Compositing in Contemporary Cinema

In this essay we’ll look at the different types of compositing used in contemporary cinema. By the end, hopefully like myself you’ll have a reasonable understanding of how different compositing effects have helped achieve the impossible in films such as ‘Star Wars, Superman’ and ‘Forrest Gump.’
My research has taken me down a number of multimedia related avenues including the internet and DVD, as well as traditional methods such as visits to the library.

What is compositing?
I find one of the best ways of visualising ‘compositing’ is to think back to art lessons in school. At some point you were probably asked to make a collage, which is basically the assembly of fragments or materials to create another image.
Effectively when you composite in movies you are doing the same thing. You are placing different images on top of one another to create another image.
Compositing is also known as matting because of the ‘masks’ or ‘mattes’ used in the compositing process.

Georges Melies

The Silent Era
The first invention that used light to project images was the ‘Magic Lantern’ of the sixteenth century. It consisted of a candle within a box which projected the light through a glass slide-painted image and a lens. When light shone on a surface, it magnified the still picture.
To come up with the illusion of motion, painted glass disks were made which moved in opposing directions. The images were than dissolved into one another with the aid of two lanterns fitted with shutters alternately dimming or brightening in unison. Mobile magic lanterns were wheeled back and forth to shrink and enlarge images and special effects were achieved by projecting onto glass or sheets of gauze.
Eventually the fusion of light, image and motion became a reality, although its attention didn’t last long because of uninspired subject matter: a man and a woman sharing a kiss; a train stopping for passengers etc.
One of the most important pioneers of early cinema was Frenchman Georges Melies. Cinema technology was just being developed, and he studied the various new mechanisms, and then had projectors, printers and processing equipment custom made.
By late 1896, Melies was incorporating his knowledge of motion pictures with stage magic acts, producing the first ‘trick’ films. These shorts relied on multiple exposures to create the illusion of people and objects appearing and disappearing at will, or changing from one form to another.
Over the next few years, Melies was perhaps the most inventive filmmaker in the world. Not only did he experiment with what could be done inside the camera with special effects and multiple exposures, but Melies led the way in the development of a film language based on separate scenes edited together in chronological order.
At a time when most filmmakers were content with single-shot films, Melies was stringing shots together to make mini-epics like ‘Cinderella,’ which used seven minutes and twenty separate scenes to tell the popular fairy tale.

The Studio Era
Introduced in the mid to late twenties, sound had a dramatic effect on movies. It saw the end of glass enclosed stages of the silent era and replaced them with sound stages. This was also the time studios chose to specialise:
• MGM became well known for its historical and musical spectacles
• Warner for its hard boiled gangster flicks
• Universal for its monster and ghoul flicks

Special effects artists who rarely had their own departments suddenly had them, although the vast majority were still called on as and when they were needed. The jobs were far ranging:
• Matt-painters made oil-painted ‘glass-shot’ images which could then be incorporated with live action.
• Stop-motion masters created puppets complete with machined skeletons which when manipulated and photographed one frame at a time achieved the illusion of motion on film.
• Model-makers designed and constructed props and miniature sets.
• Post-production experts manipulated film imagery to achieve dissolves, transparencies and other optical effects.

End of an Era
By the close of the sixties, the film industry appeared to be crumbling:

• The supreme court broke up the studios theatre chain monopolies
• Television was keeping potential cinema goers at home.
• Demographics indicated a younger movie-going audience hungry for the gritty realism of flicks like ‘Easy Rider,’ not effects laden movies like ‘The Ten Commandments’ or ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.’

As a result special effects departments were a casualty of corporate downsizing and an industry that had been run by the great dictators of the studio era like John Ford and Howard Hughes was over.

‘New’ Hollywood
The first wave of ‘new’ Hollywood directors was made up of white thirty-somethings and included Peter Bogdanovich (Paper Moon), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather), Alan Pakula (All the President’s Men), John Cassavetes (Gloria) and Robert Altman (M*A*S*H).
The second wave was made up of the film-school generation which included Martin Scorcese (Mean Streets), Steven Spielberg (Duel), Brian De Palma (Carrie) and George Lucas (American Graffiti).
Notice how the pictures made during this period didn’t break new territory with their special effects. The exception of course being Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey,’ released in 1968. Steven Spielberg said of the time: “The seventies was the first time that a kind of age restriction was lifted and young people were allowed to come rushing in with all of their naiveté and their wisdom and all of the privileges of youth. It was an avalanche of brave new ideas, which is why the seventies was such a watershed.”

