At his masquerade ball, Count Dracula and Anna Valerious dance in front of a mirror where only she is reflected. Credit: ILM.

Detailing Dracula
Dracula’s transformation was based on the same principle, according to Jeannette. “Witness cameras helped us understand physically what the actor was doing, and then we took over with keyframe animation. Dracula’s outfit transforms into his wings. He wears a long jacket that peels away and becomes a 24-foot wingspan. He’s a gigantic creature. We went for bat-looking wings, because the way he had to move was really different from the way the brides moved. They were powerful but elegant, while Dracula was more about brute force.

“The Dracula character, based on the nature of what he had to do, had to be keyframe-animated. That was very hard for us on the animation level, because it needed to stay within the realistic style of motion in the rest of the picture. So we used a lot of references. For a big hand-to-hand fight that Dracula has we shot a lot of reference footage of myself fighting with people on the crew! We used those references to create the fight choreography.”

Confronting Mr. Hyde
The nine-foot-tall Mr. Hyde was, believes Jeannette, “probably one of the most complex CG human characters that ILM has done. He has hair and a beard that we had to simulate. He smokes a cigar and has an obscene way of spitting. Stephen decided that Hyde wouldn’t be a monster but more like a giant man, which made everything more complex for us. Because of the nature of what happens with skin, we realized quickly that we had to resort to doing a full CG-animated character as opposed to trying to do a combination of live-action prosthetics. Hyde has fat on his belly that jiggles — like everyone’s problem in life!”

Mr. Hyde may have been all-CG, but ILM videotaped actor, Robbie Coltrane (the giant Hagrid from the Harry Potter films), reading his lines. Jeannette says, “We had to deal with Hyde’s facial animation, so when we recorded Robbie Coltrane we shot three different angles of his face. His videotaped performance was the foundation for our keyframe animation. There’s a confrontation where Hyde mocks Van Helsing, and we needed to preserve the realism of his action so he didn’t look like a cartoon.”

Simulation Everywhere
Van Helsing will be recognized for its monster character animation, but underlying so much of this work was the clever application of simulation software. It’s evident in the extensive virtual costume simulation, but it also figured heavily in monster transformations like The Wolf Man. Jeannette explains, “We used our cloth software to simulate skin ripping instead of skin simulation software. That gave us more control as to where we wanted the tears on the skin to happen. Typically, you’d have to pre-score skin before you did anything to a shot. We wanted the flexibility to change that on the fly. So basically we re-wrote our cloth engine to be able to support that.”

ILM used, as Jeannette succinctly puts it, “Every trick in the book.” The studio employed a variety of environmental simulations to add atmosphere to virtual environments and to cover the hand-offs between practical and digital effects. Set extensions, miniatures, photogrammetry — this show contained a little bit of everything.

A Final Favorite
ILM’s team members undoubtedly have several favorite shots in Van Helsing, but for Jeannette, one in particular sums up the challenges of this show. “It’s a scene where Van Helsing is snatched off the horse-drawn coach by one of the brides. She carries him 30 feet into the air. We’re flying with them until he manages to grab one of her wings and pull her down. She’s losing altitude, and in order to avoid crashing, she drops him and he falls back onto the lead horse of the coach. That shot epitomizes what we have done. We photographed the plate in the forest outside Prague. Then back at ILM we scanned, match moved and animated what Van Helsing and the bride would do. From that animation we went back to the stage and asked Hugh Jackman, hanging on a wire against bluescreen, to basically act out the animation. Then we took that bluescreen element back into the computer. We re-animated the bride to match Hugh’s action so we could go back to the stage and shoot the bluescreen/motion capture element of the bride. Then we brought that back into the computer and tied everything together. So we’ve got a bluescreen element of Van Helsing that’s being manipulated by a CG body that was itself a bluescreen motion capture animation. We’ve done that multiple times in this movie. I think Van Helsing was one of the most complicated shows to go through ILM in a long, long time.”

Ellen Wolff is a Southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the Web site CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.