The wolf work had to balance between time and realism.

The second challenge of the wolf shots was the animation. “In every move, we had to decide where the man stopped and where the wolf started. It took a lot of fine-tuning to get it right. It was actually done on a shot-per-shot basis. Luckily, Terry used to be an animator before he started directing movies. So, he was able to direction the animation in the minutest way, working with Ditch Doy and lead animator Steven Read to add an extra frame here or to remove two frames there.”

Coming up with a New Pipeline
Applied successfully to the wolf shots, the XSI/mental ray pipeline didn’t work for the most unusual creature of the movie, a living mud thing whose favorite activity is to swallow children. For this creature, sequence supervisor Dominic Parker opted to use Houdini, a choice that necessitated the build of a unique pipeline. “Houdini is very good in procedural animation, like making mud ripple, for example, but it’s not the animators’ tool of choice. Most of them tend to work in Maya or XSI and we didn’t want to lose this expertise. So, we built a Maya pipeline in which the animators could work in a normal fashion on a polygonal mudman model. The animation was then lifted by Dominic’s Houdini system where all the procedural services were generated. Basically, the character was first animated in Maya and all the mud interactions and gravity and ripples were added procedurally in Houdini. This was then rendered out in Mantra, Houdini’s built-in renderer. Interestingly enough, at the time when we were developing the effects, we attended a SIGGRAPH presentation of ILM’s work on Terminator 3, specifically the sequence where the female Terminator melts down in a particle accelerator, which was very similar to our mud creature. We found out that our approaches were very analogous, although they used a different set of tools. They even warned us on a couple of problems that we did hit in the end.”

In a certain way, the death of the mirror queen (Monica Bellucci) was probably the most complex effect of the whole movie. In the sequence, the queen turns into hundreds of shards of glass and shatters. In a photoreal world, this couldn’t happen, as the 3D volume of the body suddenly turns into 2D pieces of glass, a paradox that created a serious problem. Since CGI tends to emulate reality, lead animator Linda Johnson had to do a huge amount of manual work to pull the technology away from what it was built to do… All the shots were hand-retouched literally hundreds of times.

From CG creatures to elaborate set extensions, The Brothers Grimm proved an expansive experiment in wonder making.

Establishing a New Record
After two years of work, on and off, Docherty looks back on The Brothers Grimm with a mix of pride and exhaustion: “It was an enormous amount of work. Given that we did a lot of versions of each shot, sometimes as many as 60 or 70, this movie must now hold the record of the largest amount of effects shots ever created by any European company. We often worked late at night and over weekends to pull it off. Plus, the political context made it difficult for all of us. It was also quite frustrating to have one great sequence deleted from the final cut. It featured more than 70 shots of fantastic CG animation of a living tree that’s attacking the lead characters. Apparently, it was a climax on its own and it came too early in the movie. Fortunately for the artists who worked so hard on it, we are told that the sequence will be included on the DVD.”

Alain Bielik is the founder and special effects editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinéfex. He recently organized a major special effects exhibition that opened Feb. 20 at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France (www.mimlyon.com). Displays include original models and creatures from 2010 Odyssey Two, Independence Day, Ghostbusters, Cliffhanger, Alien Vs. Predator, Alien 3, Pitch Black and many more. The exhibition runs through Aug. 31.