Characters, vehicles, weapons and other 3D models for the project. Below is a series of galleries showing some of the 3D models for Revolution and the rest of the Army Men Toyverse projects.
The Army Men armies in our project, especially in canon and in Army Men Revolution, will have different shades within their own ranks, just like plastic soldiers in the real world.
Over the years, the different generations of Army Men have changed in hue. From the Olive Green in Army Men 1, to the English Green in Army Men 2, to the Apple Green in Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes. Even in Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes 2 on Playstation 2 we could see plastic soldiers of different shades within the Tan. So it will be a thing in our project.
And maybe some soldier has a hue that is between two worlds… between Blue and Violet, Red and Orange, or Green and Tan…
High speed. Precision. A weight of 250 Gr (9 ounces or 0.6 pounds). After watching this video, you don’t have to use much of your imagination to know that a pigeon would be a fierce warrior against a 2 inches lightweight Plastic Soldier.
Newton’s second law of motion states that F = ma, or net force is equal to mass times acceleration. A larger net force acting on an object causes a larger acceleration, and objects with larger mass require more force to accelerate. Therefore, the weight added to the high speed would be a tremendous force hitting a plastic soldier.
But of course, the resistance of the plastic would cause the soldier to simply fly away. The same with his beak (experienced directly with my finger in the video) bites a little hard for a human, and can even damage living tissue. But for a plastic soldier it would only cause some deep scratches or marks.
A Cockroach can run at such high speed that it could appear to you so suddenly that it would surely cause you a jump scare, even if you hear his crackling sounds. But, even with its large size compared to a Cockroach, you would never hear a Cat until it is too late.
Like each of the Bravo Company Commandos or the members of Team Assault, each animal has a set of characteristics that makes it part of a diverse variety of formidable opponents. Anyway, this is the limit of our imagination and theoretical knowledge. Which is why we had to go out and look for real information.
When it comes to translating reality into the digital realm, such as animating a pigeon and providing the NPC with, although incredible, realistic characteristics, we have to go outside and look for these components of the Real World and observe them carefully, always thinking from the perspective of a plastic soldier.
On this occasion we were lucky enough to meet a healthy, 100% functional pigeon, which was domesticated by people who then abandoned it in a bird shelter. The first time we saw her, she allowed herself to be petted and stayed quite still, which allowed us to take photographs and measure her to make the 3D model. She had just arrived at the shelter where she was disconnected from all human relationships, staying to live alone with other pigeons, away from humans who only go to the shelter to leave them food and change their water supply. When we returned, months later, her taming level had already begun to disappear. It was at that moment that we took this video.
What is the problem with domesticating a wild animal? The problem is that it makes them useless when it comes to living in their wild environments. A domesticated bird will surely die because of its ignorance, lack of knowledge or because of its “brainwashing”. She will not know how to look for food and will be eaten by a predator or hit by a vehicle, deaths from which she will not flee because she will not even know what they mean. She will not run from a human because she will not known it’s dangerous… dying by slingshot.
Now she was not as comfortable with humans and although she did not escape with the terror of a normal pigeon, she no longer liked being petted, which indicates that her treatment to live in the wild was going well.
She had already chosen a partner, a Messenger (or Racing) Pigeon that was also abandoned, bigger, adult and more beautiful than her, whose wing fracture left him on the ground, never to be able to fly at a height that would allow him to have a normal wild life. With her he had already had 2 chicks, which when they became adults, the caregivers took them out of the shelter to release them and never see them again.
Maybe this story was too long, and away from what we were talking about, right?. Well, I went extended on purpose to prove my next point…
…nothing happened to the pigeon. She is still undergoing treatment with a possible early release. But anyway, all this that we learned accidently and unexpectedly led us not only to realize the real possibilities of a plastic soldier fighting a pigeon, but also the stories that an uninformed person does not even imagine are behind an animal which is considered a “rodent of the air”. Bapulated, ignored, despised and mass murdered, she also tells us (unintentionally) about human nature and his lack of responsibility with the other life forms that make his ecosystem. The difficulties animals must go through to survive, which we do not see, are worthy of admiration.
