Rome wasn’t built in a day. While this saying refers to the real city, it also applies to the filmic version in director Ridley Scott’s DreamWorks/Universal epic film Gladiator—for which a team of visual effects artisans labored for over a year to help bring the ancient city to celluloid life.
Of course, real Romans didn’t have the luxury of using computers to build their Colosseum in CG, which was but one of the seamless effects that earned an ensemble of lead artists—including two from London-based Mill Film—visual effects Oscars for Gladiator. (Mill Film, a division of London-based postproduction facility The Mill, was launched in 1997 as a partnership between The Mill and directors Ridley and Tony Scott.)
It was the first Oscar win and nomination for the men who spearheaded the effects crew: John Nelson, a freelancer hired by DreamWorks to serve as the overall visual effects supervisor; Mill Film visual effects supervisors Tim Burke and Rob Harvey (the latter is now partnered with fellow effects artist Grahame Andrew in Lola Post, London) and Neil Corbould, a freelancer tapped to supervise the physical and prosthetic effects.
The honor is sweet for Nelson, a 20-year industry vet who began his career in ’79 as a cameraman at now defunct pioneering effects shop Robert Abel and Associates, where he progressed to technical director and then director during his eight years there. In ’87, he moved to Berlin to work with Mental Images, and in ’89, returned to the U.S. to join Industrial Light+Magic (ILM), San Rafael, Calif.
Nelson left ILM in ’91 to supervise Stay Tuned for Los Angeles-based Rhythm & Hues Studios, and joined Culver City, Calif.-based Sony Pictures Imageworks the following year. His visual effects supervisory credits include: In the Line of Fire, So I Married an Axe Murderer, My Life, The Pelican Brief, Johnny Mnemonic, Judge Dredd, Anaconda and City of Angels. In ’98 he left Sony to work on Gladiator.
Nelson says he and his colleagues on Gladiator didn’t take the Oscar win for granted, despite being favored by the trades. "We were nominated for a BAFTA award," he notes, referring to the British equivalent of an Oscar, "and we lost. So we realized it’s a horse race and anyone could win. Certainly the whole point of the Oscars is that you aren’t nominated unless you’re very good. It’s an honor to be nominated, but it’s certainly gratifying to win."
The film’s 90 effects shots constitute nine minutes of screen time. Mill Film generated 78 of the most difficult shots (Pacific Title Digital, Los Angeles, did 10 and visual effects editor Wes Sewell did two). Purely story-driven, the effects were created to help realize Ridley Scott’s vision of Rome. In large part, they serve to enhance wider shots, adding architecture and crowds impossible to achieve practically.
Nelson recalls the director’s comment: " ‘The greatest compliment, really, is to have people not notice your work and ask you what you did.’ To that, I’d add the greatest compliment is to have the audience think the film is great, and that the sets, photography and action made for a great story well told."
The film, which also won the Academy Award as best picture of the year, tells a tale of revenge and redemption centering on a Roman general, Maximus (Russell Crowe, who picked up the Oscar for best actor) who is betrayed by a vicious young emperor, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). After Maximus’ family is murdered, he is enslaved and trained as a gladiator. He returns to avenge himself on Commodus, setting up the climactic conclusion.
epic job
The process of creating the effects for Gladiator began in the summer of ’98. Nelson and Scott worked in Los Angeles, breaking down the story and bidding several effects houses. After Mill Film was hired, Nelson spent October and November in London doing pre-production for the visual effects. At that point, the story was divided into sections: the German battle, Morocco, Rome in the distance, the Colosseum interior, the Colosseum exterior and the "blimp" shot.
Principal photography began in February ’99, with Burke serving as Mill Film’s on-set supervisor and Harvey supervising compositing in London. Burke and Harvey have been colleagues since they both worked on spots at the former Cell Animation; they were recruited—along with a dozen Cell effects artists—to set up the CG department at the then fledgling Mill Film in ’97. At Mill Film, Burke served as digital effects/CG supervisor and lead compositor on Enemy of the State; digital effects compositor on Babe: Pig in the City; and visual effects supervisor on Hannibal.
"Tim and I were supposed to split the shoot and the post work," recalls Harvey, who worked on spots for his first 18 months at Mill Film; he served as visual effects supervisor on Still Crazy. "But the script and the shoot changed from day-to-day, so in the end, Tim stayed out on the shoot and I remained here."
Harvey says that the team considered building an oversized model of the Colosseum. "The problem was Ridley had up to six camera crews with wild camera moves inside of the Colosseum. It was just going to be impractical to match the lighting and populate it so we decided on the CG route."
Of the Colosseum seen in the film, 25 percent of it was constructed with an actual set piece, and the rest is a 3-D extension rendered in the computer. The partially constructed set was a one-tiered, 52-foot-high, C-shaped section of the Colosseum, built on location in Malta. CG filled out the rest of the first tier and created the second and third tiers, and the retractable canvas roof used to shade spectators.
