The latest in a string of children’s books to get the translation is Nim’s Island (opening April 4 from Fox/Walden). Based on the book of the same name by Wendy Orr and Kerry Millard, it centers on the adventures of a little girl named Nim (Abigail Breslin) who lives on an isolated island with her father. She spends her days with lizards and pelicans and sea lions for company, and then turns to the pages of her beloved, imported Alex Rover books that help encourage her flights of fancy and adventure. But when her father disappears, Nim reaches out to the author of her favorite books, Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), to help her rescue him. Unfortunately, Alexandra is a virtual recluse but, through some twists of fate, the two come together on the island to conquer the most difficult foe of all -- their own fears.

Directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, Nim’s Island actually started with the intention of being a very practical shoot, with little vfx. Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Gordon of CafeFX explains, “Early on, there had been a few versions of the script where the amount of visual effects kept shrinking with each new iteration. Mostly, I think, they were trying to bring it in on a budget. The vfx budget got smaller and smaller, and finally we got the go-ahead.

“When I read the script, I was dying to work on it,” Gordon enthuses. “It’s a terrific story, and it required visual effects that would serve that story, not the other way around. So it’s not a typical vfx film. It involves a lot of CG animals but they don’t do things like speaking. What we did was to create behaviors and actions for the animals that were theoretically possible but couldn’t be achieved in camera, like getting a pelican to pick up a tool belt or getting a lizard to look at an actor and open his mouth. Our Animation Supervisor, James Straus, and his team established the comic personalities for those CG characters, with Galileo the pelican as a helper and a hero, and Fred the lizard as more of the comical sidekick.”

Production on Nim’s Island began in Australia in July of 2007, and Gordon went out to supervise the shoot. “They wanted someone to supervise on set, but they weren’t looking to hire a production side supervisor. Since it was primarily a CafeFX project with perhaps 10% going elsewhere, I became the overall supervisor. But Nim’s Island ended up going from around 200 shots to 465, and we had an extremely short schedule and a limited budget. The post schedule went from October to February -- a little under four months. We ended up coming up with some clever ways to get more bang for the buck.”

With that huge increase, CafeFX immediately reassessed the work and Gordon says, “In the end there were a lot of extra shots, and there were even some cosmetic fixes that came up at the last minute. When the project grew, it made sense for CafeFX to take on all the character shots, in order to maintain consistency, so other vendors had to be brought in. We were already heavily invested in the pelican, lizard and sea lion, as well as the Fire Mountain and cruise ship shots.”

When it came to assigning all the rest of the needed shots, Gordon says he worked closely with producer Camille Cellucci to select the right vendors. “Camille was the visual effects producer for Walden Media during post,” he adds, “and she’s had lots of experience with other vendors, and was incredibly helpful at divvying this up. I had total trust in her. We started out with Cine-Fn as the only other vendor beside CafeFX, with them handling some matte painting shots. After looking at the first assembly we brought on Digital Dream, Eden FX and Handmade Digital. Handmade is Alan Bell’s company, and he was a co-producer on Nim’s Island, having worked with Mark and Jen before on Little Manhattan. He was on set and helped conceive many of the visual effects shots.

“EdenFX came on to handle the big transitions and non-animal bluescreen work, like the Arabian Desert sequence. One of the biggest shots they did was a huge transition where we start from Nim in the window on her island and pull back to see the entire island, then the entire globe and then push back in past in to San Francisco, past the Golden Gate bridge and then into Alexandra’s window. They also did a shot where Alexandra is in her rowboat where the camera goes up through the weather to the top of a hurricane and then back down into it to see Gerard Butler lashing down his boat in the storm. They also had the opening sequence, and another big pull-back at the end of the film. EdenFX also had about 100 shots that were island removals. Nim’s Island is set on a deserted tropical island, but in reality there were islands all around.”

Breaking down all of the eventual vendors and shot counts, Gordon recounts, “CafeFX did 174 shots, EdenFX did 203 shots, Digital Dream did 15, Handmade Digital did 25, Cine-Fn did 17, Digital Dimension did seven, Amalgamated Pixels did 13, Halon did seven and Lola did nine. The number totals more than 465 because they were a number of shared shots… There was tremendous cooperation all around.”

