SHORT SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL & ASIA 2015

Ian Hunter, one of this year’s Oscar winners, unveils the secrets behind the visual effects in “Interstellar”!

Ian Hunter, whose credits include Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” and “Inception,” won this year’s Academy Award for Best Special Effects with the film “Interstellar.” He demonstrates the magic of special effects, ranging from traditional miniature/stop motion techniques to the latest digital visual effects. Don’t miss this opportunity to catch his seminar again here! Here is Part 2:

The slides I am going to show you are a little more serious.

In that, I have gotten to work on several of Christopher Nolan’s movies, and in fact, the last four Christopher Nolan’s movies I’ve had a privilege of working on. The work has been very challenging to say the least Christopher Nolan is a very strong director who pushes his crews to do a lot of hard work and pull off difficult shots because he wants to push the envelope a little bit and be very expressive and creative. He tries to do things for real and get a very strong emotional response out of his audience. In my case, I’ve really had the privilege of working on four of his movies, ‘Dark Knight’, ‘Inception’, ‘Dark Knight Rises’ and finally ‘Interstellar’.

One of the things that Chris always pushes for is realism— despite the fact that he is making his movies, which are involving a billionaire who is able to ride in a really expensive car and smash things, or sometimes we’ve got a crew of thieves who go into people’s dreams and steal their thoughts. In ‘Dark Knight Rises,’ we have our billionaire back once again, fighting an arch enemy who is stronger than he is. And finally ‘Interstellar,’ which is a film that is a science fiction movie where we are supposed to believe that we can travel great distances across the universe and up at different worlds and different galaxies.

All of this, Chris likes to make you feel it’s real and he prefers to photograph things. And when I say photograph, it means that he is using a camera that has film in it, not digital. And he prefers to shoot actors on sets and in front of real locations. Because he thinks that, I’m not speaking about him but my impression after having worked with him several times, is that he wants you to believe emotionally what you are looking at. And the best way to do that is to photograph that and show it to you and then get you to find the story that he is presenting.
Oftentimes though, the story he wants to present has things in it that are difficult to do for real. In these particular cases, he uses visual effects to pull off the shots to fulfill his storytelling. Oftentimes, he will do most of his effects physically using either Chris Corbould, the name of a physical effects supervisor that he uses from England. He also uses one named Scott Fisher, who we have worked together on ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Inception.’ And the first thing that Chris will try to do is shoot for real. The second thing he will do is shoot for miniatures, because miniatures are still real, except they are just smaller in scale.
And the third thing he will do is to use CG. He doesn’t shy away from using CG; in fact, he uses it quite a bit but he always wants the CG to feel realistic and to not take you out of the story. It’s important that the CG artist follows realistic guidelines in order to fulfill telling a story.

Here are a few instances or a few case studies where I’ve worked with Christopher Nolan and credited some of the effects in his films.
First up is for the film ‘The Dark Knight.’ I call it the story of David and Goliath. David and Goliath were the enemies in the Bible. David was a small guy, a regular sized man, and Goliath was a giant. But David was able to persevere over Goliath and win the day. And in this case, what Christopher Nolan asked us to do was to have the Batmobile, or the Tumbler as we like to call it — the Batmobile had to drive down and smash into a garbage truck and push the garbage truck down this road, and get rid of the garbage truck actually spinning it out of control. Then Batmobile goes back into action.
Now, in order to do that, the problem we had was that the Batmobile is smaller than the garbage truck, lighter than the garbage truck generally. And in true fashion when you actually have two objects hit each other, they cancel each other’s motion out. But Chris said, well, no, no, I just want it to keep going, it doesn’t stop, it just picks up the garbage truck and pushes it back. I said, yeah but the garbage truck is heavier, it’s bigger, and when two things hit they cancel each other out. He said, yeah, yeah, but make the Batmobile hit the garbage truck and not stop and push it back. I said, okay we’ll figure it out, we will find out some way to do it.

