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Hanna The Visual Effects of Mr. X Hanna - Death Fall - 1
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The Invisible Visual Effects of Hanna Brendan Taylor, the visual effects supervisor of Mr. X, shares with us the experience working for the movie by Luis Montemayor Hanna is the new movie from Director Joe Wright about a teenage girl being raised by her father, an ex-CIA agent, in the wilds of Finland. All of her life she has been trained to survive in a cruel world, that is why she knows how to use guns, bow-and-arrow and hand-to-hand combat. The film was shot across Europe, beginning in Finland then, Bavaria, Germany, Spain and Morocco. In order to make Hanna, a movie that cost around $30 Millions that looks like a $100 Million film, visual effect studio Mr. X was brought to the game. Mr. X’s work spans across 200 VFX shots that range from snow enhancements to a tricky compositing techniques to full matte paintings and CG environments. Brendan Taylor was on-set from the beginning to supervise how shots were being achieved and worked closely with the Director (Joe Wright), Production Designer (Sarah Greenwood), DP (Alwin H. Kuchler) and stunt crews in order to seamlessly integrate what would be achieved through VFX solutions and what would be practical.
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The Death of a Reindeer It was very important to Joe Wright that he capture the harsh environment that Hanna was raised in. To do this he shot in some of the most extreme weather conditions that at times proved to present its own challenges. This scene was shot in Kuusamo, Finland, where temperatures dipped to -35 degrees Celsius some mornings. Brendan Taylor was amazed by how the Finnish crew dealt with the extreme temperatures and very deep snow; it was just another day at work for them. It was the first time that Joe Wright, Alwin Kuchler, Leslie Holleran and Brendan Taylor had worked together in a film, so it was important for Brendan to establish a working relationships in the first few days, and make sure that all the key creative’s knew that the visual effects department was there to help and solve problems. He was on the set at all times. 4 - Death Fall - Hanna
Brendan remembers that on the first day he wanted to carry his own equipment. “No one is doing this for me! I’m a Canadian! This kind of weather is part of my lifestyle, too!” he thought. But it was a bad idea, with the extra weight on his back, after two steps, he sank up to his armpits in snow and couldn’t get out! If there was one lesson to learn from this, it’s “When in Rome...” That is why everything moved quite a bit slower and all equipment needed to be brought in by snow mobile and sled. In this scene director Wright was establishing the finesse of Hanna’s archery skills when she shoots down a reindeer, so they opted to shoot this and then add a CG arrow to the side of the reindeer to avoid fruitless attempts at getting the live reindeer to act. In order to accomplished this Brendan Taylor had a conversation with Matt Ralph and Jason Edwardh, 2 trackers/animators at Mr. X about the best places for tracking markers. They gave him
a sample diagram with a grid pattern that would have allow them to a) track the arrow to the side of the reindeer b) derive information about the deformations of the muscle and skin of the reindeer in order to make animation more realistic. Given the extreme temperature and the unwillingness of the reindeer to cooperate they instead placed green tracking markers on the side of the reindeer, they wanted to make it as low impact on set as possible. It was not necessary to use a chrome ball to get a HDRI for the CG arrow since the end result would have been a split image - blue for sky and white for the snowy floor and besides there wasn’t enough time, the reindeer would have never waited for them to perform. “We would literally wait behind the camera for the reindeer to do something interesting. Having to run out into the middle of the forest/lake, disturb the fresh snow on the ground and potentially miss some good reindeer performance, seemed like poor economy” remembers Brendan.
C-130 Hercules Plane For this shot Mr. X created a fully CG C-130 Hercules plane using an old model they used for another film as a reference, they needed the new model so that it could fit into their new pipeline and they had sufficient still photo texture reference of the plane. They also used images from the internet for shading purposes, just to see how the light reacted with the particular paint used on C130s which is very matte. The match moving was nothing easy, since the camera was on a crane, in the snow, pointing to the sky with nothing to track to, they couldn’t get the crane to move fast enough to follow the airplane, so in the middle Mr. X had to speed the shot up, which created some heavy artifacting on Hanna’s face. “The lighting and compositing of the C130 went over quite easily,” comments Brendan, “though it’s funny how you have this great big CG airplane in shot, but a majority of your time is spent correcting one nostril that takes up 24 square pixels.” The render passes for the plane were: Beauty, Diffuse, Global Illumination, Lighting, Matte, Shadow, Normal, Occlusion, Reflection, Self Illumination, Shadow, Specular and Z-Depth. Hanna - Death Fall - 5
Berlin Windkanal In this scene Hanna escapes her holding cell after being captured and narrowly escapes by sliding through a giant steel door. This scene was shot at the Berlin Windkanal which was once an aerodynamic testing wind tunnel built in WWI for the German Aircraft. The art department built a section of the tunnel and Hanna’s holding cell. But it would have been too expensive to build an entire 100 foot long, 30 foot wide tunnel practically. So they built 30’ of it and Mr. X took over with the rest of it. “We took a lot of reference and texture stills of the set as well as measurements” says Brendan. “No Lidar data was used as the shape was relatively straight forward and getting a Lidar team there would not have been that beneficial”. Initially Mr. X was going to extend the practical set; the early extensions perfectly matched the art department build, but it always felt like painted wood. So they ended up completely replacing the entire tunnel to give it more of a concrete feel - like the real Windkanal, that this was meant to cut with. Brendan knew that this might happen so the material was shot in such a way as to either extend or take over fully in CG. “Most important in this case was to make sure that there was real, practical lighting on Hanna and that it matched everything else we were doing in the sequence” says Brendan. “Even though we may be replacing everything, it is really important to take the care with the lighting as if it is any other scene in the movie. HDR Images were shot on the set in a number of lighting conditions. Because the entire sequence takes place with these intense strobe lights that cascade down the hallway, it was necessary to get an HDRI with the strobes on and with the strobes off. As for modeling reference, the VFX team measured all relevant parts of the tunnel and strobe lights. Brendan provided reference photography from the walls of the real Windkanal to Chris MacLean and to compositors Rob Greb and Greg Astles and asked them to match that. “They did a really extraordinary job,” admits Brendan. The roto was straight forward as Hanna never really crosses matte line. The rendering team used V-Ray as their main rendering software in order to replicate the strobe lighting and getting real world lighting representation out of the render. 6 - Death Fall - Hanna
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Fighting Sequences Hanna had several scenes that required some crafty compositing solutions most notably in relation to the fight sequences. And it was very important to Wright to shoot the fight sequences in long continuous takes. The problem was that it was shoot at 48 fr/sec and some of the punches didn’t really look like they were connecting. That is why Brendan Taylor was there on the set near the director, so that he could re assure him and the actors that he and his team at Mr. X were going to be able to make the shots work. “I knew when shooting that these were ‘Barb’ shots.” recalls Brendan, “she has a real flare for these editorial/manipulation shots.” Brendan explains how Barb Benoit solved the shots: “Each shot was its own beast. But, in es8 - Death Fall - Hanna
sence, we would roto the person getting punched or the person doing the punching and translate them a little closer to their opponent. Then, we would slightly time warp the punch just before the moment of impact. When the punch connects and during the follow through, we would speed the shot up. It was a very effective solution that makes audiences gasp.” For Brendan it was great working with fight choreographer Jeff Imada, because he is very talented and is able to gets the most out of the actors, so the amount of fight enhancements Mr. X had to do was really minimal.
Matte Paintings Matte paintings were used to support the multiple locations of Hanna’s Travels and a combina-
tion of matte and compositing to create the high drama chase scene in the container park where Mr. X extended the environment added the background and a bunch of wire removals. “It was not financially feasible to take an entire film crew to all of the locations, but it does make sense to send one person with a digital still camera,” says Brendan. He would shoot the main plates in advance, so that later, when he was on the set, he was able to check the composition and make sure they were framing it to incorporate the matte painting as well as the action. A lot of these were shot with 2nd unit director Martin Kenzie who worked as a camera assistant with Spielberg on the Indiana Jones movies. So he really knew how to frame for a matte painting and for set extensions. “He was all about ‘options’, which was nice,” recalls Brendan. “So we shot a lot of film on
the matte painting plates.” After the plates were shot, Brendan Tylor would go to the location and match the lighting, angle and lens and shoot as many stills as possible.”Matt Schofield, our lead matte painter at Mr. X,” says Brendan “showed me a great
technique a number of years ago that I still use when shooting stills for matte paintings. You take a small piece of cellophane and tape it on to the back of the digital still camera. On that, you draw the perspective lines and key lighting cues. So when you shoot your reference stills, you
can compare it to the simple line drawing. What you end up getting is real time feedback on how the matte painting will look with the plate and whether or not the perspective and lighting will match. It makes the actual matte painting process much faster.”
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