|
updated
8/14/99
[the unedited version] by R. Zane Rutledge
as seen (edited for length) in the Premiere Issue of RES Magazine Most people don't mix these two phrases: "visual effects" and "low-budget." A "low-budget visual effects film" is practically an oxymoron, like "government intelligence" or "diversified specialist." Typically a fundamental in the "big" part of "big-budget," visual effects have long been the realm of armies of trained animators, at specialized facilities like Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Digital Domain. While smaller houses also exist, scaled to smaller films, effects budgets are anything but "low." In fact, the budgets of effects-driven films have pushed top animators' salaries comfortably into six-figure range, and Hollywood blockbusters up to and beyond the hundred-million dollar mark. On the opposite end of the spectrum lies the independent, low-budget guerrilla film, subscribing to a decidedly anti-Hollywood motto of "beg, borrow, or steal." Whatever it takes to get a picture made. This die-hard approach has produced some significant successes. And now, thanks in part to the introduction of new video camcorder technology and innovations like "FireWire," even low-budget indie filmmaking is going digital. A lot of people are justifiably excited by these technical developments. After Effects artists and "desktop" 3D animators are excited by the live-action content that digital video will make affordable. And the low-budget 16mm crowd is excited by the thought of no consumables, no film processing, higher shooting ratios, more experimentation, lightweight equipment, and low-cost non-linear editing on the computer. As these two crowds hook up and find a common landscape, a significant leap in the content of low-budget films is imminent. Which
leads us to our oxymoron that isn't. What might have once seemed opposite
ends of the filmmaking spectrum are instead coming together, joined
by common technology. With plummeting costs in computer technology and
significant gains in the power of affordable home-computing, it looks
like Hollywood's magic is about to find a whole new audience among the
cinema underground. An oxymoron yesterday, a fact tomorrow.
The Evolution of the Magician's Tools More and more, visual effects today means computer graphics. Matte paintings, traditionally painted on glass, are now tableted directly onto digital canvases in Adobe Photoshop. This program, now considered a staple to the publishing and graphic arts industries, was actually developed and nurtured from the needs of John Knoll's early effects work at ILM. It is little wonder that Mac and PC software now mimics or duplicates much of the sophistication of such studios as ILM and Digital Domain. Even top-of-the-line 3D imaging packages (like Alias PowerAnimator and Softimage 3D) must continually push the boundaries to retain a feature-set richer than the low-cost packages on desktop computers. It is a common perception among software experts that any innovation developed in the big effects studios will have trickled down to consumer software in about six-months time. This six-month lag has now given desktop tools many years' worth of big-budget effects techniques. Even some top-of-the-line 3D packages like Softimage have shifted their strategy, scaling down to run on souped-up PCs, taking full advantage of the rising processing power of consumer-grade computers (though their prices have not yet fallen enough to please the really low-budget crowd). And while Mac and PC graphics processing power approaches levels previously reserved to Silicon Graphics, SGI -- once only at home in the largest studios -- is now targeting machines toward the sophisticated desktop enthusiast. The SGI O2 workstation, with ample processing power and video capability built right in, approaches affordability for the low-budget studio. Even more sophisticated image-manipulation programs than Photoshop have trickled down to the desktop, giving advanced paint functionality to moving images. Digital compositing packages like Adobe After Effects provide an almost unlimited amount of imaging functionality, including open architectures to "plug-in" new capabilities as they evolve. The reverse trend to the "trickle-down" effect is also happening, with these inexpensive but fully-capable tools now being used in many of the bigger studios. Though not widely publicized, recent high-budget effects films have utilized consumer-level programs like Adobe After Effects and ElectricImage for many of their effects sequences. And the increasing affordability of this hardware and software means many of the top animators have similar gear in their own homes. Stu Maschwitz, one such digital artist from ILM, who has worked on effects blockbusters like Twister and Men In Black, feels perfectly cozy with his Macintosh 8500: "Having only the resources available to me at home on one little computer, I feel no restrictions whatsoever. For the type of work I'm doing, there's never a point where I'm thinking, 'God, I wish I was at ILM with all their stuff.'" Stu's current side project is a guerrilla effort called Skate Warrior, shot years ago on VHS for a shooting budget of "about fifty dollars" and being posted with the latest in desktop effects on the Macintosh -- namely "ElectricImage, After Effects, Lightwave, and a beta test of Commotion." Indeed,