Now, they had shot most of the scenes for the film at a road called Wacker Drive in Chicago, Illinois, but they couldn’t use it to do this scene for a couple of reasons. One of which was they could only shoot from 7 at night to 7 in the morning and then they had to turn it back over to the city of Chicago so they could continue driving on it. The other thing, of course, is that they couldn’t risk destroying one of their multimillion dollar Batmobiles by hitting a garbage truck, and frankly they couldn’t get a real garbage truck and a real Batmobile to do what the action that Chris had asked for.
In this case again, we turned to doing it as a miniature effect. We built a model of Wacker Drive that matched what was shot on location, we built a Batmobile and we built a garbage truck. However, Chris liked to shoot his action scenes with moving cameras.　So the Batmobile was driving and it was being chased by two Scorpions, they call them, which are camera trucks that have cameras on the back of them.　They are actually Mercedes-Benz SUVs and you drive them along and you follow the action.　In order to make sure our shots matched the rest of the film, we had to build a model of Wacker Drive that would allow us to follow the Batmobile with the camera and create the same sort of shooting style that they were using in live action.　Even though it’s a miniature, the final model that we built for Wacker Drive was quite large. The sort of covered part of the miniature was about 120 feet long and then the place where everyone is standing is another 40 feet, so it’s 160 total feet of set that was built. And it’s actually larger than my stage in Los Angeles. I ended up building it at an old hanger that used to be used to build the space shuttle of all things. That’s the only place I found that was large enough to do it. You can see that window off to the right there, we kind of felt like we were in some sort of James Bond’s villain’s lair building this set.

We built this large model of Wacker Drive in one-third scale and we also built several of the Tumblers or Batmobiles. This particular one was the one that was going to be used to smash into the garbage truck, and what we did was to make sure that it could do the job. It’s actually made of steel underneath the fiberglass shell. On the outside, you see fiberglass but underneath that is fixed steel plate and that made the Tumbler much heavier than the garbage truck was going to be.　We also took one of the cars from ‘Batman Begins’　which is a radio-controlled car and we refurbished it for the shot where it spins out because the real Batmobile actually couldn’t spin out. It’s? if you imagine something spinning out, it has to go 180 degrees around and so it faces the opposite direction. When the Batmobile would try to do that for real in Chicago,　it would hit the curve. It would just steer right into the curve and it never quite worked, so we had to do that as miniature also.
We’ve got our miniature Batmobile both in radio control and the steel one and here we are putting it together. It’s made heavy. It’s very durable and has this big, what we call, the knife in the front. If you see in the very front between the tyres, there is a big steel plate. That was actually what was used to pick up the truck and push it up.
Meanwhile, Goliath, in this case, is the garbage truck. We decided to build that out of aluminum and foil and plastic resin, so it’s actually quite light. For instance, even though we did build out of lightweight materials, the garbage truck ended up being about 300 pounds but the Batmobile, made of steel, ended up being about 600 pounds. Now, we have a thing where we’ve got more mass on the Batmobile side than the garbage truck side, so this is going to help us push that garbage truck aside when we need to film it.

Now, this was a low budget movie; I kind of say that as a joke, but we only really had one garbage truck chassis, so we had to build several different bodies so that we could get several takes of this crash occurring. Here, we are with these replaceable bodies that we can make. They are all very lightweight and they are made of crushable material. It’s literally plastic resin and foil. They are very fragile. This would allow them to be crushed by the Batmobile, which is much more durable. Here, we are putting together inside of a set that we showed you previously. It was very low, so we had to sort of hunch down to get inside there. I have the driver in there too, don’t worry, he doesn’t get hurt. When he gets smashed against the roof, I had a cable on him so we could pull down, so he wouldn’t hurt himself.
The other trick though, was to pull these vehicles along from below. So what we did was we had a slot in the middle of the road and from that slot, we had a post that would come up and catch the truck and catch the Batmobile. And then we used what we call skates, which are these mechanical devices that were below the set, and they would actually crash into each other. Those were pulled on cables on Servo motors. And again, we planned all this out. We actually did animation showing what the affect would be before we built everything and then once we built it, we tested it at our stage… Wham!

We have the truck now, we’ve got the Batmobile. We also needed to have those cameras chasing the action, so we actually built separate camera cars that were built on chassis for… what we call them? You drive around in little cars… But we put cameras on them. Those had remote controls heads on them, so we could actually follow the action as the Batmobile is going down the road. We also had to do the spinning with the Batmobile. So that’s the radio-controlled car that we would test and spin for the shot of the spinning. It also had all the flaps that worked on it. Then, finally, we took all of the testing we did and put that together in our set, 120-feet long, breakaway car, tough Batmobile, smash, follow the action and spins out.
What we ended up doing was we had one shot where the Batmobile was on the cable, it crashes into the garbage truck. And then in the second shot we pulled the garbage truck back with the cable again and do the spinout with another model. When it’s cut together, it appears to be a continuous set of action and here is how it appears in the film.