We humans tend to downplay everything that is small, but on the other hand we are fascinated and concerned about animals such as cats, dogs, lions, elephants, etc. Larger animals that we consider exotic because they are rare and we are not surrounded by them all the time. Therefore, from the Army Men plastic soldier’s perspective, a simple pigeon would be considered an impressive and exotic animal, from a world very different from their own: uncommon. On the other hand, the pigeon would ignore it due to its smaller size, not considering it a threat like if they were insects (unless the Army Men shoot her). It is for all these reasons that we assumed that they would protect a pigeon as much as we would protect an elephant.
Therefore, not only did we learn to admire an animal that we had never even thought of before, but it also opened the doors to an immensity of narrative possibilities for our story. That’s why the title “Animal Warriors” doesn’t just have the simple meaning you thought before reading all this.
The assets of the game will be a lot, but for the most part they will be the same three-dimensional geometry with different textures, as in the case of the Real World assets.
We will try to make each door, each wall, each window and each wooden furniture different, using an algorithm that will modify the location of the textures so that even if they have the same assigned texture, will be different, using mirror and rotated coordinates.
But the most important feature of these 3D assets will be that they will be made up of 2 layers of textures, not just one. And we are not referring to the different images that make a texture (diffuse specular map, opacity map, bump, reflection, self illumination, etc.) but will be made up of 2 textures, one on top of the other, with a system of opacity that will allow the texture from above to show certain characteristics of the texture from below, always talking about the order in which they will be positioned.
A texture will be the one that will have the details of the object, such as depth or any inescapable characteristic such as the hole for the key. The other texture will fulfill the function of color, surface texture and imperfections.
Plastro in his beginnings was a young Yellow military leader molded directly to be one, coming out of special molds for it. But he was thrown into the toughest battles of the latter part of the Great Gray War, which caused him to become discolored from staying on the front lines for so long.
The yellow color of his body became pale, whitish… like a half-baked plastic soldier, similar to all those soldiers molded from recycled plastic, commonly assigned to lower ranks and thrown to the front like cannon fodder. Among the officers, everyone laughed at him, calling him “a sad and different color”, which generated an idea in his head: Make all that Yellow workforce, exploited by their nation, independent, under a single flag: The Tan color.
The color of these second-class soldiers was due to the recycling process, which with each recycling the yellow saturation was lost.
There came a time when the war spread so much that it became somewhat strenuous for the Yellows, and without realizing it there came a time when these “second-rate yellow soldiers” were more than the pure saturation Yellows, and the bad treatment never change.
Plastro moved his cards and conspired against the Yellow Army, wanting to take control of it to overthrow the Yellow government, organizing a coup d’état… which ultimately was unsuccessful.
Plastro was imprisoned since the crowds that followed him at that time, who were already derogatorily called “Tannic” instead of Yellow, would have caused more problems to the already war-hit Yellow Nation. But unfortunately for the Yellows, Plastro did nothing more than be the flame that started a fire in an ammunition depot soaked in fuel.
Little time passed, and as Plastro wrote in his memoirs: “A few months later, isolated from all information outside my cell, I began to hear all kinds of sounds of confrontations inside the base, and then some Tannic soldiers arrived to take me out of there, calling me ‘Leader.'”
By the time Plastro was freed, he left the prison facility being greeted by a thousand Tannic soldiers raising their weapons and celebrating, with fire, debris and dead Yellow soldiers everywhere, shouting “Plastro, Plastro, Plastro”.
Having taken advantage of his time in prison to plan his new intention to take power, adapting to the new circumstances, Plastro made the yellow government and the armed forces believe that despite considering him dangerous, he actually had the power to appease the insurgency to end the civil war.
Given the situation of the war against the Grays, the Yellow government had no choice but to accept it and thanks to this Plastro gained the trust of the Yellow Army, and over time he climbed through the high ranks, achieving an important position despite his “Tannic” condition. This even began to change society’s opinion about these second-class citizens, becoming more respected. At the same time, the Tannic of the Yellow Army became one of the most experienced and hardened divisions in the army, being sent to the toughest battles not out of contempt, but because they were the most capable.
Being led and strategically commanded by Plastro, these forces became unstoppable, and after patiently waiting a few years, Plastro achieved the perfect context for his final blow on the Yellow.
On a date around 1954, the “Tannic”, now respectfully called “Tan”, deceived the Yellow higher-ups into believing that they would win the war against the Grays by cornering them in the Thermopiles, making them fall into deception due to the fact that having managed to make the Grays move there. But it was all a trap…
In reality, the Tans had been secretly allied with the Grays for some time. In exchange for destroying the Yellows, the Grays promised power and glory to the Tan. Plastro accepted… and between them they made the Yellows fall.
