.

About half of Rainmaker's 300 effects shots involve face replacement and about half of those have two faces per shot. Other effects included altering the background stadium so the L.A. Sports Arena would look like three different facilities in different cities, complete with crowds. Rainmaker was the overall supplier for the film, with about 80 shots sent out to other houses. Digital Dimension and Image Engine did some comp shots and Soho contributed renderings of the crowds using Rainmaker's Massive setup.

The crew totaled about 150 people, who did five months of post-production work from October through February, Breakspear says. That includes about 25 rotoscopers, 25 trackers, 15 tracking people, 30 compositors, 30 CG people and a management team of about 20 and a team working with editorial.

Breakspear says these tools gave the filmmakers an enormous amount of flexibility to constantly refine, alter and splice together specific elements as they searched for the funniest moments. "We had opened a Pandora's box and gave the filmmakers the ability to make some pretty cool decisions along the way that otherwise have to be made on set, that lock you into a certain performance, and then you're done," he says. "They have the opportunity to change things that aren't laughed at enough. It gives the filmmakers a new set of tools."

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comic book blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.