ER problems
(part 2 of the making of the stargate mask effects)
The action was filmed twice. Once with the bad guy wearing the fully
extended helmet, and once with the bad guy not wearing the helmet. The
fight scenes were planned and choreographed so that the motion would be
similar in both shots. An incredible testament to the forgiving "FIX IT
IN POST!" capabilities of Elastic Reality is that the shots typically
DID NOT LINE UP.
That is, in addition to making the helmet pieces appear or disappear
like a mechanical apparatus, ER was also picking up the bad guy from
where he was in take one, and lining him up with where he needed to
be to coincide with take two.
The effects guys at Kleiser-Walczak were really super. They fed back
their problems, and our programmers fed back fixes and they put in a
lot of hours, assembling the many intricate helmet shots in the movie.
They had to walk a very fine line, that is, their work had to be perfect
because in several shots, the effect was to take place during close-ups
of the actor's faces…this is the cinematic equivalent of a master
magician performing slight-of-hand with his audience only inches away.
The Kleiser-Walczak team, in my opinion (and in the opinion of reviewers
like Siskel and Ebert) did a fabulous job on those effects.
The material itself was scanned film frames shots in an animorphic (or
some other greek sounding word) format…Elastic Reality dynamically
adjusted for the pixel aspect on the fly.
The JIGSAW warping mode was to go into Elastic Reality 2.0 for the SGI
(and did). Before ER 2.0 for the SGI came out, however, we released
ER 1.0 for Windows, which coming from the same code base has exactly
the same JIGSAW capability which has gone on to be the basis of many
of our TransJammer effects.
Jason
Lifestyles of the poor and anonymous