But Plastro did not trust the Grays, and distracted, worn out and trusting, the Grays near the end of the war were betrayed by Plastro, who kept almost all of his production power, leading to the end of the War. The Reds and the Greens, along with the Blue remnants decided to leave things as they were. The chances of losing a new war were high.
The surviving Gray remnants retreated and managed to survive. Although neither they nor the Blues were ever able to fully recover. The offpring of the Red, the Oranges, took the opportunity to become independent without much resistance from the Reds, who were quite plasticophobic themselves, they allowed it. Lo Tan remained the greatest power almost forever, until they were worn down by Plastro’s conquering greed. The Greens, although very inferior, remained the second most powerful nation. The Reds closed themselves in and nothing more was ever heard of them, except that they still exist.
The few remaining Yellow leaders found by the Blues, at that time greatly diminished by suffering the worst of the Gray attacks on their practically conquered continent, reached an agreement that changed the course of history: Create the Greens.
The remaining Blue forces that managed to escape from their nation, fighting from the outside, were a great force that had been fighting in this way for a long time. But unable to replenish themselves, they were lacking important resources. They were the ones who found more than half of the Yellow plastic reserves abandoned (approximately 2/3), along with the hopeless Yellow leaders and 15% of the remaining Yellow armed forces. Those who found the rest were the Reds.
The Blues and Yellows somehow and for some reason that is difficult to explain reached a secret agreement: Create the Greens. The plan was basically to create a new hybrid army in a secret location, remote and unlikely to be found. The place would be some remote and of little use location, so that neither the Grays nor the Reds would go there by accident and find them. Their hope was that the Reds, the most powerful force resisting the Grays, would keep them busy long enough for this new army to grow without hesitation.
The Blues and Yellows’ prediction was correct: The Reds found the rest of the Yellow plastic reserves and created the Orange Army, diluting the Red with the Yellow to obtain a greater number of fighters. This made even the Reds twist the fight and just before being conquered they pushed the Grays, exhausted by the large size of the Red territory and by maintaining a war on so many fronts, the Reds taking a position on the offensive, although slow.
This situation gave the Greens enough time to grow, to the detriment of the Yellows consciously melting themselves, becoming extinct, and the Blues sacrificing most of their remaining resources, barely making it, taking shelter and hiding, to survive the end of the war. This is how they learned to be the best spies, only performing this task to minimize the use of their surviving soldiers, but achieving great and useful strategic achievements: information.
Thus, with a few years and without interference, the Greens were created en masse, to enter the war by surprise, twist the balance of the conflict and thus win the war. No one would suspect its existence until it was too late.
For this reason the Greens were never a conquering nation, and were never aggressive against the Blues, except for the mercenary species who worked on their own for the Tan in the Tannic-Green war. And it is also for this reason that the Greens always helped the Blues without any type of condition.
Plastic World’s Dawn Land is an almost exact copy, a mirror, of a place of the same name, but in the Prehistoric World, or vice versa. Upon entering this place from the respective portal, the user arrive at an almost identical place, as if it were the same place, but with the original statues like new in the Prehistoric World and with the statues old, rusty and broken in the Plastic World, like if years passed.
This raises the question: Are the other worlds a version of the Plastic World, but from another time?, or in this case are they simply imitations of the same places?. Or are they like those tables of human modelers who made miniatures of their world? Is the Toyverse then a product of human modeling? Well, in some way, maybe…
Explorers have said that by taking this reference point, and heading to known places at certain coordinates from there, you can find ancient versions of the well known Plastic World locations, as if an Army Men base or city had never existed there. But this enters, for now, into the realm of mere speculation.
UNKNOWN DATE
The first historic events of the Army Men are unknown, but new studies are pointing all clues that were created in the Big World, aka Real World, like the rest of the other toykind. So almost all toys in all worlds from now on use this universal time measurement.
Whatever happened to the creators, The Makers, The Maker or “Humans”, or wherever they went, is still a mystery.
1939 (approx)
In this RW stardard time detonated the first and for today only Great Army Men World War, know like the Grey World War. It was a sudden large-scale coordinated attack on all known nations of that time: the Blues, the Yellows and the Reds, perpetuated by the first great nation: The Gray Nation.