Again, the trick there was that we had to start with a live action scene which is the full-sized Batmobile, the full-sized garbage truck and the full-sized Joker in the car, then intercut that with our miniature— smashing into the garbage truck, spinning out, and then finally leaving— and then we go back to live action again.　It was really important that our model, not only the Batmobile and the garbage truck but even Wacker Drive, had to match specifically what was shot in live action so that we could intercut those two scenes together.

The next film that we worked on for Mr. Nolan was ‘Inception.’

Again, this was a really challenging project for us. Christopher Nolan had this notion or this idea that we could build a dreamscape, a world where you are inside someone’s dream. But his thought was that while you are in that dream, there are rules that you are going to follow in terms of how the action was to take place and the way time would slow down in the dream. Even though you can get away with a lot in a dream, in Christopher Nolan’s world, you still need to sort of stay within the logic that he establishes.

For that film, we had to do a scene involving what we called the Fortress Hospital. This was near the end of the movie where within a dream, and we’ve come up on this giant building in the mountains, and in the building is a character that has some information and they need to steal that information. But as they are trying to steal the information, the dreamscape starts to disintegrate. So Christopher Nolan wanted to show this Fortress Hospital collapsing and disintegrating in a specific manner.　This is where it got really tricky and challenging for us because he wanted the building to collapse but he wanted to do it in such a manner that the building was falling apart in pieces. So it didn’t come down in one big swoop, it actually had to come down in a very choreographed manner and in extended series of actions so that he could see on film that the fortress was disintegrating, demonstrating that the dream was itself disintegrating. And the dreamscape was coming apart.
In order to do that, we built this large model of the Fortress Hospital. We built it in one-sixth scale and the reason we built it so large was because we had to put pyrotechniques(pyrotechnics) into it.

Both for ‘Dark Knight’’ and for ‘Inception’, I used a pyrotechnician named John Cazin, so he specialized in doing miniature explosives that we used on this film. We built it in a very modular fashion. We built
a framework for the – on the left which is for the mountain itself. The fortress itself was built first as set of patterns. Here you see the patterns in the middle. We made moulds of those patterns and then from that we cast very fragile pieces and assembled them. So that also was one of the challenges was that we had to build something that was structurally strong enough to hold itself up but weak enough to fall apart on cue.
In order to do that, we actually did quite a bit of mechanical engineering where we built a collapsing frame inside the model that held it up. We could attach these breakaway phases to it and then on a cue, we could actually get that frame to fall apart and take the pieces of the model with it. Here is another section of the model being completed.
Also, what was difficult was that it was an inverted pyramid so the basic shape of the building, a regular pyramid facing this way is strong but an inverted pyramid facing this way is weak, so it’s inherently a weak structure. It needs to fall apart on cue and we had to put it outside in the wind and so it became very difficult to pull this off but we did it.

Here are a couple of tests we did showing the pyro. Now, the first time you see the pyro, it will be at normal speed, but then we’ve slowed it down to show you the frame rate that we are going to be shooting at. So, for instance, this was at 72 frames per second, so when you first see it, it’s at a normal speed. And then the second shows the same clip at 72.
That was for the columns that break on the building. We did a test also just for the explosions, so again
the first part is at normal frame rate and the second part is at 72 frames per second. The sound is also slowed down which is kind of cool.
What we are doing here is normal frame or normal film is projected at 24 frames per second. When you shoot a miniature and especially when it’s blowing up or collapsing, you want to shoot at a higher frame rate. The reason for that is to slow the action down so that when it’s projected again back at the normal frame rate, it feels like it’s got mass and weight. In this case, we shot at 72 frames per second which
turns out to be about the right speed you want to shoot for one-sixth scale to get the action to slow down and appear to be normal when it’s projected back at 24. We are shooting three times faster showing – projecting it back at the normal frame rate. Which means that if we shot something and we see it only take place for 1 second to our eye, when we watch it again, play it back, it will take 3 seconds.
That’s how we were able to make this large model appear to slow down and feel massive.