the computer industry seems to have reached a critical and significant
juncture. With more and more of the effects artists' tools available
on an increasingly powerful desktop, the primary financial barrier that
still exists between script and post is the inflexible cost of film
and film equipment. Enter Digital Video By now, more than a dozen digital video (DV) camcorders have come to market, almost half of them blazing with new-fangled techno-connections like the miraculous "FireWire." These cameras may not give the low-budget filmmaker full-screen IMAX, or for that matter even a 35-millimeter print without some very real sacrifices and an expensive blow-up process. But for direct-to-video or direct-to-DVD, a very legitimate, high-quality camcorder finally exists, and Coppola's predictions (that "a little fat girl in Ohio is going to....make a beautiful film" and movies "will really become an art form") can't be too far away. And the quality of prosumer cameras will only improve. Details like widescreen (16:9) CCDs and interchangeable lenses may soon be available, narrowing the quality gap between "pro" and "prosumer" cameras even further. Regardless, many professionals are impressed with even the latest "prosumer" cameras and the DV format available today. The resulting images are clean and crisp, "good enough" for many pros and semi-pros. Certainly good enough for the low-budget guerrilla crowd that can get their hands on one. The lossless digital transfer to computer is even more significant for the new-age filmmaker. According to Stu Maschwitz, "Speaking from a purely technical standpoint, the thing that excited me, the reason that I bought my DV camera (the Sony VX-1000), was that it had FireWire on the back." Indeed, a direct digital path into the computer is a major stepping stone for visual effects work. And while the quality keeps going up, the prices keep coming down. FireWire was designed from the get-go to be inexpensive to manufacture. The cable itself was retro-developed from the I/O used on the Gameboy, a hundred-dollar video-game toy. Even when HDTV emerges on the scene, the prices and capabilities will continue to trickle down toward the prosumer, and into low-budget filmmaking range. Some people are understandably wary about changing digital formats, as television evolves to embrace improving image resolution, flickerless progressive scanning, and any other improvement the consumer will pay a little more money for. Indeed, as these technologies advance, the desktop director/producer is going to find an obsolescence-induced "upgrade" needed for the latest DV gear, in a similar vein to evolving computer gear. This is likely the largest deterrent to the low-budget indie crowd. After all, when was the last necessary "upgrade" in a Bolex camera? But rapid progress of the new format will also drive earlier generations of DV gear into the "used price" arena, a place where true guerrillas make their deals. The issue of image quality is also largely a subjective one. "It's irrelevant," says Maschwitz. "If someone came in and stole my DV camera, I'd shoot a film with my Hi-8 camera. If someone stole my Hi-8, I'd go find my Pixelvision...People only want to watch a film because the film is good." Robert Miller -- director of Mail Bonding, the first all-digital live-action short film -- agrees that there are more important issues than image quality: "I think the new DV cameras are an exciting development for indie filmmaking. They capture good digital images that can be ported, without loss, into a personal computer -- and there you can do virtually anything with them. But good, inexpensive gear is only a means. At the end of the day, story is everything. And your story will come through using that equipment." Indeed, when a compelling story captures the audience, many find themselves unaware or uncaring whether video originally caught the images. In deft hands, the filmmaker's magic seems to transcend the storage format altogether. Which
brings us to the most important part of the equation....