With all the constraints, Gordon adds that CafeFX had to get really creative with their hero animal shots, as the order kept increasing due to production challenges. “For example, there are many, many CG pelicans,” he offers. “The real ones don’t fly because their wings are clipped. Trained pelicans were supposed to be used on set, but in many cases that couldn’t be done without vfx because the pelicans tended to bite or run away when they got close to an actor. I remember we were trying to shoot with the pelican and Gerard Butler and there were two pelicans playing Galileo. All it had to do was sit there, but as soon as Gerard would say a line, the bird would run or peck at him. So we had those kinds of problems but we solved it with a split screen. It was a little tricky, since we couldn’t lock off the boat, but we managed. There were quite a number of CG pelicans, but we also composited real pelicans that we shot against bluescreen, against partial sets, or that second unit shot out in the wild. Any time we needed something like a pelican picking up a tool belt, it was CG, though. We also had several long shots where the pelican flies down to a little boat in the middle of the ocean, and those were CG, too, because we couldn’t get a real pelican to do that.

But for the close-ups with pelican landings, we set up bluescreens and had the trained pelican land on marks and then extracted him for the shot. Many shots were conceived in the edit room too, and for those shots we looked at what elements we had. Sometimes we used one of our bluescreen takes. Other times we rotoscoped something out of our second unit library. Every trick in the book was used. We kept our Compositing Supervisor Tom Williamson and his team busy right to the end.”

Despite the proper allocation of work, Gordon maintains that additional shots kept piling in. “It got very intense in the last few weeks, and we got about 50 new shots during that period,” Gordon continues, “including six new lizard shots, and one pelican shot. Those would have gone to CafeFX but we were at capacity and we had a very hard deadline. CafeFX would be able to give the models and textures to another vendor, but the rigs and the shaders were all custom. We bid it out to a few companies and I fully expected them all to turn it down, but Digital Dimension said, ‘Yes.’ I was concerned since this was a ridiculously short amount of time, but Digital Dimension totally came through…”

Based in Montreal, Canada, Digital Dimension jumped into the fray and helped the Nim’s production meet their deadline. DD Animation Supervisor Kim Richardson says, “We looked at some stock from the other vendors to get a heads up. We didn’t get too many shots so it wasn’t too hard to get the animation done quite quickly. It was fun. They supplied us with all the models and the textures so we basically had to re-rig them because we had the lizard, Fred and the pelican, Galileo.”

Considering they had to match prior work, Richardson adds, “We studied the movement of the lizard. It was real lizard animation so we looked at the BBC Motion Gallery for eye movements. He didn’t really move that much which was interesting because we had never really done a real lizard before. We looked at the real lizard on Nim’s shoulder and used that to match. It worked and wasn’t difficult for us. We had three animators on the job and used Softimage. We would animate the shot, give it to the lighting guys and then it would render out and go to comp in a blocking phase to the director. We would get comments back and then render it with the final patches.”

Despite the headaches and scary turnaround, Gordon says enthusiastically, “I have never had an opportunity to participate at such a high level creatively. The directors and producer were wonderful people, who were very inclusive in terms of wanting to hear ideas.”

Tara Bennett is an East coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1-6.

The Society recognized the company's outstanding work on the HBO Film "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" in the category of Created Environment in a Live Action Broadcast Program or Commercial. Digital Dimension was also nominated in the category of Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or Special for their work on the Movie "Race to Mars" presented on The Discovery Channel.

The visual effects work in "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" consisted in recreating scenes that would traditionally be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible to film with a live cast. The company therefore created digital villages, backgrounds and sceneries and then included CGI riders on horseback and soldiers along countless additional extras in order to make the final shots look picture perfect.

"Despite the fact that the effects in this film are invisible, they were extremely complex shots." said Ben Girard, President of Digital Dimension. "Wounded Knee relied heavily on past historical accuracies, it was essential for our digital composites and CG to be indistinguishable from anything shot practically. This required great attention to detail on behalf of our effects team, and we're very proud of their work."

The VES is the entertainment industry's only official trade organization representing the extended community of visual effects practitioners including supervisors, artists, producers, technology developers and studio executives.

including the "money shot" involving a car tumbling through the air and smashing into the hoods of two more cars traveling on the ground, as a veritable CG-fest. But you'd be wrong.

That stunt, along with many others, was staged on location with actual cars flying through the air and smashing into each other. The scene showing John McClane, the rugged New York cop played by Bruce Willis, sending a car flying through the air to take out a hovering helicopter was achieved in much the same way - the physical stunt was staged and photographed from different angles, and then Digital Dimension cleaned up the image and handled a lot of detail work.

Elsewhere, more apparently ordinary shots demanded the creation of close-up, photo real cars. In Live Free or Die Hard, the visual effects work is often both more and less than meets the eye.

The mandate was to bring a certain physical reality to the production. Director Len Wiseman - on his third film a VFX veteran, with Underworld and Underworld: Evolution already under his belt -wanted to set his action apart from the more CG-heavy competition. "Len was insisting on the fact that, because we've got Transformers and other big CG movies coming out, this one has to feel more real," says Chris Del Conte, VFX producer at Digital Dimension. "It has to be embedded in some kind of practical reality in order to give it that edge of being a Die Hard."