A New Hope
During this period George Lucas was working on a script for ‘Star Wars.’ With it, he hoped to create a universe that would serve as a new kind of mythology.
Sadly most in Hollywood thought this was a pipe-dream because of deadline constraints and a shoestring budget.
After being turned down by a number of studios, Twentieth Century Fox picked up the project and along with a group of late twenty-somethings, inexperienced in the ways of Hollywood, George Lucas created ‘Industrial, Light and Magic.’
• Industrial – For the hardware which would record and composite film elements
• Light – What movies are made of
• Magic – An effects artist’s stock in trade

The group went on to create a revolution in visual effects.
Interestingly you’ll notice that the sub-title for ‘Star Wars’ is ‘A New Hope.’ One wonders if this has more meaning than the layman viewer realises.

The ‘Anderson’ and ‘VistaVision’
The old saying “They don’t make things like they used to” is certainly true of the Anderson Optical Printer. Picked up by ILM in 1975 for production work on ‘Star Wars,’ it was decommissioned in 1993 having processed millions of feet of film and still in perfect working order.

VistaVision

Built in the fifties by Howard Anderson for Paramount Studios it had been used for groundbreaking movies including ‘The Ten Commandments’ but had been sitting around unused for more than a decade. As a result ILM picked it up for $11,000. Its market value was $300,000.
ILM wanted the Anderson for more than just compositing purposes. The camera used a long since used production process called ‘VistaVision,’ a process which took standard 35mm film and instead of running it vertically through the gate of a camera, ran it horizontally, therefore doubling the frames exposure are for filming. This format was also known as ‘eight-perf’ for the number of sprocket holes on each side of the frame. Usually there would be four.
This would have no doubt been a major bonus for ILM. This is mainly because in the large majority of scenes in ‘Star Wars’ up to forty different optical compositing changes had to be made per shot. Therefore they needed a ‘film’ type that could withstand numerous changes. For obvious reasons the film grain worsens for every change that occurs, therefore degrading the picture quality.

Once these complex composites were produced, they were optically printed onto the standard ‘four-perf’ 35mm film for cutting into a movie.

Motion Control
Previous to ‘Star Wars,’ special effects such as flight would be achieved by moving a model on wires past a camera.
For ‘Star Wars’ the Dykstraflex system was created.
Using blue-screen photography and programmable, repeatable motion-control track camera systems it delivered mechanical flexibility, accuracy and speed. It remained with ILM for fifteen years.
This revolutionary motion-control system meant that during the filming of ‘Star Wars’ a mechanized camera fitted to the end of a boom was not only able to move up and down on tracks but also execute the desired pan, tilt or roll-motion.
If we want to create ‘the impossible,’ for example a man flying through the sky, blue screen photography can be utilised to achieve this effect.
When a sequence is shot in front of a blue screen the object can then be easily isolated from its background. This is basically because photography’s three primary colours of light are red, green and blue. Therefore when a subject is photographed in front of an illuminated screen of one of these colours the object can easily be isolated by generating colour separations.
Say we have a photo of somebody standing in front of a jungle, and another where the person is standing in front of a blue wall; it’s a lot easier to separate the latter. This is mainly because a person has next to no blue in their colouring. Therefore when we remove the blue from the image (optically or digitally) it’s easier to create a new background.
A great example of this can be seen in Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Forrest Gump.’ One of the central characters, Lieutenant Dan (played by Gary Sinise) loses his legs during a scene in Vietnam. Rather then film Dan from obscure angles to give the illusion he’d lost his legs Zemeckis’ special effects artists removed them digitally using blue screen photography.

Optical Printers
With an optical printer all the different composites can be re-photographed on a new film negative.
This is done by projecting the exposed photographic elements into the eye of a facing camera lens which then photographs it and any subsequent elements onto the same strip of negative film.
It’s important to remember that optical compositing and matting techniques are much the same as what we do with applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator today. The main benefit of today’s technology being it’s a lot quicker and cheaper.
During production of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ two new VistaVision cameras dubbed ‘Empire’ cameras were created. They were almost identical in design but were lighter and had shutter speeds ranging from one frame-per-second to 96 fps.
An optical printer dubbed the ‘Quad,’ was also created. It went on to receive an Oscar for technical achievement.

Rotoscoping
Another popular technique which combines animated images with live action is rotoscoping.
This involves creating masks or mattes by tracing portions of still frames of a live action scene. The tracings are then used as masks where 3d or 2d objects can be laid over a live action sequence.
It’s important to remember that when rotoscoping you should use as few points as possible. This is so that when you move onto the next frame you only have to manipulate a minimal number of points, thus avoiding ‘movement’ around the edges of mattes (known as ‘boiling edges’).