Filmmakers (Indie Guerrilla El Mariachi Style) Blame Robert Rodriguez. Now every young, slacker, straight-out-of-film-school (or dropped out), wanna-be hotshot thinks they can just grab a camera, scratch a script out on the back of some napkins, and go to the bank. Well, some are proving they can. These, the fearless creatives with a story to tell and the gumption to go for it, have been waiting for their chance at empowerment. And digital effects may be the next step. Many have already embraced the digital world, primarily for the power and affordability of non-linear editing. "Break the rules" is the only rule, and they do it every day, maxing credit cards, bumming loans and borrowing gear, shooting without permits, insurance, or craft-service. Some have bought hard-drives for non-linear editing 29 days at a time, returning the hardware just under the "30-day return" limit, right after transferring their movie data onto a new drive. Stories like this are not uncommon, die-hard character pulling off the improbable, beating the odds, beating the system. "Be scary," Robert Rodriguez says. They're being plenty scary. Established pros and brave new artists have already broken the barrier, slashed the digital edge with a wave of "firsts." Artists like Robert Miller (Mail Bonding) and Frank Grow (Love God) have put bits to tape and then expanded them for the silver screen. Love God scratched the surface of visual effects potential, going where film costs could never have taken it, and revealing some small glimpse of the way the artist's creative process might be affected. Gary Leib, credited with digital visual effects on the film, comments on the production: "The Avid room for Love God was two blocks from my studio. So Frank and I would literally draw an idea on a cocktail napkin in front of the Avid, and then I'd go home and make it, throw it on a piece of half-inch and the next day come back, and we'd cut it in on the Avid...So it grew very spontaneously." Stu Maschwitz' Skate Warrior is another example of spontaneous creativity. The action film was originally shot while Stu was in school at Cal Arts with "a very low-tech camcorder." Now over 150 visual effects shots make up the 45-minute film, both enhancing the drama and adding general production value to the whole. Maschwitz explains: "I began to see areas where I could add special effects to shots that I had never thought I would be adding them to." This enhancement involves both obvious effects sequences -- the muzzle flash from guns, explosions, spark hits and smoke, even a skateboard transforming into a sword -- and less obvious details, including adding crane shots, replacing background plates, stabilizing hand-held footage, and adding custom "film look" treatments to help make the aged video look more like film.
Stu Maschwitz'
Skate Warrior -- a 9 gig and a 9 mm
The same break-the-rules principals that brought low-budget films to light will quickly apply to effects work as well. Effects directors will be pushed to do more with less, to find ingenious solutions to problems that can't be solved with money. Up-and-coming art and film students, learning Photoshop brushes and Avid editing in addition to messy oil paints and clunky flatbeds, are already turning their minds to the digital spectrum. And what some tools do for painting or editing, other new software does for models and puppets, opticals and soundstages. Other
digital films are in the works, at various budget levels and across
various genres. Many innovative filmmakers are paving the way for the
digital future. The digitally-savvy of the new breed of Rodriguezes
may choose not to enlist in one of the armies building visual effects
the Hollywood way, but instead to craft their own stories. Or like Stu
Maschwitz, some big-studio animators -- having already earned their
knocks (and their salaries) -- might decide they too have their own
stories to tell, and the means to tell them. The Reality of Garage-Band Effects The paranoid among us may not welcome effects capabilities to the lower-class of film, for fear that the quality of indie stories might suffer, replaced by the bang of affordable effects. But low-budget films will never gain the huge effects production studio and the months and months of post required to crank out hundreds of complex effects shots. They will not be able to compete with big-budget effects extravaganzas, nor should they choose to. Instead, some high-end techniques become available to a low-budget picture -- and a poignant or important scene might be realized that would otherwise have remained unwritten. The choice of accomplishing that "perfect shot" with visual effects will allow even more good stories to be told. And the effects themselves will be different. As Stu Maschwitz points out, "At ILM I'm pushing the limits of what can be done period, and at home I'm pushing a different limit. The things that I'm doing on Skate Warrior, cars exploding and crane shots, are things that Hollywood can afford to do for real." Robert Miller also believes that low-budget effects content will be different: "Hollywood films are often little more than spectacle effects. Their stories, if present at all, rarely have soul, but they do push the R&D envelope and are occasionally entertaining. Robert Zemeckis' films -- Forrest Gump, Contact -- are wonderful exceptions to this. What we as independent filmmakers can consider are new ways to use straight-forward effects to tell a meaningful story. Mattes, blue-screen shots, compositing, this and more can all be done on personal computers now. What I'm interested in is making a thinking-person's special effects film." It
should be clear that not every Hollywood effect will find its way to
the low-budget indie, even if we desired it. Many of the most impressive
visual effects in today's blockbusters -- especially advanced 3D character
animation -- are probably unfeasible for the garage-band production
crew, in some cases requiring hundreds of highly-skilled, trained animators
and months or even years of time. (Note, however, that unfeasible does
not mean impossible.) Even if some big-budget techniques are now available,
how the indie uses a given technique will likely be quite different
from traditional Hollywood effects channels. But it is these techniques,
once considered unobtainable given the complexity and high resolution
of film, that have developed to the point that they are almost simple
to produce in video. And the illusions they create are well worth factoring
into even a lower-budget shoot. The Effects to Expect Digital matte paintings are an obvious use. This technique alone will likely change low-budget filmmaking drastically, giving it some of the best of the upper-class bang. From sweeping vista shots to simply being somewhere you could never feasibly be, the matte painting is one of the oldest and most effective illusions in cinema. True to form, this opens up low-budget opportunities: No permits? Don't shoot there! A series of still photos, some pushed out of focus as backgrounds and maybe one good establishing shot, and you are there. Hawaii, Siberia, Egypt -- the low-budget setting has expanded in a nanosecond. Simple matte paintings can be greatly enhanced with a 3D technique called "camera projection," possibly one of the simplest and most powerful new techniques. With camera projection, matte paintings come to life - what was once a static shot limited to crude pan and zoom can instead shift in perspective, including professional dolly and crane shots that give true big-budget feel to an otherwise budgetless scene. Maschwitz has used this technique to great effect in his opening and closing sequences for Skate Warrior, adding dynamic crane shots to shots that were originally filmed locked-down, or in one case, hand-held. "The final shot of the film was originally a stray up-angle that I grabbed of a building. In order to create a suitable image for camera projection, I had to stabilize that hand-held footage, and average several of those stabilized frames together to reduce the noisiness of the image. I was then able to digitally perform my crane shot in ElectricImage." Image stabilization, or motion-tracking, is another technique now available to desktop post-production. The benefits of image stabilization alone are often bounded by the limited resolution of the video frame, since scaling the image up is rarely a good idea in video. DV cameras with optical/digital stabilization, or the use of a Steadicam JR, are usually better low-budget options than raw stabilization in post. But the more important use of stabilization -- for adding effects seamlessly to hand-held footage -- is a more relevant consideration. "For the most part," says Maschwitz, I would say that stabilization is useful 5% of the time for stabilizing shots and 95% of the time for adding effects into a shot filmed with a hand-held camera. In the latter case, the motion in the original shot is left wholly intact, with the effects smoothly following the sometimes-erratic motion of the footage." With these and other compositing techniques, important pieces of the set might not even be there during the shoot, might in fact exist only in the computer -- either modeled in 3D or scanned from a photograph. And subtraction can be as powerful as addition; simple retouching jobs like wire-removal are relatively painless in digital space. Stunts that might be dangerous without ropes and harnesses, or expensive props, might now be possible -- the glaring safety gear deleted or the expensive prop added in a final composite shot. Add to these techniques the possibility of synthetic bullet flashes, laser burns, light and smoke and fire, even many once-dangerous stunt elements - these can now be plucked off CD-ROM or sculpted out of 3D cyberspace and dropped into live-action scenes with Adobe After Effects or some other compositing program. Maschwitz's action film involves numerous shoot-outs; the actors simply used toy guns painted black. "In every shot where one of these guns is fired, I'm going in, I'm looking for that frame where the gun rocks back, and on the frame right before that I'm adding a digital muzzle flash and maybe some interactive light on the surroundings or the shooter's face...and on the frame right after the gun is kicked, if it's a high-profile enough shot, I'm masking out the region where the gun hand is and adding a little bit of motion blur to it so it actually kind of looks like the gun is kicking in their hand. And then the final coup-de-gras is to take a little looping movie that I made in ElectricImage of a 9mm brass shell that just sits there and spins in space, and in After Effects I animate that to do a little parabolic trajectory out of the gun. So every time these guys fire the guns, there's a muzzle flash, a kick, and a shell ejected." 
Similar techniques -- involving firecrackers Stu shot with his DV camera -- give Skate Warrior the sparks of near-miss bullet shots, a little puff of smoke, and some floating debris. "I had no idea that I'd ever be able to do this, but it makes the gunfight scenes much more interesting because there's what looks to be very practical pyro events going on right next to the actors. And that's a good place for the motion tracker too, because if that's a hand-held shot then you can just grab the corner of the jeep or whatever's in the frame and just track this little smoke poof element to it, and then roto out whatever is in front of it. It's really quick and makes for a pretty convincing effect that sort of livens everything up." Putting live-action into all-digital scenes requires a few tricks and techniques. Difference mattes and blue- and green-screen technology are more and more common and affordable, though the best of the bunch (Ultimatte) is rather expensive for an After Effects plug-in. Still, even cruder compositing software and matting techniques continue to improve, and more home-grown blue-screen setups are likely to be built. As Robert Miller described, "You can get blue-screen to work really well with Premiere." While blue- or green-screen work may not be simple using DV, it is certainly possible for many who might never have considered it. Digital "treatments" are probably the simplest flair After Effects can offer. A stylized treatment can often mask or hide the low-budget feel of video, a weakness lessened but not eliminated by DV's improved format. "Film look" filters will likely become a standard for digital video movies. Other filtering techniques can be used to warp, bend, and distort imagery, or used to add snow, rain, smoke, fog. Gary Leib appreciates an experimental application of some of the wilder After Effects filters, including many layers of filters on filters. "It's the way things collide. The way a certain blur will hit a certain other thing...and you'll be like 'whoa, that looks like this, or suggests something.' ...Especially the DigiEffects filters in After Effects can really pile up in strange ways. Just the math operations on pixels can give you some good stuff. I definitely look for and seem to be getting projects that lean toward more psychedelic or stranger imagery, and this stuff just lends itself to it so perfectly." More than simply replacing traditional effects techniques, visual effects will give low-budget films new benefits - benefits Hollywood films would never rely on. It will become another part of the "simpler-faster-cheaper" guerrilla approach. As Stu Maschwitz clarifies, "Part of what I've come to love about this whole guerrilla filmmaking thing, and that I really prefer about doing it digitally, is that by doing these traditionally practical effects in post you get more control from a storytelling standpoint. You also reduce the degree to which you have to ask anybody's permission to get the stuff shot. It frees you up from the constraints of a production environment, where everything is hectic and everybody is asking you questions - and it's hard enough to think about how you're going to buy bagels for all these people or how you're going to get a certain shot by the end of the day, let alone how you're going to extract a good performance out of someone who probably was cast more for their availability than their thespian ability. It's difficult just to make a low-budget film about two people talking in a cafe, so if you're sitting there worried about whether your squib went off properly, or whatever, it just keeps the already restricted production from flowing as smoothly as it otherwise could." Most
importantly, with digital video, a broader set of possibilities are
available for a low-budget price, and those of you in the writing stages
might want to scrawl your napkin-backed scripts with these options in
mind. Digital Video and Visual FX: Truth or Dare A lot of us want to believe in the promises of digital video, in the opportunity to redefine the future of film. Will DV give visual effects to low-budget indies? Will it provide the means to realize stories that otherwise would never be told? Will Coppola's "little fat girl from Ohio" and Lucas's "two guys in a garage" be giving acceptance speeches at an upcoming Academy Awards? A lot of us are going to give it a try. Says Robert Miller: "At Sundance last year I mentioned to a couple of established producers that an independent feature film with meaningful special effects could be done on a low budget. They didn't believe it. Like others in the Hollywood herd, they will believe it after they see it." Some of it is happening already. The indie-guerrilla-16mm rebel is at it, thrilled with higher shooting ratios and instant dailies, pleased with the camera's light weight and unobtrusiveness while dodging permits, maybe even by the raw docu-feel of video. The visual effects supervisors, the technical directors, the 2D and 3D animators -- the cogs in the wheels of the big houses -- are all imagining the creative things they could do solo or with only a handful of like-minded talent. And the fringe computer whiz independent artist, who has played with all the cool toys and cranks out limited 3D or After Effects composites for CD-ROM or industrial videos, is now anxious for a powerful story to take him further. Whatever
the source, from DV to Hi-8 to "enhanced" VHS, and whatever the software
being used, from Photoshop to After Effects to Softimage, visual effects
are coming to low-budget indie film. Where digital video and guerrilla
filmmaking collide is an interesting place -- a space where powerful
effects techniques thrive and some talented minds are busy at play.
Don't count your oxymorons before they hatch. R.
Zane Rutledge (zane@dnai.com) is a partner at 668, torn between For
More Information [this incomplete list was omitted from the article;
it is included here for reference] FireWire/DV:
DVD:
Blue-screen
technology: Digital
filmmaking: LIST-SERV
AND
STAY TUNED TO RES MAGAZINE FOR FUTURE "IN-DEPTH" ARTICLES ON MANY OF
THE EFFECTS TECHNIQUES TOUCHED ON IN THIS ARTICLE! Computer
Equipment Relevant to this Article COMPUTER
HARDWARE FIREWIRE
BOARDS (as of August 97) SOFTWARE
Digital
compositing: Digital
illustration: Film
look: Blue-screen:
CD-ROM
collections:
668 ©copyright 2000 by r zane rutledge. all rights reserved. |