"A lot of shots in the film had CG cars in them, including the tunnel sequence," said Del Conte. "A lot of the cars that you see close-up when Bruce swerves his car and turns around and heads back down to the other end of the tunnel are CG. We actually added a bunch of CG cars at the front of the car line to give the feel of imminent danger that was needed for the sequence. So the majority of the cars that are close to Bruce Willis's car weren't in the actual stunt take - and the tunnel that you see back there is all CG."

3D Tunnel
The sequence was actually photographed under an underpass, although the script called for the action to take place in a long tunnel. The Digital Dimension team showed up on set to take a walkthrough the location and get a feel for the environment. Later, they would be working with a slew of high-res reference images of the pillars, ceiling and floor, as well as architectural plans for the underpass and a low-res pre-vis version of the scene that was used as a template. The result was not just a seamless extension of the underpass, but a virtual version of the tunnel environment created in 3ds max.

"We really put a lot of time and detail into displacement on the tarmac, and using the photo reference for the walls and pillars," says Roberts. When [Die Hard VFX Supervisor] Pat McClungand [Die Hard VFX Producer] Joe Conmy came in and we showed them our renders, they were blown away. They said, 'This will be great for an extension - but there are two shots that we didn't get in the tunnel, and we can use this as the hero background.'

"That came in handy when a practical shot didn't quite deliver the goods. Del Conte explains that a close-up shot of Willis diving out of his car at the last minute before sending it airborne was originally shot at half-speed on a flatbed truck - and it showed. Digital Dimension was asked to wipe out the live background and replace it with its own CG tunnel and road. "In the end, all that's real in that shot is Bruce and the car he's jumping out of. Everything surrounding the car is CG, "Del Conte says.

The team also put lots of effort into making its CG cars not only photo real, but flexible, so that requests from the director or VFX supervisor to tweak one aspect of a scene were easily answered. "Our process of building and texturing the cars works really well - making sure that althea geometry detail is there, that all the rounds are there so the specular highlights really get hit in reflective environment, and working with car paint and multiple layers so the compositors can really dial in the level of reflection and ambient occlusion for shading in those areas," says Roberts."All those little details that we can get quite anal about really show in the end frame. We provide a large number of passes to the compositors so they can really dial and control a lot of those things and turn out iterations very quickly, rather than us constantly having to re-render an entire scene."

And, because the tunnel was a 3D environment instead of just an extended background, the interplay between the lights overhead and the reflections traveling across windshields and hoods was perfect, finishing out the photo real quality of the effects.

A Dislocated Stuntman
The team also spent extra time fixing some shots that weren't photographed under VFX supervision. For one scene depicting McClane diving over the hood of his police car as another vehicle smashes into it, a clean plate was needed in order to reposition a misplaced stuntman in the shot. Complicating matters, he blocked the camera's view of the hood of the car as he jumped away.

"Optimally," says Bruhwiler, "you'd shoot that with no stuntman in the scene, and then shoot the stuntman on green screen. We had to paint him off the hood of this car with no clean plate available. We had to go to the camera car company - only several months ago! - and find one of several police cars that were used in the shoot and take photos of it to help us clean-plate the stuntman off. For a compositor, it can be pretty thrilling to pull something off like that.

"The very next shot in the sequence shows McClane coming off the hood of the car and hitting the ground. The seemingly simple shot presented its own challenge - as the stuntman rolled across the ground, he had to morph into footage of Willis, photographed separately, mimicking the stuntman's actions. "During the transition, we had to replace the cop car with a still and then animate the rocking-back-and-forth motion that resulted from the stuntman rolling off the car and also animate some of the lighting changes," says Bruhwiler. "So the background is a clean plate animated to look like the original plate."

Three-Way Car Crash
That stunt leads into the one where a car flipping through the air crashes into two more on the ground as McClane and Matt, the computer hacker he's charged with protecting, huddle between them. Dropping through an open space in the ceiling of the underpass, a crane yanked one car into the air and threw it into the front ends of two more that were being pulled by cables, with a camera rig running in between them. "We had people comment, 'Wow, your CG cars looked so nice in that shot,'" says Del Conte. "Well, there is no CG car."

"Because it's all practical, there's so much in that shot that you get for free - the way they react, the dust that's kicked up from the cars," says Roberts. "It's a really impressive starting point for us to take it to the finish line."

"The actors were shot on set again, with a similar camera move and some lighting on them, but you can't really light actors for this kind of situation, with all the lighting being changed quickly byte cars - and with cars smashing on top of them," explains Bruhwiler. "We had a lot of in-comp work to bring down over lit highlights, timing it so they looked shadowed and getting some of the spill color from the taxi in there. It was a challenge to put them in the scene. But you had to buy that they were there, or the whole shot was ruined."

"Also, the shot was pretty clean," says Del Conte. "I don't think either of those windshields shattered, so little or no glass fell between the cars, let alone over [the actors]. There was a need for a lot of CG glass and debris flying through the air, covering them and around them, to integrate them into the scene."

"This was a pretty 2D-heavy shot, but after 3D-tracking the scene in order to figure out where the characters should be, we had to do a match-move of both McClane and Matt," says Roberts. "We had low-detail characters we used for that purpose, and then we just, frame-by-frame, animated their positions. Then we were able to use those animated characters as collision surfaces for the glass and also matte objects for the glass so that some fragments would disappear behind the CG characters and some would pass in front of them. When comped, it really looks like McClane is integrated into all of this glass flying around and bouncing off him and Matt."

"We really have to give credit to our roto/paint department because this film is so stunt-heavy, "notes Bruhwiler. "They had a lot of cables and wires, and all of those had to be painted out. The cables on the road pulling these two cars were very complex - we even did some projection mapping of textures to help them paint those out." Making matters worse, those cables were throwing off sparks as they scraped against the ground during photography. Also removed from the shot was the crane arm and camera hanging off of a visible camera truck, which had to be in frame to capture a dramatic reverse-angle shot leading into the stunt.

More than One Way to Smash a Pillar
Next up is the "pillar shot," in which McClane and Matt (rotoscoped out of the live-action shot) once again narrowly escape grievous bodily harm as an out-of-control tow truck (photographed hitting a metal barrier on a blue-screen set) slams into one of the overpass pillars (a beefed-up version of a3D pillar from the virtual tunnel), resulting in an explosion of - well, the explosion was refined significantly during the VFX process. First the team dialed up the dramatic impact of the explosion. Then, acting on last-minute feedback from the director, who didn't want the action to look too fantastic, they scaled back the spectacle a little bit.

Initially, Digital Dimension created a test shot showing cracks appearing on the pillar as the truck The three-way car crash. In the finished shot, bottom, note the addition of our heroes and lots of debris. According to Roberts, the effect didn't feel violent enough to put across the force of the crash, so the team started researching real-world disasters like earthquakes to get a real-world reference for what such a crash might actually do to a pillar more than 10 feet in diameter.

"We originally had a little displacement of a section that was going to pop out," says Roberts."When we showed it to Len, he said, 'You know, I really want to see rebar. I want to see pieces blowing out.' So one of our areas of exploration was just how much stuff should come out of the pillar, and the direction it should fly based on the surface normals of the pillar. Our particle system, Cebas Thinking Particles, was just looking at the curvature of the pillar and, based on the force of the impact from behind, it was sending fragments out perpendicular to their emitting surface. So fragments would fly off to the sides, but there wasn't anything flying directly toward camera. We ended up adding some custom elements and fragments that would fill that need."

Roberts and his team started employing a variety of techniques to fill the screen with debris, adding rebar and chunks of concrete as well as heavy dust and concrete layers. But toward the very end of the process, Wiseman asked them to pull back on the fancy stuff to keep a sense of reality about the shot. "As we added more and more to the shot, the pillar started becoming the event, rather than Bruce and Matt getting out of the way," Roberts explains. "It became, dare I say, a Bruckheimer moment. We had to pull ourselves back from that, and it was very helpful to have Len communicate what he needed from this shot." Dust and smoke were banished from the frame, and what survived was a huge pillar cracking and throwing debris at the audience as our heroes, again, narrowly escape death.

"It was a little painful to see all those man-hours not end up on the screen," Roberts admits. "But it was definitely the right decision in context of the sequence. It would have taken you out of the moment, and you would have concentrated on the wrong thing."

From big-picture narrative elements to visual grace notes, Wiseman's view of VFX work was exacting. "We even talked about the lens flare from the headlight of the truck before it smashes out," says Del Conte. "We had a lens flare we were working with, and he's like, 'You know what? I'd rather have a lens flare optically hitting the lens this way, and going across like this.' We understood what he was talking about, and he was direct about what he was looking for on the photographic end of things."

Taking Out the Helicopter
The original shot. Note cables holding the helicopter in place, the lack of rotors, and the equipment scattered on the pavement below. The film's signature stunt, involving an airborne police car slamming into a hovering helicopter, was also at its heart a practical stunt. In other words, an actual car was thrown into an actual helicopter - although the 'copter was held in position by wires, with no rotors spinning. A stuntman leaping from the helicopter in the nick of time was rotoscoped in from an alternate take.CG debris and rotor blades, which break apart as the car rams into them, were added by the Digital Dimension team.

