Visual effects producer Ken Dailey and visual effects supervisor Sue Rowe needed to bring Benny the Book to life in more than 50 shots. Courtesy of Cinesite Europe. © Miramax Films.

3D artist/supervisor Jon Neill developed the technique for Benny. The facial scanning technology was from London-based Soho-cyberscan. Twelve different cyberscans in a range of phoneme positions and key face shapes captured Mistri’s facial poses. That 3D scan went into the live action background plates. Using key shapes, the artists then match distorted Mistri’s 3D head to his performance. The performances shot on the bluescreen day could then be seen from a 360-degree perspective that wasn’t actually captured on the day. The final result on film was a talking, perspective changing, tracked into book, 360-degree move around the actor’s head. Rowe explains, “It was a clever way of taking the live-action footage — a real performance — and mapping it onto the 3D geometry. In some cases we needed some extra animation, adding eyebrow and facial expressions, but the majority was captured in camera.”

The 30 strong in-house team set up for the film (now NexusVisualEffects) was responsible for a number of composites, digital landscapes and the blue skies digitally added to replace the filmed gray Irish skies. To enlarge practical sets such as the Hall of Records and the 4 Seasons Hotel, 3D set extensions were created in Maya. These were comped in Shake and After Effects. Digital matte paintings by in-house artist by Dave Gibbons were used for the Giant’s bean field and the field of yellow flowers — a sequence that was a particular favorite of O’Haver’s. Andrew Garnet-Lawson provided matte elements for Lamia street top-ups. Traditionally painted mattes were created for the Galleria and the Giant’s Barn exterior by Steve Mitchell and Lucy Richardson respectively. The paintings, on hardboard, were photographed onto film, scanned in and digitally comped with additional elements. Bickerton feels, “Digital matte paintings can suffer from a sense of cut and paste unless CG elements are created. With this approach, an artist truly blends and composes a shot without limitation. I also like the way a painting photographs, the emulsion and grain structure responding naturally to the image.” Problems of scale occurred in scenes mixing giants, humans and elves. Giants were envisaged as being approximately 15 feet high — about 2.6 times larger than a human. Oversize set pieces were considered but ultimately deemed too expensive. Instead the Giants were shot within a set interacting with 1 foot 5 inch high dolls. Consequently every shot in the Giant’s Barn involving Ella and her group was a bluescreen composited in-house in Shake. “Plates were shot as lock-offs, tiled plates, simple pan and tilts or all-singing and dancing — excuse the pun — crane/dolly shots that were to be tracked. Shots were tracked in 3D Equaliser and Boujou, then converted to scaled up moves for the Wotan Moco rig via Iktrix software.” Bickerton adds, “Two exciting days were then spent shooting Ella’s dance number on a cove bluescreen stage, mixing and overlaying over the background plates to music playback. I constantly considered how fast background plate shots would be when they were scaled up 2.6 times in order that we could achieve the Moco on the bluescreen stage in realtime.”

Mary Ann Skweres is a filmmaker and freelance writer. She has worked extensively in feature film and documentary post-production with credits as a picture editor and visual effects assistant. She is a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild.