MPC had numerous challenges to contend with on the more action-oriented Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and Alain Bielik reports on the results.
While the first movie called for minimal visual effects work, Elizabeth: The Golden Age features digital trickery, including the creation of the Armada and its confrontation with Englands navy. © 2007 Universal Studios.
In 1998, Shekhar Kapurs Elizabeth, a brilliant recreation of queen Elizabeths early years, garnered critical praise and no less than seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Nine years later, the same team tells the rest of the story in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (which opened Oct. 12 from Universal).
Although the first movie featured minimal visual effects work, the sequel had entire sequences relying on digital trickery. The main challenges were to create the Armada, Spains massive fleet in the 16th Century, and its dramatic confrontation with Englands naval forces at the Battle of Gravelines in 1588. Selected to produce the all-important shots were London-based MPC (The Moving Picture Co.) and in-house Visual Effects Supervisor Richard Stammers. The team included VFX producers Michelle Corney and Victoria Mowlam, CG Supervisor Ian Ward and Compositing Supervisor Jessica Norman. We did about 75 shots, Stammers says. It definitely wasnt a huge vfx project, by modern standards, but the shots were highly complex. We worked on them for 13 to 14 months with a small team.
VFX Supervisor Richard Stammers and his team at MPC created about 75 shots for this sequel. Though not a large number, the shots were highly complex.
Stammers started working on the movie in January 2006, doing extensive previsualization in Maya to help design and set up the vfx shots. We tried not to look at Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander too much, yet you cant help but look at all the fine vfx work that is out there Some of these movies were a hard act to follow, especially since we were, comparatively, on a very limited budget. For this reason, we tried to use our budget as wisely as possible. Early on, we discussed the possibility of creating the water in CG, but I voted against it. It would have been too expensive, and also, from a creative point of view, I just didnt want to go down the route of CG water.
Instead, I suggested that we shoot plates of real ships at sea, and capture realistic wakes and reflections, in camera. Ideally, the ships would have the same mass and the same type of wooden hull as our period ships, and we would replace the real ship with our CG vessel. For practical reasons, it didnt work quite that way for all of our shots, but having real water in our plates gave us a good starting point. In one of our largest shots, the camera starts tight on a ship in the foreground, and then goes around the bow to reveal the whole Spanish Armada behind. That foreground vessel was actually a real wooden ship that had just about the right hull shape. Since it was 30% smaller than the war ship it was supposed to represent, we shot it like a 2/3-scale miniature to get the correct wave scale. It worked out brilliantly.
Rigging Ships Riggings
For Master and Commander and Pirates of the Caribbean, filmmakers had real ships at their disposal to shoot the sea sequences. This was not the case on The Golden Age. Every marine shot had to be a visual effects shot. For scenes where the action took place on a deck, the team used a full size partial set of Sir Walter Raleighs ship that was built on a huge gimbal rig on stage at Shepperton Studios, near London. Incidentally, at about the same time, the Stardust crew also shot scenes on a ship deck set built on another stage nearby. The major difference was that on the Stardust stage the set was surrounded by a greenscreen cyclorama, while on the Golden Age stage, it was a bluescreen
Every marine shot had to be CG as real ships were not available for use in the sea sequences.
Early on, we decided to avoid camera angles in which you could see the water interaction alongside the set built ship, as it would have been costly to matchmove and composite a live-action sea plate in, Stammers notes. The bluescreen shots were generally framed so that you would only see the water in the far distance, at the horizon. It allowed us to create the scene with straight composites using Shake. For the same reason, we also avoided camera angles in which you could see high in the masts. The practical set included 10-foot high partial sails and extensive rigging, and we needed to avoid extending or replacing them with CG elements. We wanted to spend the money where it really mattered, that was on the wide shots featuring entire CG ships.
Using Maya, the team built one hero British ship and one hero Spanish galleon. The ships geometries were based on the practical set that was being built concurrently. For part of the shoot, one side of the set had been redressed as the Spanish galleon deck. Once both sets were completed, they were extensively photographed in high resolution. The images were turned into suitable textures using Photoshop, and then projected onto the CG hulls. Rendering was carried out in RenderMan using global illumination.