"We had a low-poly representation of what was happening that we could use in each shot," says Roberts. "We did a 3D track of the flying Crown Vic and had a stand-in for the helicopter. We modeled the head and tail rotors and the engine exhaust. They gave us a lot of reference material for this A star-model helicopter so we were able to match the rotors exactly.

"We animated rotors with the flying car moving through, and we were then able to see at which frame the car would impact with the rotors. We set up a combination of particle sim and rigid dynamics so the rotors would shear off each time they spun around, as the car got closer and closer. There was a lot of work with fragmentation to make that believable."

Believability was more important than consistency, the team found, when it noticed that the same simulation didn't have the same impact when seen from other angles. So additional simulations were run, with the car's velocity altered and tweaked to fall in a way that seemed credible. Some of the falling debris fragments were adjusted individually, for the same reasons. "Having all the fragments visible against the blue sky, some pieces were distracting - they were falling slowly, and you didn't get a sense of where they were or how quickly they were moving," Roberts says."Some pieces felt like they were floating. We had to bake that simulation and then take pieces out, designing it on a per-shot basis to make the sequence flow."

Practically Speaking
In the final analysis, the extent of the practical stunt work gave the VFX crew a leg up on its FX work, according to Bruhwiler. "Because of the extensive practical-shoot aspect of the whole show, but especially the tunnel, it gave us a great reference for the CG, and how to match the practical shoot rather than doing it from scratch and trying to recreate reality out of our heads."

The helicopter pilot jumping to safety was shot separately. The final shot Fine, but isn't there any shot in the sequence that's all CG? Turns out there is such a thing. Fairly late in the edit, Wiseman realized that he needed a P.O.V. shot to help set up the big helicopter stunt. The shot in question has McClane, frustrated and shaken after the huge pillar explosion, looking toward the end of the tunnel and seeing a helicopter hovering near one of the toll booths. It's the moment where he decides to send the car airborne to take out the chopper. Unfortunately, that POV shot wasn't captured on set, and the options available for cheating it were underwhelming.

"They didn't get a chance to shoot that plate," recalls Bruhwiler. "They had a plate they wanted us to use, which was shot from the middle of the road and above a driver's height. And we looked at it and said, 'Well, that's not really his perspective.' We suggested that, based on the budget of the shot and because we had the CG tunnel already, we could recreate this shot from the proper perspective. We used some of the [live-action] elements from the plate they gave us, plus a CG car and the plate of the helicopter hovering behind the toll booth. We added some smoke and fire and light flicker and camera move to sell the idea that we're looking from McClane's perspective. The audience doesn't suddenly get thrown by being in the middle of the road looking down."

As elaborate as the final result is, the tunnel sequence only totaled about 25 or 30 of the nearly200 shots Digital Dimension touched. Outside the tunnel, Digital Dimension did a lot of cityscape tweaks to make Los Angeles locations feel more like Washington, D.C. The helicopter stunt, for instance, takes place in front of several tall buildings, giving the background a very metropolitan feel. That was scaled back a little bit by adding a more modest building - dubbed "Grandma's holdout building" - amid the skyscrapers. ("She wouldn't sell to big corporate, so they left her alone," jokes Del Conte.) And for shots showing an entrance to the tunnel, various buildings and vehicles were removed and/or replaced - because of an odd camera move, one shot was run backwards, necessitating the removal of a moving police car. Digital Fusion was used to projection-map a clean-plate frame over the car after 3D-tracking the shot. (Tell-tale palm treetops had to be removed, as well.)

Digital Dimension's work on the film also included painstaking shots using Massive crowd simulation software to visualize an evacuation of the U.S. Capitol, among other impossible sights, as well as some digitally enhanced traffic-jam footage underscoring a plot point about city services being taken offline by a malevolent computer hacker. And there were more shots involving explosive action at a natural gas plant much later in the film.

In the end, Digital Dimension feels like its work here stands apart from the CG pack - even though (or maybe especially because) so many viewers end up completely confused about which elements were live-action and which were VFX. "CG got so overdone in the late 80s and early 90s, with action movie after action movie trying to one-up each other," says Bruhwiler. "It's become a poetic, choreographed CG fantasy world, and this just felt - visceral is a great word. There's a gut-level reaction to it. Going back and looking at the old movies again, seeing Lethal Weapon and the Die Hard movies, I have a greater appreciation for what they were achieving back then, because they had to shoot it all practically. There was no VFX capability or budget for those things. There's something very human about it."

How They Did It: Live Free or Die Hard
Modern VFX For an Old-School Stunt Flick
By Bryant Frazer July 12, 2007 Source: Film & Video

45 of which were head replacements using Eddie on Green Screen in makeup and then composited onto a real woman's body.

"When our visual effects work is invisible or thought to be practical make up, we have done our job!!" - Benoit "Ben" Girard, President, Digital Dimension

Digital Dimension transformed Murphy into the show-stealing Rasputia, Norbit's 400 pound wife, by digitally replacing a body-double's head with Murphy's. While head replacement was initially planned for just a handful of shots, the success of Digital Dimension's work allowed Murphy to only wear the Rasputia "fat suit" for a few shots. "Most people have no idea visual effects were used to turn Eddie into Rasputia" says Chris Del Conte, Visual Effects Producer at Digital Dimension. "Even if they know they're looking at Eddie Murphy in make-up, they think he's wearing a fat suit."

Digital Dimension's visual effects work was so indistinguishable from reality that even professional film critics were fooled:

"Norbit" will probably be best remembered for the incredible work make up master Rick Baker has created. Baker doesn't just pile layers of latex on Murphy...it is an undeniably impressive feat, especially during the scene in which the rotund Rasputia visits a water park in a pink bikini. - Christy Lemire, Associated Press

"Technically… the film is a marvel. The scenes of Eddie Murphy acting with Eddie Murphy are so seamless and convincing that after just a few minutes you buy entirely into the idea that Norbit, Rasputia and [Wong] are distinct individuals." - Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star

While Murphy has played over-sized characters before, Rasputia presented a unique challenge. During the film's water park sequence, she struts around in a bikini that leaves little to the imagination. The majority of shots at the water park featured Rasputia body-doubles Lauren Miller and Markecia Sago, and then turned it over to the magicians at Digital Dimension to swap out their heads for Murphy's.


The sheer weight of the make-up required to turn Eddie Murphy into the 400-pound Rasputia led Murphy and the Norbit team to favor digital head replacement for the film's water park sequence. Rasputia body-doubles Lauren Miller and Markecia Sago acted out the scenes on set. Murphy then performed the character's facial expressions in front of a green screen, wearing head-makeup only. The performances were later integrated into seamless shots by Digital Dimension's talented team of artists.

"The body double's performance was then stabilized at the neck so Eddie and the Director, Brian Robbins, could see what head actions would be necessary to match the body" says Digital Dimension composite supervisor Erik Bruhwiler. Even so, this was merely the starting point for Murphy's portrayal of Rasputia. "Our effects work was meant to support that goal" comments Bruhwiler. "It took a lot of artistry on the part of our compositors to combine Eddie's often frenetic performance with the more subdued performance of the double. The green screen photography also lacked the subtleties of the on-set lighting, and we took care to add these aspects back into the composite."

In one of the movie's most memorable gags, the turnstile attendant at the water park asks Rasputia whether she is wearing bottoms, in response to which Rasputia lifts up her sagging belly to show him that she is indeed wearing a tiny bathing suit. Lauren's bright pink bikini bottoms were clearly visible as she approached the turnstile, so paint-roto supervisor Tammy Sutton devised a method for hiding them until the reveal, using the grid warp tool in Eyeon's Digital Fusion software to pull her belly down over the bathing suit. "We were careful to stretch the entire belly evenly so it wouldn't be a noticeable effect, and kept the natural movement intact by mimicking the movement of the skin while she walks" says Sutton.

Frequently, the two performances did not line up, leaving Lauren's head showing behind Murphy's. "Creating clean plates was most difficult for the water park scene," recalls paint-roto supervisor Tammy Sutton. "We thought at the time that we would only be replacing Lauren's face, so she was shot in full costume including a large pink floppy hat that we ended up removing from the background plate and replacing it with Eddie's hat. As Miller was walking and standing in front of moving people, we had to piece together backgrounds from other shots, hand painting certain areas."



The shot of Norbit and Rasptuia dancing together at their wedding was particularly important to director Brian Robbins, as this is the first time the two characters are seen together as adults. Face replacement was used for this and two other shots, in which complex interaction between Rasputia's head costume and her shoulders made it impractical to replace the entire head. Painstaking artistry was required to ensure that Murphy's face did not slip in relation to the body-double's head.

The team's attention to detail meant that even simple split screens, the most basic technique for combining multiple performances by the same actor into a single shot, were taken to the next level. A number of these shots involved placing Mr. Wong (Murphy wearing flawless makeup created by Rick Baker) in shots with Norbit (also played by Murphy). "We were very particular about how those shots should look," reports Erik Bruhwiler. "They couldn't look like split shots. Any time the characters crossed over each other, or even got near each other, we wanted shadow integration and light bounce, which was critical to tie them together in the scene. There are even moments where they're not actually touching, but we'd do a little cloth deformation to make it look like they're rubbing against each other, just to sell every single shot as being in-camera, and not an effects shot. Obviously, Brian (Director) was thrilled with the outcome, as were we."

The movie's most extensive use of 3D animation appears in a scene where Norbit receives unexpected marital advice from neighborhood dog Lloyd, played by a pug named Mushu (previously seen in a speaking part in the Men in Black films). A photo and video shoot with Mushu allowed Digital Dimension's 3D team to record his range of motion and facial expressions, as well as gathering extensive texture reference. Digital artist Phi Tran build Lloyd's head using low poly modeling techniques, adding detail with subdivision surfaces and adjusting his geometry based on Cyberscan data of Mushu. 3D Supervisor Andrew Roberts, Technical Director Justin Mitchell and Digital Artist Travis Yohnke were on set for Eddie Murphy's scenes with Mushu, recording multi-angle HD footage to aid in tracking the dog's head movements.

Lloyd the dog encourages Norbit to take revenge for both of them, in a scene that never fails to draw big laughs from the audience. Digital Dimension's 3D team, led by 3D Supervisor Andrew Roberts, used on set reference footage and a Cyberscan of dog performer Mushu to animate the pug's facial features. Senior Technical Director Mitch Gates created a range of emotions for Lloyd, adding eyebrow movement, wobbling jowls and CG whiskers to make the dog's speech completely convincing.

Senior Technical Director Mitch Gates created a full range of morph targets needed to make Lloyd speak and emote, filming himself performing each line with exaggerated emotion as a starting point for animation. Keeping a mirror on his desk allowed Mitch to analyze the behavior of each facial muscle group for any given expression, although some creative license had to be taken in applying human speech and emotion to a canine as Lloyd expresses frustration, sorrow and anger. Footage of Charlie Murphy (Eddie Murphy's brother) performing Lloyd's lines also proved helpful in translating some of Charlie's facial characteristics to the pug. During dailies, the animation was played back in slow motion - at 6 frames per second - to ensure that Lloyd's mouth shapes were correctly synced to the audio track. Mushu's lack of facial movement led the filmmakers to request CG animation beyond just the dog's mouth. Flesh simulation tools were used to add secondary jiggle to the pug's lips and jowls, which made a big contribution to the believability of Lloyd's performance.

Back at the water park, Rasputia becomes resentful of Norbit's interest in his friend Kate, and decides to take a ride down a water slide to show them how it's really done. Robbins wanted a series of shots showing an immense amount of water being forced out of the chute by Rasputia, including close-ups of her face and a shot of the tidal wave from Rasputia's POV. Digital Artist Brian DeMetz handled this complex sequence with variety of techniques, from CG water to shooting practical water elements for reference. Custom CG particle rigs were created for multiple passes that generated millions of water droplets. While Demetz was able to get the water working relatively quickly, perfecting the effect required many refinements, including an 'atomized' water pass achieved primarily through volumetric mist layers.





Digital Artist Brian Demetz created CG water and spray for a number of shots in which Rasputia plunges down a waterslide with devastating speed. DeMetz eschewed traditional fluid dynamics solutions in favor of water meshing, a technique which enabled him to sculpt the water's interaction with Rasputia and water slide by controlling millions of polygons.

The movie's opening sequence depicts baby Norbit's unceremonious arrival at the Golden Wonton Restaurant and Orphanage, as he is tossed out of a moving vehicle by his father. The lifeless baby doll used on set was replaced with a CG baby bundle, modeled and textured in 3ds Max by Travis Yohnke. The CG model was rigged to allow bending at the waist and neck, ensuring that the constraints were rigid enough to prevent the baby from flailing about excessively. Yohnke tracked the shot in SynthEyes, using Reactor to design a rolling motion that lands the baby in the correct position for the following shot. Secondary motion and cloth dynamics added to the baby bundle's realism.

Digital Dimension's work on Norbit is their latest release in a string of #1 hit movies, including Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, Pursuit of Happyness and Epic Movie. They are currently completing work on Blades of Glory and Die Hard 4.

Following on such collaborations as "Zathura: A Space Adventure" and "Blade: Trinity, "Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Conmy entrusted the company with the movie's three large NASCAR race sequences, as well as other select scenes, for a total of 267 shots.

"Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," directed by Adam McKayand released by Columbia Pictures, stars Will Farrell as a racecar driver trying to get his career on track. Digital Dimension's extensive contribution, which consisted of 2D, CG race cars and green screen composites, CG crowd creation, shot tracking, image replacement, detailed rot scoping and digital reflections, ensured that the intricately shot race action set against a packed-to-the-rafters speedway supports the comic contest at every turn.