1943
The Tan took over the Yellow Nation, putting 85% of the Yellow Army in the Thermopiles passage, attacking them in mass. Half of the Yellow Army escaped through the narrow passage, saving a few, but meanwhile the secret allies of the Tan, the Greys, finished the Yellows forces on the other side.
However, this entire joint maneuver between the Grays and Tan, which achieved the total and complete independence of the Tan, cost them dearly: Losing all the raw materials for Yellow plastic production.
1944
The Green Army, created by the Blue and the last Yellow survivors, entered the War after spending years building their forces in secret, attacking from the opposite side of the Red Front of the Plastica Continent.
1965
The Red with the Orange forces they created and the recently emerged nation, the Green, that entered the war suddenly and without having previously revealed its existence, they pressed from several fronts with their entire armies, suffocating the Grays faster. At the same time the Tan betray the Greys, cementing their fall at this conflict. After that, the Blues and Reds started a Cold War that remains active to this day, while the Greens remained neutral to them. But the Green managed to frustrate the Tan rise to power, so from that moment the rivalry between the Tan and the Green started.
The Grays retreated and never recover their glory from this conflict.
May 5, 1975
He carefully guided his troops through a deadly barrage of enemy fire on over 16 missions covering 5 different terrains. Only the best military minds prevailed in that blazing battle of ground based infantry. Tons of weapons were at his disposal, blasting away with howitzers, shredded plastic with .50 caliber twin machine guns, or quietly speared the enemy with his razor-sharped bayonet. Never before had a plastic war reached this size and scale. Dived back into the trenches!. It was Real Combat, of Plastic Men.
Sep 2, 1986
The Tan attack again. Blood, sweat and plastic–on the ground, at sea, in the sky!. Three theaters of war: Land, Sea and Air!. The Tan enemy was mobilizing for invasion. All the Green forces at disposal: helicopter, battleship, bomber, tank, the whole nine yards. It was total war for the Plastic World all over again. The most complete Army Men war yet!
1991
The Tan once again waged war with the Green Nation, so the Green retaliated by attacking the Tan capital. When they discovered that the Tan had created weapons of mass destruction, they declared a full-scale war against the Tan and deployed their forces worldwide to destroy the revived Tan Army and its new weapons.
1994
The events unfolds in the midst of the eternal ongoing war between the Tan and Green armies. The Tan forces are on the brink of creating weapons of mass destruction, aiming to finally crush the Green Army and end the war once and for all. It’s up to the Green Army to lead a team of Green commandos in a daring mission to thwart the Tan army’s plans.
Jun 30, 1998
This was the first known mission of Sarge. He is tasked with destroying the device before it can detonate
Jul 2, 1998
In this conflict, which seemed to be one more among its main protagonists, the Tans and the Greens, followed by secondary actors, the Grays and the Blues, a discovery was made that changed everything forever: The Portals, some doors in that then interpreted as “supernatural” that would take the Army Men where no plastic soldier had gone before
Feb 20, 1999
Once Sarge does go back, he and his squad started an adventure that constantly juggle back and forth between the Plastic World and the Real World, completing objectives to halt General Plastro’s schemes, and the schemes of a treacherous former Tan Army Major: Mylar.
Aug 21, 1999
Once again the Tan Commander Plastro is out to defeat Green Sarge, only this time he has enlisted the help of an Alien Army of bug-eyed extraterrestrials. To combat this new menace, Sarge has teamed up with Tina Tomorrow and her Galactic Army of Space Troopers. It’s up to Sarge to defend both, the Plastic World and Real World from Plastro and the evil Alien Army menace.
Nov 20, 1999
This events were another back and forth between the Plastic World and the Real World, but this time the Green Army helicopters took front. The most important events were the monsters created by Dr. Madd: plastic hybrids and beings from the Real World, such as Insects, armed with weapons fighting the Green air force.
Nov 27, 1999
The starting point of a new era for the Army Men. The Tan Army is invading the Green Nation, obtaining weapons of mass destruction from the Real World. Sarge Hawk, the protagonist, discovers portals leading from the Plastic World to the Real World and to prevent the destruction of the Green Nation, Sarge must destroy the portals and stop Plastro.
Sep 25, 1999
This events took combat to the skies with the vaunted Green Army Air Cavalry. The main protagonist of this story is an all-new hero, a pilot named Captain William Blade that leaded a new campaign continuing the epic battles between the Green and Tan plastic soldiers. They fought in the air and on the ground to rescue POWs, extract wounded allies, sabotage enemy plans, and most importantly, to fight the evil Plastro.
Mar 24, 2000
Blade and copilots, plus Sarge and Vikki, once again takes to the skies with an onslaught. Plastro has enlisted Tan Air Ace Baron Von Beige to trap Captain William Blade and destroy the Green Nation, with the help of the Blues.
May 25, 2000
Sarge’s Heroes 2 starts where its predecessor left off. The capture of Field Marshal Tannenburg will end the war, since Plastro has disappeared, becoming a victim of plastrification in the Real World. Brigitte Bleu, a spy, has developed a serum that reverses plastrification to bring back Plastro. Sarge Hawk’s job, and sometimes Vikki, is to destroy the serum, eliminate the Tan threat, and capture Plastro and Tannenburg.
Apr 4, 2001
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Jun 5, 2001
Is up to Sarge Hawk and reporter Vikki Grimm to thwart Plastro’s plans for conquest.
Previous attempts to discover Plastro’s plans were thwarted. Riff was captured and Scorch disappeared.
The Tan Army planned to dominate the world using Alien technology. Not just the Green Nation, but this would affect both the Plastic World and the Real World.
Sep 10, 2001
Believing she is following a lead on a story that could be her big break, ace investigative reporter Vikki G. is actually falling into a diabolical trap set by her nemesis, the beautiful Blue superspy Brigitte Bleu, who discovered new worlds and controlled them.
Dec 3, 2001
Sep 3, 2002
Oct 12, 2002
Jul 20, 2004
Jul 9, 2006
Army Men Major Malfunction events. There are no more Tans, so the evil Malfunction assembles an army of toys to take over a single house. He kills Sarge and Sgt. Hawk.
2017
More than a decade later, new heroes, new villains and new toys still fighting conflicts. The Toyverse continues its path years after Sarge, Sgt. Hawk and Vikki Grimm. Murphy, Victoria and the other new Green heroes of the Strike Team must defend their nations at all costs with new allies: Action Figures and other toys.
2023
The battlefield diversifies and becomes a fusion of different types of warfare. Murphy, Victoria and company adapt and evolve.
TODAY
It’s the era the Army Men are in right now. Winds of drastic changes are blowing…
Before 3D design and video game design, other talented artists had to face the challenge of making small beings look realistic, and showing giant environments from their perspective. In this first part of this series, we will reveal some of its ingenious secrets, knowledge that will help improve the experience of the small world of Army Men: Revolution
An article and interview made by VFXBLOG (https://vfxblog.com) December 19, 2017
Films like “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”, The Indian in the Cupboard, Ant-Man, Fantastic Voyage, Inner Space, Willow, Hook, among others, are all movies that have used different techniques of visual effects to do large things smaller, or show how the world looks from the perspective of a plastic soldier.
The visual effects supervisor, Eric Brevig, has worked on this type of films, including one of our favorites, “The Indian in the Cupboard”, which presented visual effects by the ILM of George Lucas, a visual effects company created by “The Creator of Star Wars” to be able to make Star Wars.
These techniques have varied, from the forced perspective, large sets, filming on green or blue screen and, of course, digital media such as 3D.
But before reading this text we copied and pasted, with our opinions interjected, we ask you to go first to read it in the original source, attached below!
vfxblog: What had been your experience with any miniaturisation effects prior to The Indian in the Cupboard?
Eric Brevig: I had done certain short sequences in other projects. I did a 3D, double 70mm Disney EPCOT film for the theme park around 1980. It was like a dream sequence for a pavilion that they built there about imagination. And part of the dream sequence had the little boy, who was the main character, imagining that he was looking at a miniature circus, maybe three feet across, filled with tiny clowns a few inches tall and so forth. Then later on he shrunk down to fit into somebody’s hand.
And so that was the first time I had to really wrap my head around how you shoot mixed scale characters like that so that the perspective is correct and so forth. And since that was a 70mm 3D, meaning stereo 3D, project, there was much less tolerance for cheating things like scale and perspective.
I also did work on the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience for another Disney theme park several years later and just continued the same sort of things. I was on Hook at ILM as well with Tinkerbell. It was very familiar territory for me by the time The Indian in the Cupboard came up.
vfxblog: What is the major thing you think you have to get right with any kind of scale or miniaturisation work?
Eric Brevig: You have to be able to have the tiny element look like it was photographed from the same camera as the large element. And that means all aspects of photography – depth of field, shadow size, obviously camera position and camera motion and lighting. In Hook, because most of the time Tinkerbell was a fairy character that was glowing, the lighting became a combination of casting her light onto the background.
I remember we had a scene that I’d actually proposed to Steven Spielberg because I loved it in the Peter Pan animation, where the little Tinkerbell character walks up Peter’s shirt. Robin Williams was wearing a shirt and we had the character, Tinkerbell, walk through an ink pad so she left tiny little footprints. And it was just a lot of fun to work with Robin and getting him to, in a very tight close up, track his eyes where I was going to composite in the Tinkerbell character, and I gave him a little guide to follow. And then on overscale piece of blue screen set, we shot Julia Roberts following the same path.
But one thing that’s kind of fun when you’re doing little characters like that is that you can speed up the action because little things can move quickly. So I was adjusting the timing so that, at the rate that an adult Julia Roberts, full size, could walk up a set that looked like somebody’s blue chest, laying down of course, that her character, composited in, would track exactly where his eyes had been looking.
vfxblog: With Tinkerbell in Hook, and in several other films like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, one of the main methods was to build over-sized sets. And then there’s also shooting the actors against bluescreen and compositing them in, and there were some forced perspective shots. But was that kind of the idea, to mix it up a bit, so that audience isn’t really quite sure how you’ve done it?
Eric Brevig: Yeah, I think that’s the most fun. We did one or two forced perspective shots, which I love to do and I kind of, growing up really was enamoured with the work that the Disney studios had done on Darby O’Gill and the Little People, which was all essentially forced perspective. There’s maybe one or two composited shots in the entire movie, but most of it was very sophisticated forced perspective and mirror shots, where a front surface mirror is partially removed, revealing a background set that’s painted and lined up precisely to match the foreground.
When I was a student in college, one of my student films, because I had no technical equipment to do anything sophisticated, was basically a mixed scale student film, where I bought $1 mirror tiles at the local construction supplies store and carefully scraped off the silver from the back and lined it up with the foreground set and the background set. So that was all stuff that I loved to play with and experiment with as a kid. And then, because I think on Hook Steven really wanted to do that the old school way, my art director and I set it up for him, so we could make it look like Julia was in the doll house, and the doll house was in the foreground, and she was on an oversized set in the background.
But the reality is, it is so cumbersome to take the time to do that in front of camera, and so much faster and easier to use compositing and CG that we did it one time and they said, ‘That’s great, let’s not do that anymore, let’s just go back to the way you want to do it,’ which is using multiple photography elements.
vfxblog: Hook came out in 1991. By the time Indian and the Cupboard came along in 1995, had digital compositing moved on to a point that was even more beneficial for pulling off scale shots?
Eric Brevig: Well, it didn’t necessarily help with scale, because both the large scale and small scale characters were played by actors, so you’re obliged to photograph them both. If you have a small character in a fantasy world or in a CG world, life is much easier. But if you’ve got both characters, large and small scale on screen together in a photorealistic world, you’re obliged to come up with a way to photograph them both so that they both look like they’re in the same environment. And also, for the actors and performers, you have to come up with a way for them to interact and act together.
So a lot of the work on Indian in the Cupboard was to facilitate that kind of emotional relationship that was the core of the movie. It wasn’t a fantasy – well, it was a fantasy, but it wasn’t a spectacular visual effects extravaganza that was showing off, look what we can do. It was an intimate tale of two characters from different worlds and different scales who developed this emotional bond. So it was really important to allow the actor, his name was Litefoot, who played Little Bear, to be able to hear and react to, as an actor, this giant boy. And similarly I had to help the boy, who was played by Hal Scardino, find where to look and so forth and be able to act with the Indian actor so that there was this genuine sense of two people communicating.
vfxblog: I’m curious if going from optical compositing to digital compositing made any difference at all?
Eric Brevig: Well it didn’t really make a big change because essentially we were just replacing the clunky, mechanical, optical printer phase with the equally clunky, primitive digital compositing stage. But it gave me the opportunity to do some fun, nuanced enhancements. I remember there was a shot of, I think it was a cowboy, he’s supposed to be two inches tall and he’s walking across a bed with a comforter on it, and I had a big uneven surface that was blue and shot David Keith, who was playing the cowboy, walking across that.
And my director of photography is a fella named Chuck Shuman, who I worked with on a lot of movies, from Total Recall to The Abyss, and he’s one of the most precise and brilliant directors of photography in understanding how to match the lighting between a small set and an oversized set. And he would actually match the size of the lights, scaled up, when we shot the actors portraying little people, because that’s the way the light wraps around you, is the relationship between the size of the light source and the size of you. And so, when we would shoot the normal set, we would have normal sized lights, whatever size they were, a foot across, and he would rig, for bluescreen miniature people, I think the scale was like 24:1, 24 foot wide illuminated surface that would cast the matching shadows.
In any event, we would shoot these, but there really wasn’t a way to puppeteer how the footsteps would move the fabric because oversized fabric never looked convincing. One of the things that I learned early on was, if you can always shoot the non-miniature stuff on real sets with real cloth, like you would normal macro photograph, it adds a verisimilitude to the scene that you can’t get with oversized props and so forth, which are very difficult to pull off and not have them look a little bit like oversized props.
In any event, as our character walks across this blanket, we were able to digitally put in little divots and depress the cloth wherever his foot stepped, which just sort of locked him in, in a way that you could never had done without digital. Because we’re essentially just warping, or morphing a little bit, some of the background imagery as his foot is making contact. So there were really nice little enhancements like that, as well as just the ability to perfect the compositing edges and so forth, in a way that photo mechanical compositing did not allow us to do.
vfxblog: You mentioned a really cool thing there, which was matching lighting for when a character is shot big and when they’re shot small. What about camera movement, did you use motion control to match up small and large shot plates?
Eric Brevig: I would decide based upon the needs of the shot, which camera – because we had to photograph foregrounds and backgrounds with cameras because they were both real environments – which camera would lead the shot. Let’s say it’s the little boy and he picks up this tiny Indian and he moves across the screen with it in his hand. I would photograph that with a traditional camera, tracking the boy. And he’d have just a little tiny object, I think I used something that looked like a bent paperclip, so that he had something in his hand that was showing him where to put his eye line and kept him honest about how he was holding it, but was easy to paint out.
And then after we had shot that, we would analyse the footage within the duration of the shot that was intended to be used in the movie and we’d say, ‘Okay, here at the beginning we’re one foot away from his hand and six inches above that. Okay, well that’s equal to 24 foot back and 12 feet above.’ And so we would design a camera move, using a very big crane arm, so that we would, as the boy moves through the shot, the camera’s now six inches from the character and one inch above his head, well, that equals 12 feet back and six inches would be six feet above his head.
So, we would basically plot out in the real world what we were doing in terms of matching that camera. And because you have a lot of space for leeway when you’re moving a camera 50 feet through a sound stage, it doesn’t matter if you’re a little bit to the right or the left of where you’re supposed to be, because then by tracking the two and using digital compositing to lock the two together, you’re able to make the perspective of one non-motion control shoot fit the other one by sort of locking them together afterwards.
If instead the shot is driven by what the little characters are doing, well, there was one very nice shot where the camera’s creeping across the little boy’s bedroom, and we can hear the Indian is singing some sort of traditional song. And the camera peers over this toy box that’s in the foreground, and we see that the Indian’s sitting on top of this little half-built structure that’s going to be his home. So what we did is, we figured out the total distance needed at the scale of our adult actor, and it was like a 100 foot camera move, and then we’d come down and we’d peer over where the box would be and then we boomed down, basically into a close-up of him, and we shot that first.
And then by tracking it and using a motion control system to shoot the same move on a bedroom set, we were able to lock them together precisely in photography and really get that sense of no hindrance to the camera wherever it went, because we were shooting on a genuine bedroom sized set, rather than a little bluescreen of the Indian. All the depth of field and focus and all that stuff was exactly as it should be, so it felt like you’re crawling, you know, the camera sort of creeping through this room and peering over a little toy box and there, in shallow depth of field, on this half built house, we’d find the Indian character.
Once again, my director of photography, being aware of what we were doing, would take incredibly precise notes on, for example the bedroom set. Including colour temperature from each of the lights and positioning, and we’d really create that on the giant scale of the screen stage and the two fit together really, really precisely.