A tricky aspect of the CG ships was the creation of realistic movements in the sails and ropes. Our CG galleons had up to a dozen sails, with these huge pennants and flags on top of the masts, and as many as 5,000 ropes! Stammers marvels. So, a realistic simulation was of paramount importance. This part of the project was supervised by CG artist Claire Pegorier. She utilized a proprietary adaptation of Syflex that we have integrated into our Maya pipeline. Claire built a really complex rig that allowed the hull animation and simulated wind to drive the movement of the sails and ropes. From this setup, we created a number of pre-cached simulations for various wind conditions that could be applied to our background ships. For our foreground hero ships, we always created unique and detailed simulations. Generally speaking, we tended to over-emphasize the sails animation compared to real life sailing conditions. For instance, we would add gentle ripples or billowing to the material. It gave the boats a lot more character. We tended to favor set ups that made our ships look good on screen, as opposed to what they would have done in real life.
The shots of the approaching Armada were intended to feature 130 Spanish ships, but Stammers found it was not necessary to include more than 50. The composition gave the impression of more ships and they looked good on screen.
Battle Stations, Everyone!
The layout of the battle shots was determined as early as previsualization. In order to give the director a better idea of the finished result, MPC rendered the previs with more details than what is usually required. Stammers wanted the composition to be locked in by the time the team started work on the high-resolution version. Then, CG artists would reproduce the original layout using low-resolution puppets, then at render time these were updated with higher resolution versions, depending on their distance to the camera.
The shots of the approaching Armada were intended to feature 130 Spanish ships, but, most of the time, it appeared that it was not necessary to include that many. We noticed that, in some shots, we only had about 50 ships, but on screen, the composition gave the impression that they were double that, Stammers notes. What really mattered was what looked good on screen. The fact is, once you put in about 50 ships and filled up every single gap, there is just no room to add more anywhere. So, you do end up with fewer ships than you thought you would need anyway. In most of our shots, we had an average of 30 to 40 ships.
With so many ships featuring so many textures at any time, managing render time was definitely an issue. For practical reasons, the fleet was broken down into several layers at rendering time. These many passes allowed compositors to assemble the shots with maximum flexibility. Stammers and his team wanted to avoid having to go back and re-render a whole shot because of a modification on one particular element. CG artists thus made sure that the compositing team had enough passes to work with. If needed, 2D artists also had the opportunity to add additional light sources to create interactive lighting in particular areas. This included creating a flash of light whenever a cannon was supposed to fire.
The battle sequence required many extra elements to be included in the final composites. We did an extensive practical smoke, fire and burning embers shoot to gather live action elements, both on bluescreen and blackscreen, Stammers explains. Debris projections were created with our proprietary rigid body dynamics engine Papi. Those included collapsing masts too. An interesting aspect of the sequence was creating the burning ships. We used an in-house system in which we positioned 2D cards on the CG ships within Maya, and then projected live action fire elements on them. By doing this in 3D space, the lighters were able to place light sources that created a pool of interactive light around every fire element, which greatly added to the realism of the scene. For the sailors themselves, we used a combination of bluescreen extras for the foreground elements, and CG animation for the background. The sailors animation was mostly built out of MPCs motion capture library, although we did use hand animation to create specific movements. The human geometries were textured using still photographs of extras in costume.
The compositing of these shots was tackled in two stages. The live-action sea plates always required sky replacements and extensive grading before we passed then on to the CG lighters, Stammers says. We had to get the dramatic mood of the background right first, otherwise the lighting would be all wrong. In the final compositing stage, many layers of atmospherics were added among the CG ships. Our most complicated shots featured probably 50 different layers of smoke, about 20 different fire elements, and maybe over 100 individual passes on the CG ships. Some of these shots took more than two months to put together in compositing.
The battle sequence required many extra elements to be included in the final composites. MPC did extensive practical smoke, fire and burning embers, both on bluescreen and blackscreen.
Capturing a Feeling
Parallel to the massive CG effort on the Armada sequence, MPC was also responsible for the creation of various period environments for the movie. Those were created with traditional photomontage matte paintings. The sceneries were then populated with 2D elements of bluescreen extras. A challenging shot featured the Armada ships under construction in a shipyard. The CG ships of the battle sequence were re-used for the occasion, but the models were stripped back of some of their textures to simulate an earlier stage of completion.
After more than a year-and-a-half on the project, Stammers concludes: We were able to push the visual effects in such a dramatic way, creating shots that really captured the feeling of all those great marine paintings of that time, pieces of art that were so inspirational to us throughout production. That ended up being the most rewarding part of the project.
Alain Bielik is the founder and editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications, both print and online, and occasionally to Cinefex. In 2004, he organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musee International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.