"Digital Dimension delivers visual effects that are photorealistic without exception," stated Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Conmy. "They complete high-quality work on budget without compromising artistic integrity. And they are great fun to work with. No matter what the challenges, Digital Dimension will find the solution and get it done in a timely fashion.

We knew we wanted Digital Dimension to be our lead house from the start," Conmy added. "Based on past experience, we knew we'd be able to say 'match this' and our other collaborators would key off their work. We knew the effects would look fantastic, but no one had any idea they would look this real.



"Digital Dimension's Visual Effects Producer Chris Del Conte notes that because almost all of the racing shots were filmed in empty stadiums, populating the grandstands and "recreating" many of the infields posed two of the project's biggest challenges. The infields were accomplished by leveraging footage captured with a high-speed moving camera car where possible. Digital Dimension compositors tracked, retimed and color corrected this production footage to create infield splits that perfectly matched the target plates.

The crowd effects (approximately 60 shots) included working in 2D to match crowd plates to the angles and quick maneuvers of the camera, tiling 2D crowd footage or, in some cases, tracking in an entire sea of spectators behind the small group of actors filmed live on set. On shots for which there were no filmed crowd elements that matched the angle and perspective of the camera move, Digital Dimension used Massive Software's 3D crowd animation system, which allowed thousands of realistically responding, completely digital race fans to be populated in the shot.


"Massive is one of the newest additions to our toolset and using the software gave us the ability to create a fully digital crowd with precise control over the crowd's movement and range of emotional responses, "said Justin Mitchell, Senior CG Artist, Digital Dimension. "Working with 'typical' NASCAR fan models we constructed, we could place characters and give them different levels of behavior and excitement, from sitting attentively in their seats to jumping up and applauding."

"Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" also included around 100visual effects shots completed at Digital Dimension to enhance the realism of scenes that were filmed with the movie's principal players in cars on green screen. Digital Dimension added a variety of subtle touches and details to these sequences, including moving backgrounds, "grime passes," visor reflections and artificial camera shake, to make it feel as if the actors were really in the race of removals, which saw Digital Dimension eliminating everything from film cameras to cylinders used for spectacular stunt car pyrotechnics, rounded out work.



Software used on the production at Digital Dimension ranged from Eyeon's Digital Fusion for compositing to The Foundry's Kronos software. 3D elements were modeled, animated and rendered in Autodesk 3ds Max with mental images' Mental Ray. 3D tracking shots and camera fly-troughs were done fully in CG by the company, with 3D digital elements ranging from the stadium, track and in field to crowds, hero race cars, and even grass. An extensive amount were applied to shots using Andersson Technologies' Synth Eyes software, while completely digital 3D crowd scenes were produced with Massive from Massive Software.

Digital Dimension recently completed visual effects for projects including "Slither," "Bordertown," "Final Destination 3" and "Deepo's Undersea 3DWondershow" for the new Georgia Aquarium. Digital Dimension is currently in production as the sole VFX facility on Eddie Murphy's new film "Norbit" as well as an all-CG animated feature, "The Legend of Secret Pass." This past spring, Digital Dimension also won its sixth Emmy Award for its work on the Super Bowl 39 Open for FOX.

CREDITS:DIGITAL DIMENSION
Executive Producer: Benoit Girard
Executive Producer: Dan Lombardo
VFX On-Set Supervisor: Leandro Visconti
VFX Producer: Chris Del Conte
Composite Supervisor: Erik Bruhwiler
2D Coordinating Supervisor: Tammy Sutton
Lead Compositor: Ryan Smolarek
Lead Key/Compositor: Daniel Rubin
Compositors: Tommy Tran, Brian Smallwood, Travis Wade Ivy, Martin Hilke, Tatjana Bozinovski, Jeremy Appelbaum, Michael Cashore, Marco Paolini, Wing Kwok
Roto/Paint Artists: Chad Ridgeway, George Gervan Jr., Richard Gervan, Dan Walker
Matte Artist: Patrick Mullane
Lead CG Artist: Andrew Roberts
3D Artists: Justin Mitchell, Mitch Gates, Travis Yonke, Phi Tran, TongTran, Brian Demetz, Brandi Johnson, Hans Payer
VFX Coordinators: Joseph Bell, Anthony Kramer
VFX Production Assistant: Landon Medeiros
Production Intern: Tamar Feder
Pipeline & Tools Programmer: Sean Looper
Systems Administrator: John Brake
Systems Infrastructure: Guillermo Pussetto