Mill Film also fabricated some 40,000-50,000 virtual spectators to fill out the spectators in the Colosseum. The virtual crowd was achieved by shooting 35 extras against green screen. Three video cameras were mounted to capture the top view, side view and front view of crowd members in various lighting set-ups. Each performed different actions (cheering, booing, talking, etc). Harvey came up with the idea of having the extras wear a special blue wrap over their costumes that could be digitally recolored for variation.
Each spectator was then mapped onto a virtual flat card. These cards were positioned in every seat in the stadium, allowing the images of people to be distributed around the Colosseum. "The computer randomized the performances, the timing, the color of the togas and stuck them back in the model," says Harvey, who tested out the technique in pre-pro by videotaping a group of Mill Film staffers dressed in improvised togas. "They snuck a few of us in [the finished film]; not that you’ll notice, but we know where we are," jokes Harvey.
Nelson says they devised several innovations to achieve what Scott wanted. For the film’s first battle sequence in Germania, a virtual battlefield was established by digitally joining together three plates that became the left, center and right sides of the battlefield. "We took out the lens distortion, sewed the plates together, added a ton of CG and CG effects, and did a virtual panning move through the battlefield," Nelson explains.
The Germania scene showcased some of Corbould’s handiwork—a fleeting decapitation shot, a shot in which a large crossbow known as a scorpion skewers two Germans, and the explosive pyrotechnic effects. A two-time BAFTA winner for his work as special effects supervisor on The Fifth Element and Saving Private Ryan, Corbould implemented several technique he’d used on Saving Private Ryan, including staging amputations with the help of real-life amputee performers fitted with artificial limbs.
At press time, Mill Film’s Burke was unavailable for comment. He hardly had time to reflect on his Oscar win as he was in Morocco on another assignment.
One of the hardest sequences was the lingering aerial Super Bowl-style "blimp" shot that revealed the Colosseum and swooped down to show a battle in progress. "We needed to know what lenses and what height we needed to be at, as large components of the shot would be added in post and we needed to compose the plate with those elements in mind," explains Nelson. "We did previsualization of the shot, and worked out the height of the helicopter with a Wescam mount. We worked out the proper lens, bearing in mind both the real and the virtual set. We shot in Vistavision in order to have a large negative that would give us more area to work within.
"We scanned the film," he continues, "added tops of buildings and extended the Colosseum to rise up to meet the camera. We added thousands of people on the streets—seven hundred outside and three hundred inside the arena—added hundreds of CG motion-captured slaves on the velarium operating the CG roof shade, and filled the Colosseum with forty thousand fans. We then added a battle with fighters and chariots—the original plate had one chariot—rendered and composited all the elements and filmed out the finished shot. It was really complex."
In addition to Mill Film’s proprietary software such as Crowd Builder, which streamlined the spectator rendering process, the programs used to create the film’s effects included Alias and Softimage to model; Softimage to choreograph moves and animate; Renderman to render and Inferno to composite.
Groundbreaking technology has vastly broadened the filmmakers’ storytelling palette, making possible things that, previously, could only be imagined. "I think two years or even a year ago," says Nelson, "if someone had said, ‘You’re going to have a twenty-six-second Steadicam shot moving around gladiators coming out into the arena, and the arena they’re going to be in is full-on digital—people would look at you and go, ‘Are you crazy?’ And not only did we conceive it, but we pulled it off."
"I think the genius in Gladiator is thinking about a visual effects problem unbounded, so you can approach it from a purely creative point of view," observes Nelson. "The bottom line is that we can do anything. The reason [behind an effects approach] always has to be why you’re doing it, not how you’re going to do it. I’m confident I can figure out a way to do anything."
Moving On
Harvey opened Lola Post last year in tandem with the aforementioned Andrew (who was also part of Mill Film’s CG team on Gladiator) because they wanted to run their own company. Harvey is now happily back to working on commercials, including those for Twining Tea and Thorpe Park, an amusement park in Surrey, England.
"We might go on to doing features again in a year or two," says Harvey, "but at the moment, we’re having fun working with our old friends, old clients, who we’ve known for years. Grahame spent a year in Australia [as visual effects supervisor] and a year doing the post on Babe: Pig in the City, and it takes it out of you. … We were very lucky with Gladiator…it was fun. But it’s nice to get back to doing good creative work in commercials; they turn around fast.
Nelson now intends to get back into commercial work as a director, while he continues his feature endeavors. "I think commercials are quite dynamic and they drive the envelope of what can be done," he notes. "What I’ve seen being done is very fun stuff. When I do features, I direct a small section of the film with respect to the visual effects. I’ll direct my own unit and I do a lot of the heavy lifting so the director can keep his eye on the big picture. With commercials, instead of just directing part of the movie, I direct the whole thing."
