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'Jarhead': Winning The Invisible VFX War

Tara DiLullo talks with Academy Award nominated ILM visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman about winning the invisible visual effects war with their work on Jarhead.

ILMs visual effects puts viewers right in the oil fields of Iraq with the soldiers in Jarhead. All film images © 2004 Universal Studios. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Industrial Light & Magic.

The old adage says, War is Hell, but the same might be said of the process of bringing a truly realistic visual representation of a wartime environment to the big screen. Varied directors from Coppola (Apocalypse Now) to Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan) to ORussell (Three Kings), and hundreds in between, have sought to bring the truths of war alive for audiences. Most recently, Sam Mendes took his turn by directing his translation of former Gulf War soldier Anthony Swoffords personal memoir, Jarhead. A gritty depiction of the ground war that Americans never saw because of the hoopla surrounding the more impressive and decisive air attacks, Jarhead follows Swoffords (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) experiences with his fellow marines on the ground in Iraq, which was a mix of the boring, bloody and almost surreal.

For Mendes, the core of Jarhead was capturing the ground level perspective of the soldiers, without the histrionics of impressive battle scenes, gimmicky camera tricks or over-the-top visual effects set pieces. While Mendes mandated seamless and unobtrusive visual effects creation, that certainly didnt mean they werent copiously throughout the film to attain the realism he sought for authenticity. In actuality, Jarhead is one of the biggest visual effects films of the year you just wouldnt know it. Thats because the director went to Academy Award nominated ILM visual effects supervisor, Pablo Helman (Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones) and his team to help create a film where the magic is in what you dont see.

In order to achieve that invisible mandate, Helman explains it started with their approach on the set. The first thing that we did was not draw attention to ourselves when we were on location. Sam is an actors director and I said that we werent going to stop him from doing absolutely anything. Having Roger Deakins as the dp, you dont want to be in the way. If you are going to have these people [on the film], you want them to just do what they do. So there was no blue or green screen. Whenever possible, I was on location marking things, but if I didnt have a chance, we would just keep going. I would always be available to Sam when it came to consulting on location. I was mainly, to be honest, an observer.

Because of that, Helman says the eventual number and scope of the effects were ever evolving as the shoot progressed. When we talked to Sam on location, he always said he wasnt sure how things would end up because of editorial. A segment that might have been 10 seconds sometimes ended up being like 45 seconds and we did a bunch of things in it. Overall, the effects became about 45 minutes of screen time, a visual effects extravaganza.

The environment itself also dictated the addition of more shots than anticipated. When we started, the location was in summer, so we were thinking we would get away with a lot of stuff because it looked like a desert. It turns out, we shot in the winter and it rained like crazy. Even in the desert, I was amazed with the greenery all over the place. We covered ourselves from a visual effects point of view, in that we did have a camera, second unit, to capture b-roll of things we knew we had to populate the location with, like tanks or military equipment and personnel. But even though this is mainly a 2D show, we had to match the locations through the whole shoot, so it became a 3D show in that, because of all the tracking problems that we encountered, we had to replace backgrounds and all kinds of things; then we used the match-moving information and the match-move file to position things in 3D space. The line between 2D and 3D is very blurry. Even if you think that you arent generating particles for something, you are still using the match-moving information and all the technology that comes with 3D anymore.

Pablo Helman, visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic. Photo courtesy of ILM.

Helman adds that there were many unexpected moments, such as the Saudi Arabian airport sequence. In it there was a TWA sequence, where a plane was carrying soldiers. They were supposed to be TWA planes done by art direction, but they couldnt get the planes. They got us two 747s and they were United planes, which are gray and blue, he chuckles. The planes needed to be white and have TWA on them, so we had to replace all the planes and also put a bunch of planes in the background. All of that was done with a model plane, about the size of 3x2 that we bought online. Its actually kind of a neat way of thinking about cheaply fixing something. Through our new tool, Zeno [an ILM developed single platform software system that integrates several visual effects pipeline processes into one common user interface], we had the small models that said TWA and we photographed the models outside and we projected those stills onto geometry and used 3D match-move. Zeno was used for everything that used match moving.

Detailing the Zeno benefits, Helman explains, It allows you to think about the artist in a general way. I think we are going away from specialists. It would be a lot better if we had an artist that did the modeling and then the 3D painting and then the lighting and the rendering and the compositingit would be great if we had one person to do all that because it creates ownership. It gives you a sense of contribution and saves a lot of time. But when you work in an assembly line system, you do something and pass it along and every time you do that, you open yourself to errors. This is where Zeno helps.

With a team of 80 artists on Jarhead, Helman adds that they utilized other software systems and tools too. Besides Zeno, we used Maya and Inferno and Shake. The particle system is proprietary, so we use a combination of things. We did about 450 shots, but the funny thing about visual effects now is that I dont think that its about a number anymore. I think its just screen time and how complex things are. Its a typical question do I think visual effects are ruining the story? No. If you dont have a story, you shouldnt be making the movie. We are always illustrating the story or giving more information about the story, but you have to have a story. I think a lot of it has to do with the approach. [On Jarhead], we didnt use bluescreen and its not that we are against it. Everything in visual effects is about control. The bluescreen allows you to separate things; however, there are some things that you dont get when you separate, like those elements that are part of the environment. When you have a movie where that is everything, you just have to forget about it and trust that your roto crew is going to be the best. All the roto work was incredible [led by Beth DAmato].

War is hell and making photoreal effects can be too.

Of course, Helman admits the film does have a few traditional effects moments, most dramatic being the impressive oil well fires. Steve Cremin, the special effects coordinator, was able to get us one fire. In terms of scale, its about 400 feet tall and we were only able to shoot about 150 feet from the fire because it was so hot and our eyebrows kind of blew back, he laughs. The thing is from that one fire, I had a camera crew and then every time there was a take, I shot from a different point of view. We created a library of 30 or 40 fires. It turned out that in the whole third act, every shot is pretty much a visual effects shot because of the fires and so that was created from a library of one fire. Sam took that one fire away from every scene and then we replaced them all. The reference tells us that the fires were raging and they were really moving a lot, so that takes away the scale. We had to take that away from every scene and replace it with other fires that we had shot from.

There was also a scorpion fight sequence that was created almost entirely with CGI. Helman smiles, We tried to shoot the scorpions live and I think the first shot is a real scorpion, but they tried to get them to fight and they wouldnt. They are pretty dangerous! So we had them there and got incredible reference from them for movements.

With post work commencing on Jarhead earlier this year, Helman says he had the added challenge of balancing his work on War of the Worlds with Dennis Muren. Yet Helman maintains that Jarhead afforded the opportunity to develop their skills and their visual creativity. One of the things you want from a visual effects artist is to develop their eye. Its very seldom to get a show that allows you to develop that. Usually, its doing something just science fiction and poppy. So from a non-technology point of view, Jarhead was a great exercise. This is the kind of project that I like working on. We all have strengths and weaknesses as visual workers and I think we probably are best at marrying things into the background. What you do is analyze the image and ask what about the frame doesnt look real? Maybe the lighting is wrong or the shadows are wrong or too dense? Its really interesting and its how I like to think of these shows.

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI-FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.

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