CG Cheering for 'She’s the Man'

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from the film by simply clicking the image.

Mark Breakspear, visual effects supervisor at Vancouver-based Rainmaker, tells VFXWorld about the unconventional way it approached crowd shots for the soccer scenes in Shes the Man, a new riff on Shakespeares Twelfth Night starring Amanda Bynes (opening March 17 through DreamWorks). To fulfill the assignment, Rainmaker made use of eyeon Digital Fusion 4 on BOXX, Inferno on SGI, Flame on SGI, boujou and LightWave.

Bill Desowitz: Describe the work Rainmakers team did?

Mark Breakspear: The shots fell into two main categories: crowd and rigs. The crowd shots required us to fill seats on areas of the stadium seen through camera that the 300 extras couldnt cover. These shots were tricky because we wanted to allow the director [Andy Fickman] to shoot them anyway they wanted. We dont believe that shots need to be lock-offs, technology has been around to solve that problem for a long time now. But the traditional way of doing crowd shots was to lock off the camera, move your crowd around into different plates or tiles, and then stitch them back together later adding a fake move to the shot in post. We wanted to do something better than that!

The rig shots were for when either our hero, or our stunt team had to do a massive jump to kick the ball, or save a shot, etc. Upping the action, these shots allowed the director to intensify moments by adding action that couldnt be achieved for real. For visual effects, it meant carefully making sure that on set, that wires didnt get in front of actors faces and in post, making sure that you couldnt see any signs of their removal.

Initially, the plan for Shes the Man (STM) was to shoot the football (or soccer in the U.S.) scenes in such a way that we only featured the stadium for a small and specific number of shots. As ever, this was fueled by a responsibility to the budget. But, things change... No surprise there!

In the end, we had about 100 shots in total. Most of the shots were adding to the real crowd of about 300 extras. The actual Thunderbird Stadium at University of British Columbia holds about 3,500 people when full, so no matter how much we tried to get away without seeing empty seats, we couldnt avoid it.

BD: How did you approach the crowd shots?

MB: As briefly mentioned above, the crowd shots were created in a new way to the more traditional way that they are normally done. The traditional approach would have meant that Andy would be forced by visual effects restraints to lock off the camera. Sometimes this approach seems to be the way companies go because they always look at crowd shots as just crowd shots. In STM, the crowd was going to play a vital role in building tension between the two teams and adding to the excitement of the game. Lock off shots would never work for this. I think thats why we got the job.

When I first met the production team, it was on the pitch at Thunderbird Stadium. The meeting was essentially with department heads and we were the new guys pitching for the job! I felt straight away that the crowd shots were more than cutaway to the crowd shots. They breathed a life into the movie and needed to be shot in a way that maximized their ability to aid the narrative. I think the director knew that the crowd shots were very important and when we echoed that, he saw that we were the right team to partner with for the movie.

BD: Lock off went out the window.

MB: At first, the filmmakers were a little wary of our approach. It wasnt safe and, as I said, it wasnt the traditional approach that so many in production were aware of from working on other movies. That proved a big hill to climb. We didnt want them just going with us on faith, as we wanted them to understand the fairly complicated technology that was behind our plan. We did a few tests that illustrated our approach, which helped a lot. I think from that moment they saw how a dynamic moving camera added to the power that 3,500 crazed football fans can create.

They were sold on how important the crowd scenes were going to be, and through a barrage of e-mails and technical memos, we brought the whole production around to our way of thinking.

We allowed the camera to go anywhere it wanted, any type of move and any type of lens. The way we planned the shoot gave us this flexibility and ultimately made the shots look better. We shot our crowd tiles on a second unit day against greenscreen, covering the angles we knew we needed, and also individual people in case we needed to go to 3D characters later on. Then we put these plates into 3D and 2D, tracking them into the scenes, using the correct angles and adding the shaded lighting to the crowds at the top of the stadium.

In post, we created some cool new techniques for manipulating our data. One of our team, Mathew Krentz, created a way to alter the clothing of the crowd to increase the variation that we had in our plates. This meant that we had more choice when building our final shots and thus gave us the chance to make them as good as they could be.

BD: Anything noteworthy that happened on set?

MB: Visual effects saved the day when hair and make up realized at the end of the football shoot that the wigs the doubles had been wearing were slightly a different shade of color than that of the talents... There was a moment of panic for the producers, but we managed to save the day giving them the ability to alter the color. To be honest, it wasnt that big of a deal to visual effects, but to production it was massive!

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.

Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.