Led by VFX supervisor J.P. Jaramillo, the company delivers 256 shots on Kevin Costner’s epic Western, including river, canyon, and town environments, digital horses and insects, and lots of fire, smoke, and rain.
Even though Kevin Costner’s large body of work spans a host of genres, his true love is the Western, which became his directorial playground for Dances with Wolves, Open Range, and his most recent: a four-part cinematic franchise that chronicles the settlement of the American West before and after the Civil War, beginning with Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1. Costner not only directed and co-wrote the script but reportedly invested $38 million of his own money. Going along for the ride was Ingenuity Studios, which rustled up some digital artists under the supervision of J.P. Jaramillo to create 256 shots consisting of river, canyon and town environments, high plains critters including horses and insects, and effects like fire, smoke, rain, blood, and muzzle flashes.
“On a personal level, Kevin Costner has this investment in the film that is different from a director making a studio movie,” notes Jaramillo, VFX Supervisor, Ingenuity Studios. “Not only with the financial side of things but also with the story, which he has been trying to get off the ground since the 1990s. Kevin also named his son after one of the characters in the movie. When it comes to the visual effects there was a nice balance that he struck in giving us a clear vision for a lot of the scenes. But there are several other ones where it wasn’t terribly important how we got to the end product. For example, sections of the river were mapped out for different parts of the future movies so the geography of it was specific. But with the massacre that takes place at night, he gave us more liberty to amplify the scene and was happy with the work.”
Enjoy the VFX breakdown reel, then read how the work was produced:
Water is so familiar to the human eye that there is no margin for error when recreating it digitally. “To recreate water there is a lot more going on than you would think for such an everyday household material,” observes Jaramillo. “It’s reflective, so you have to consider all of the environment and context of the lighting and the scene around the water. The same patch of water on the ground can look completely different depending on the time of day, how windy it is, and the sediment quality. We had to wrap our brains around how water works at a physical level to be able to then recreate it for as many shots that we did under as many lighting conditions and environmental situations.” Dozens and dozens of simulation tests were conducted early on. Jaramillo continues, “The whole other side is the topography of the water, like the flow of the surface, how it’s moving and interacting, and how choppy the surface is, which then influences what it’s reflecting. We had to go on a shot-by-shot level of tweaking the speed, flow and intensity of the river to get to what Kevin wanted.”
Shots of skies were incredibly impactful. “Kevin was trying to draw from these classic Westerns where they couldn’t replace the sky all that much but had these vast tapestries of beautiful locations out in the West,” states Jaramillo. “It was important for him to showcase the natural beauty, and you don’t always get that on the day. There were quite a few shots where we had a blank sky so it’s part of our job as artists to heighten the film in these invisible ways.”
Noting how his team handled various storms, one of the many perils faced by settlers, Jaramillo shares, “You add too much rain and lose everything. If you don’t add enough rain, you’re not feeling the precipitation and danger. Props to the compositing team because they’re chiefly responsible for balancing all the elements that you see in the final image. How is intense is the rain? How dark is that stormy cloud in the background? How bright does the lightning get?”
The horse chase was shot day for night. It needed to be cut with another scene that took place at night. “There were 30 shots,” Jaramillo explains. “You have your sunlight, sky and ambient light. You want to keep that going into nighttime and say, ‘That sun is now going to be moonlight.’ The environment around it is going to get a lot darker. One of the biggest things that we did was replace the sky. After that it’s balancing the colors with a lot of rotoscoping. We needed to isolate every element to have individual control over them; that way we were able to shape light.”
Though much of the story takes place in New Mexico Territory – which included Arizona and part of Colorado - actual principal photography took place in Utah. “There are different kinds of mountain structures, erosion, plants and climate,” notes Jaramillo. “We knew from the beginning that it was never going to be a complete makeover to make it look like New Mexico. The scope on that would have been too big and we would have to altered far too much of the terrain in order to make that happen. We found a happy midground where we saw what could be brought from New Mexico to sprinkle along the river but made sure what we were bringing wasn’t such a radical departure from the photography.”
There are 30 crowd shots that required digital augmentation. “We created this big library of clothes and props that was fed into our crowd system, which in turn generated period accurate extras that were dropped into shots.” An effort was made to burn the town of Horizon for real when doing the massacre scene. “The massacre wasn’t intended to be a big visual effects scene, but due to the reality of shooting it ended up being that way. Our team didn’t have the luxury of bluescreens and greenscreens nor a ton of light to work with either. Several of these fires couldn’t be lit so one of the biggest challenges wasn’t necessarily adding in the fire, crowds, embers raining from the sky, and smoke. It was the fact that there was no light in most of these shots to motivate that fire. If you have a giant fire, it’s going to be giving a ton of light on the scene, so we had to go in and relight every single shot.”
In one scene, a horse gets shot and falls to its death while catapulting its rider. “A stunt double was on top of this fake horse, which was attached to this pully system that catapults him into the river,” explains Jaramillo. “In the early stages of the shot we’re adding in the CG horse, which looked great. But the stunt double was not reacting to the movements of the horse. There is a lot of secondary motion; however, we weren’t getting any of that because it was shot on a stationary puppet. Much to the team’s dismay the only way for the shots to work was if we fully replaced both the rider and horse with a CG version; that way we had full control over how it fell and the speed. What you’re paying for with visual effects is not only the end product but all of the different ways you can control it artistically to get to that result.”
Also requiring digital modification was the canyon. “The plate was shot well for visual effects. You know what you’re going to keep and replace. Something that they wanted was for it to feel dangerous, that the rider and horse could fall over at anytime. We pushed the edge closer and closer to the path of the horse. On the day it was dry compact dirt, so we had to create an entire mud simulation for that path. We added sticks and stones to interact with the horse. We had to roto animation a 3D horse that followed the live-action horse one for one so we could take that model and use it to drive the simulation of the mud and the rocks getting tossed around. That was a complicated system to setup and all of it pays off.”
Jaramillo concludes, “It was a balancing act of visual effects being supportive of what you’re seeing onscreen but not stealing the show; that was the guiding thesis statement of our involvement with the whole movie.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