Front and Rear Projection
These two compositing techniques are frequently used in visual effects.
This is mainly because they are a lot less time consuming because masks or mattes don’t have to be made. Using the front or rear projection technique the actors themselves act as the mask. This is achieved by recording the actor’s performances in front of live projections of the background.

eXistenZ

One of my favourite examples of rear projection compositing is during David Cronenberg’s last film to date ‘eXistenZ,’ about a new gaming experience in which its players actually enter a different reality.
During the first quarter of the movie the two central characters (Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh) have a lengthy scene driving along in a pick-up truck.  During the director’s commentary on the DVD Cronenberg explains that he used rear projection for two reasons:

• Stylistically he wanted to suggest without being too obvious that there is something artificial about the world they are a part of.
• Budget constraints. Cronenberg says that to light, yet alone film a long car ride at night involving a lot of close-up dialogue would be very expensive.

He goes on to point out that the actual movement of the car was created by grips in the studio merely rocking it. Again this gives it the ‘not quite real’ feel he wanted to achieve.

Unlike rear projection, in front projection the background image is projected from the front of the screen. A good example of this is in Richard Donner’s ‘Superman.’ For this movie the visual effects team actually made their own lightweight front projection rig.
Optical supervisor Richard Field says the key to the flying effects in the movie was the beaded screen they created, because it reflects light back in exactly the same direction but almost a-thousand times the original intensity.
A piece of glass, mirrored on one side, transparent on the other is then placed in front of the camera at a 45-degree angle. A projector, beaming out the given background is then bounced off the mirror and onto the screen where the image intensifies. The image then bounces straight back into the camera where it’s recorded.

Zoptix
During the making of ‘Superman’ another visual effects breakthrough was the creation of Zoptix.
This was the device responsible for the shots of Superman getting closer or further away during his flight sequences. Created by Zorran Perisic it’s basically a zoom lens fitted into both the camera and the projector.
Where Superman is spinning, as he gets closer it’s simply the projector footage being rotated whilst the camera zooms-in on our hero.

Compositing Software
When buying different software packages the most important consideration is probably whether or not it supports the different plug-ins available. At the moment compositors are very good at this.
Compositing packages enable you to import, isolate and combine elements from several video shots into a single frame. They all contain masking and keying tools which means you can integrate still and moving images.
Many of the different packages now enable you to work in 3d as well. This means you can place layers in 3d space and add and animate cameras and light. You also have the power to look at your work from several viewpoints at once.

When purchasing compositing software it’s worth checking to see if it offers motion tracking. This means you can trace the 2d motion of an object within a scene and map an object or image onto the moving object. Motion tracking is also used to correct ‘camera-shake.’
At this time (2002), ‘After Effects 5.5’ appears to be the most popular for both Mac and PC. It costs £617.00 although bought as a production bundle it goes for £1439.00.
Looking at the pricier side of the market, for £200,000.00 ‘Flame’ is an industry standard high end compositing tool for video and film.

The Future
As far as the future of compositing is concerned if you let your mind run riot you can conjure up all kinds of possibilities.
Only last year saw the release of ‘Final Fantasy,’ the first movie ever where its stars are synthespians (computer generated actors) and although the film itself was something of a flop due to a rubbish storyline, the movie’s special effects have been praised.
One future event that excites me is the release of Bruce Lee’s latest movie ‘Dragon Warrior’ in 2004, nearly thirty years after his death. Indeed, the dragon is making a return thanks to South Korean film company ShinCine Communications, which acquired the rights to Lee’s likeness from his estate.
According to reports the company have been working on the film for four years so far, and the wife and daughter Lee left behind have both given their blessing to the move. Admittedly opinion is divided over whether it’ll actually be any good but if rumours are to be believed ‘Dragon Warrior’ could see the beginning of a new era in cinema history.
Films like Jet Li’s ‘The One’ already have short sequences featuring digitally created actors but ‘Dragon Warrior’ will see director Chul Sin give digitised Bruce Lee ‘leading man’ status alongside a human cast.
He’ll do this by getting a select few martial artists to imitate Lee’s moves with motion capture equipment. He’ll then apply the movements to his digital Bruce Lee models, giving fight sequences a natural flow.
With a bit of luck half-rate actors will no longer be able to carry on as if they are something special, demanding ridiculous sums of money per film. Special effects gurus could finally be about to receive the recognition they deserve.

Other developments in the future of compositing will include cameras which enable the capture and manipulation of 3d data in real time. I only recently heard of such mechanisms and you’ve got to see them to believe them.
‘Zcam’ enables the real-time separation of an object from its background. Instead of relying on blue screen compositing, foreground elements can be shot against any background, and displayed against select backgrounds.
It seems clear these cameras won’t be the norm for a while but just they’re existence is surely proof enough that the future of compositing could change dramatically.