A group of frightened and enraged villagers chase Frankenstein’s Monster to the top of a windmill Credit: ILM.

Keeping it Lively
While Van Helsing is full of impossibilities, ILM encouraged Sommers to get as much “reality” in camera as possible. For example, notes Jeannette, “When Van Helsing was lifted by a bride above the village, he was physically lifted on wires. We had to correlate the keyframe animation of the brides exactly to the physics of actual motion, so it looks more real. It was good for us to know how to tie in the style of our keyframe animation to what the actors physically could or could not do.”

Being faithful to “live” moments also guided ILM’s approach to the “transformation” scenes, such as The Wolf Man turning into beast right before camera. Jeannette says, “Stephen challenged us to come up with a new way of seeing a human transform into a werewolf. Stephen wanted this transformation to be a single shot — he didn’t want to cut away, he didn’t want to cheat. He wanted to blow the audience’s minds by having something different.”

Rather than have wolf hair grow out through the skin, ILM’s approach was to have the werewolf hair split the skin and force itself out —as if the monster was bursting out from within the man. Jeannette encouraged Sommers to keep filming the actor throughout the entire transformation sequence so that ILM’s animators could use his physical performance as reference. “We wanted to keep components of the actor as long as possible while transforming his body with CG. We used that to inform our keyframe animation of the werewolf. It was just a matter of sculpting the muscles changing over the live action and blending the two together. We have several of these ‘hybrid’ shots.”

Dracula’s bride Verona (Silvia Colloca) circles her prey, Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale). Credit: ILM.

Bearing Witness
To facilitate this process, ILM rolled video “witness cameras” whenever the motion of an actor was key to getting an effect. “In addition to the live-action camera, those witness cameras would inform, from other angles, what the actor’s body was doing,” explains Jeannette. “Most of the time when you track a performer’s motion from one camera point of view it’s hard to know how far away from camera certain limbs are, and how close to camera they come. It’s always an approximation, and that can lead to inaccuracies. Also, if the camera is framed really tight on the face and then pulls away, you don’t know what’s happening to the rest of the body before it’s revealed. So those witness cameras informed us about the physics of an actor’s performance and we could accurately recreate it. Preserving the realism of an actor’s performance and enhancing it with CG technology makes him look like he is really going through those contortions.”

This approach was applied during live-action filming, not against blue-screen. Jeannette asserts “ This allowed us to get to a very realistic representation of an actor’s performance without motion capturing it. We also got all the interactive lighting from the set. We did that every time we had a major interaction between a computer graphic character and a live action actor.”