Not surprisingly, there was extensive use of digital doubles in Van Helsing, especially for the title character played by Hugh Jackman. In fact all the actors were cyberscanned and photographed extensively for texture references. One example of how this was used, says Jeannette, “is a shot that starts with Van Helsing on top of a six-team horse-drawn coach that’s running towards a canyon. A vampire bride flies in and picks him off and he does a 360º flip and falls in between the horses. This starts as a digital double, transitions to live action in the same shot and winds up being close up on his face. We had to recreate every little article of clothing that Hugh was wearing so there was a lot of cloth simulation. The coach then arrives at a broken bridge over the canyon and the six horses jump over the break — the whole thing is keyframe animation.”

Director Sommers used previs extensively throughout the film, but he saw it as a jumping off point when shooting the elements. Credit: Frank Masi.

Precision Planning
With sequences like that, extensive previsualization was required, notes Jeannette. “Previs was done for all the sequences that Stephen knew would require a significant amount of visual effects work.” The initial previsualizations, executed in Maya, were done by freelancers working in Sommers’ production office. Jeannette notes, “These animatics were all rendered to capture the essence of what the scenes would be. It was great. We literally stuck to a lot of that when we shot the plates.”

Sommers, however, is famous for making scenes more complex during production. So while the animatics guided much of the orchestration of the live-action filming, Jeannette observes, “Animatics are just stepping-stones — Stephen always adds more while he’s shooting elements.”

Just as the previs helped the live-action crew during plate photography, ILM’s preliminary animation also helped the actors see how their performances would need to dovetail with their digital doubles. Having preliminary animation blocked out was especially crucial for the sequence in which Dracula’s brides swoop down to attack the inhabitants of a village.

Life Imitates Art
The brides, with sleeves that transform into manta-ray wings, were done as CG characters in long shots. For closer shots, actresses were filmed on wires against bluescreen. Jeannette explains, “Scott Squires was the effects supervisor in charge of these particular characters and I recommended strongly that we not do fully-CG brides except when they were flying far from camera. But there’s a significant amount of shots where they come in close and deliver lines. So we decided to combine CG bodies and live-action heads. This wasn’t the first time that’s been done, but the process by which we did it was different.”

Previs, CG, live action with a Cablecam and motion capture were all used to make the sequence with Dracula’s brides flying through the village. Credit: ILM.

For starters, the plate shots of the village attack were notably complex. Cinematographer Allen Daviau had used a remotely-operated camera on a Cablecam rig high above the ground to get very dynamic shots from the flying brides’ POVs. Once Sommers’ rough-cut of the plate photography was scanned into ILM’s computers, the camera movements were recreated and the entire sequence was blocked out in animation. So when Squires’ team arrived at the bluescreen stage to film the brides’ facial performances, the animation showed the actresses what they needed to do.

“We shot 50 hero shots of the actresses against bluescreen,” recalls Jeannette. “They were suspended several feet above the floor, being helped by stunt people as they pretended to fly. They based their performance on the animation that we’d created.”

Double Duty
What made this bluescreen shoot unusual was that in addition to capturing the actresses’ facial performances, ILM motion-captured their body movements at the same time. “Our motion capture department devised a suit with markers that emit infra-red light, which the motion picture camera didn’t see,” explains Jeannette. “That gave us the live performances of the actresses, and also the data to animate their CG bodies. It was perfect, because everything was captured at the same time.”

The realism of the shoot was enhanced with wind machines. “We’ve got shots with the brides flying at camera and the wind pushing their hair and wrapping around their arms and heads. The interaction of the CG bodies and this live-action hair added to the realism.”