We’ve built the model. It’s in pieces. It’s very fragile. Now, we have to put it together and so we built this in our parking lot. We used a crane to put it all together and lift it in place. The miniature itself was about 47-feet tall when it was done. Oh, and one of the things that happened was Chris always likes to throw something at us to make it more exciting. One of his sorts of signature types of shot is a helicopter shot,
so in order to shoot a helicopter shot looking down on this miniature, we are already 47 feet in the air.
But he wanted to see a helicopter looking down, so if you look in the upper left, there is a technocrane, which is a camera crane, holding a camera on a platform that’s being held up by another crane 70 feet in the air. And that allowed us to get that sweeping shot that looked like a helicopter.
Then, surrounding the model down low are some cameras in boxes to protect them from the photographer from the explosion. You can see here that we actually built only the amount of the model we needed for the destruction and for the interaction of the breakaway pieces as they hit the mountain.
Everything else to the left and right of the model in the shot were created with stills and footage taken in Calgary, Canada. Paul Franklin was the supervisor, from the frm Double Negative, who worked on this and has worked with us on the previous Nolan movie, ‘Dark Knight’. He took our photography of the destruction and combined that with the photography in Calgary to create the whole scene. But we only built as much model, as I said, that needed to interact with the actual collapse.

To give you a sense of what we had to do in order to put this together, here is a time lapse showing
the actual construction of the miniature. We used shipping containers to hold it up. They were very durable and structurally gave us something to weld to. They relayed on our parking lot a very specific angle so that when we would shot this at a specific day in a particular month, the sun angle on our model would match the sun angle of the live action in Calgary. It was all calculated out very carefully. The mountain was built in modules, sections, and then those sections were added over the containers.
We also then built the fortress itself in pieces in our parking lot. And that had a steel frame, like I said, inside, that we were then able to hoist in the place with the crane after we attached all the breakaway faces.
It became very difficult to work on the model once it was in place because we had to work off of these lifts, so we couldn’t just walk up to it anymore. So, all the dressing and all the fine work had to be done off of lifts. We then dressed the mountain side with fake snow. We loaded the model with explosives and you saw those tests beforehand. We blew it up real good. We then took it apart, and 1-week later, we put it back together again for a second take.
Yes, so that was again a pretty challenging job. It took about 14 weeks to build the model and to put it together outside. And then for the second take it took a week to recreate it again. We had already built these other parts. The actual sequence, there were over 200 events occurring from when the first explosion starts to when the final part of the building collapses. The actual amount of time it took
to watch those 200 events take place was 5.5 seconds. I got to push the button, so that was a lot of fun.

The next show we got to work on was ‘Dark Knight Rises’, a sequel to ‘Dark Knight,’ and this was a little easier to deal with than ‘Inception.’
Chris always put on the – in the Batman movies; he always puts a really cool sort of opening scene.
He had done one with the joker in ‘Dark Knight’. In this case, he wanted to do one with the character of Bane, where he hijacks an airplane called the Embraer, which is a Brazilian turboprop. He has got a guy onboard he wants to take, so he gets on board the plane…

Anyway, who has seen the movie by the way, a show of hands? Very good.
Anyway, he wants to take this plane, so Chris wanted to do the scene where he shows this airplane being taken by Bane, but he wanted to make sure to show that it was being sort of ripped apart by the turbulence as it gets taken by this larger plane above it. In order to do that again, we resorted to a miniature. So we built a model of the Embraer that matched the full-sized airplane. That’s the full-sized one. We took basically light art scans of that plane and used that to build a CG model. From that, we built a physical model that matched the CG1 per se. Then, we also used that model to create previz
that showed the scene, shows the wings coming off. Again, this was a guide for us, the previz became techfiz [ph] where we took the same animation but then laid it out in our parking lot showing the actual motion of the plane and motion of the cameras and how big the green screen is. You can see it’s a pretty big green screen. We also put fans in front of the plane, so as the parts come off they would fly back.
We used air ratchets to pull the plane apart in pieces. So, while we are doing this, techfiz is showing us how we are going to shoot the scene, we took the digital model that we had of the airplane and used that to CNC cut, a body, and from that body we took a mold and from that we were able to then build the airplane. We built a laser cut interior, added that to the fiber glass part of the airplane, painted it, put it together. Everything that comes apart on the plane, we put detailed, so the wings and everything that you would expect to see once the plane comes apart was there. I had little pilots inside of it. All the detail was added to the plane to match the full size plane. We also tested the explosions, so here we are just showing the engine burning out and also the wing coming across, coming apart, and then here is one of the takes.
So, that’s the photography of the element against the green screen, again shot outside. Once, we took the wings off, we then took the same model and shot the scene where the tail comes off. Again, this is shot outside at a specific time of the day and a specific day in the month, so the sun angle that’s on the model matches the sun that was in the photography for live action. Again, once, we did the model photography, we handed the elements over to Double Negative and Paul Franklin, the supervisor, again took the miniature and combined that with the live action they had shot. The idea, again, was to make sure that our miniature photography and their live action photography matched and was seamless. Again, here how appears the scene as it appeared in the film.

The other scene we were involved with on that, was for when in the movie the Bane character takes over from Wayne Enterprises, it takes all the Tumblers and weapons from Wayne Enterprises. We had to build what we called Bane’s Lair, so again we got to work on the Batmobile again. Only this time it was going to be painted in a neat camouflage color. We also built this model of Bane’s Lair which was the sort of sewage plant. They had built that in England in a place called Cardington in England. As the bottom of the set, we built the top of the set and we had to break the roof out to let the Batmobile fall through.
The other thing that was happening was during the scene, it is a sewage plant, so there is water spraying everywhere. It is dripping everywhere. We actually installed water sprayers in the model that allowed us to have water spraying down on the camera as we photographed it. Again, we do a lot of planning, so we tested the crashing of the Batmobile as it comes through the ceiling. Work out the timing of when we need to breakthrough that ceiling and drop it. This is a shot showing it in mid-air as it comes through. Then, we also built the bottom where it comes down and hits the ground. That was another set that was shot separately so that we shot one shot of it coming through the ceiling, another shot of it coming and hitting the ground and those were then cut together in the final movie. One of the main reasons that we built this model it turns out, I found out later, was that Christopher Nolan again, for storytelling purposes, wanted to be able to look up and see the bottom of Wayne Enterprises had been breached and he wanted the P.O.V of Batman looking up to do that. Well, they didn’t actually have enough room in Cardington to build the full set. They could do all the fight scenes down at the bottom with Batman and Bane, but when Batman looks up and he sees that the roof has been breached, it turned out to be one of our miniature shots with the rain coming down, and then we shot some of our guys, as stunt players, crawling through the hole that was created. It served double duty, not only did we get to see the Batmobile breaking through but we provided these P.O.Vs. Again, it’s a case of a miniature being used to help tell the story.

Christopher Nolan very strongly believes in using visual effects, like any other shot in his film. When we shoot for him, we shoot all the shots full length. We give it to him full length and then he edits or cuts them together as he feels necessary to tell the story. Oftentimes, we will show a full action and so, for instance, back to ‘Inception’, we start with the tower in the front collapsing and finish with the big building in the back collapsing. It’s all one long take and then he decides how he wants to cut that together. It’s nice because it means that as a director, he considers the visual effects shots to be as integral to his storytelling as any other shot in the film. It’s just a matter of we are using a different technique but it’s all important in the long run.
So, uh… We’ve built the Bane’s Lair. We’ve tested the Batmobile breaking through and then here we are showing the scene as it appears in the film. The ceiling above Bane’s Lair, the Bane’s Lair part below, where the Batmobile came through, that’s one-third scale, but even I didn’t have enough room in my stage to actually put the ceiling above it at the right distance, so the ceiling that’s above Bane’s Lair,
that is part of Wayne Enterprises, is one-sixth scale. So, the foreground and the part in the front is one scale and then the part in the background is a smaller scale. It appears to be further in the distance than it really is because it’s in the reduced scale. But that’s one of the tricks to this business is to combine scales and combine techniques in order to pull off the shots. Then, the little guys that are crawling up are some of my crew dressed as SWAT team members, who are pulling up on ropes.

We’ve gotten two destroyer garbage trucks and blow up a building and do a lot of destruction for Christopher Nolan.

To be continued…