Deuces are wild and so are the animals in Noah, a tale inherently steeped in pairs. So appropriately enough, the film’s primary visual effects house, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), coupled with LOOK Effects to form a formidable duo of their own. ILM created a veritable animal kingdom, turning out the mammals, snakes and insects for the epic movie while LOOK handled the birds. ILM also brought to life the Watchers, fallen angels who take the form of huge rock-like, six-armed creatures that help Noah build the ark and defend it against Tubel-cain and his followers. ILM deftly handled the flooding and battle sequences while LOOK did the Garden of Eden and environments in the pre-flood world.
Darren Aronofsky directed Noah which stars Russell Crowe in the title role as the Biblical hero who has visions of an apocalyptic deluge and takes extreme measures to protect his family from the coming flood.
Noah is Aronofsky’s interpretation of the Biblical story. A Paramount Pictures production in conjunction with Regency Enterprises, Protozoa Pictures and Disruption Entertainment, Noah also stars Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth and Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Marc Chu, ILM’s animation supervisor on Noah, said, “This is the biggest job we’ve taken on in terms of complexity. We used new software and had to come up with a methodology of how we would put all this together. We created an animal kingdom that was grounded in reality but not typical or conventional.
Darren wanted us to build species that didn’t exist. There’s no way we could build every single animal separately; that would have taken far too much time. So we broke our animal kingdom into sets of animals that we could then modify and build variations of—different body types, sizes, sort of base model animals. We would then change certain attributes—heads, tails, proportions, texturing, fur when needed. This helped us get a lot of mileage from a base set of animals.”
Further adding to the complexity, continued Chu, were the walk cycles that had to be devised for each animal. “We had to create cycles for walking, trotting, how they slow down and go to sleep. These individual cycles were a huge undertaking….But the big challenge for animation was creating the Watchers. We brought in some dancers Darren used in Black Swan for inspiration and movement studies—to map out how these massive fallen angel rock characters would look and move.”
Two key Watcher characters were the group’s leader, Samyaza, and Magog who defends Noah.
“We had to make them unique in how they moved,” related Chu. “We spent a lot of time to depict their character—they were once beautiful angels now bound by earth and hindered by their bodies of rock. We wanted to convey a majestic sense of these creatures trapped inside their imperfect bodies and trying to cope.”
Chu and his animation team dovetailed with their VFX studio counterparts under the aegis of ILM’s Ben Snow, overall visual effects supervisor on Noah. Their coordination and cooperation have been honed over the years on such films as Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Terminator Salvation.
“The collaboration between us was great. We’d attend each other’s dailies. Ben would see where the animation was. We’d see where the rendering was. There was a great back and forth to push things and make them better—all to complete Darren’s vision, which wasn’t easy. There are visuals in Darren’s head that are not easy to realize but always challenging.”
The collaborative juices were also flowing directly between ILM and Aronofsky. “Sometimes Darren would come to ILM in San Francisco or it would be Ben and I flying to New York to work with him there. And when none of us were traveling, we would work through cineSync,” related Chu. The latter technology enables remote viewing anywhere of video in synchronization. “Plus you can sketch, draw on the work and it all plays back in real time. You start off with an idea, try things out and arrive at what’s best.”
As overall VFX supervisor, Snow was also connected to the work being done at LOOK, explained Chu.
“Ben was tied into the review sessions LOOK would have with Darren—we would share shots. They would provide birds for a sequence in which they would have our animals. They would have Watchers in their sequences or vice versa. We were sending files back and forth with Ben responsible for overseeing and making sure things were coherent all across the board.”
And, of course, all the elements had to be meshed seamlessly with the live-action footage and cast performers.
ILM delivered 411 shots, including 285 from the animation team, for Noah. The LOOK coterie of talent was responsible for 300-plus shots.
Darren Aronofsky
Chu described working with Aronofsky as “a treat…Ben and I were over the moon to get the chance to work with someone who has such great vision. He’s an independent filmmaker essentially doing a blockbuster which isn’t a typical pairing, It’s the best of both worlds. We did everything we could to help him make the movie he wanted.”
While Noah marked Aronofsky’s first time teaming with ILM, the film was the continuation of a relationship between the director and LOOK, and more specifically its VFX supervisor Dan Schrecker.
“Darren and I were college roommates,” shared Schrecker who worked on such Aronofsky films as Pi, Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Black Swan. Schrecker was with his own visual effects house Amoeba Proteus for his initial films with Aronofsky, bringing LOOK into the picture. Then Schrecker joined LOOK and continued teaming with Aronofsky. LOOK’s work on Black Swan earned BAFTA and Visual Effects Society (VES Award) nominations.
“Darren is a great director who knows what he wants,” observed Schrecker. “He’s very specific. And if he’s not sure at times, he will let you know. So much of what he does is so well thought out, which was again the case with Noah.”
Noah was by far the largest and most complex film in LOOK’s 16-year history. Proprietary feather and flocking systems were developed to create assorted varieties of photo-real birds.
Dave Zeevalk, LOOK’s CG supervisor on Noah, was most intimately involved in the bird pipeline.
“There were a lot of design aspects in terms of creative contributions,” said Zeevalk. “The technical hurdle was not only figuring out how to go about creating millions of birds that would hold up in close shots but also being flexible enough so Darren could give us feedback which we could respond to in a reasonable amount of time, incorporating changes or features he wanted. We had 2 million flocking birds in the very first shot in the film—we gave them the textural feel of feathers without placing feathers on them. We had 3,000 hand-animated birds that got feathered. To create the needed volume, we would turn out one feathered bird and make 15 versions of it—without too much repetition in any given scene. We did a ton of rendering. We’d get notes from Darren and would adapt to his feedback. We had different chunks of birds to extract and plunk new ones in. We would extract individual birds and replace them in composite.”
The sheer volume of birds wasn’t the only consideration. The birds had to be programmatically dispersed so enough variation was seen on camera. Every owl for example, explained Zeevalk, had 15 options of what it could look like. No two of the same were right next to each other. Darren would tell us he didn’t like that particular bird here or there, that he needed it to look different in some respect. ‘This bird has to be more of a green color.’ We’d go back and shift things around. We had to be able to shift hue and saturation of color while maintaining a unique look for each bird to avoid repetition.”
LOOK also had a hand in the environments early on in the film before the flood, working off of plates that were shot in Iceland.
LOOK created environments and set extensions, matte paintings, many stylized sky replacements, and work in the Garden of Eden, including the tree of knowledge and the fruit of knowledge.
ILM’s Chu noted that building knowledge is dependent on speaking freely and exchanging ideas. In that vein, Chu affirmed that Aronofsky was always open to suggestions.
“If I had a new take on something, I’d email it to Darren and ask what do you think about this? He would reply. It was really great to work with him.”
Chu said the same about Noah editor Andrew Weisblum, who also cut Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Black Swan, the latter earning a Best Editing Oscar nomination. “Andy was very open to feedback,” related Chu. “He and Darren were dream clients.”
Aronofsky earned Best Director Oscar and DGA nominations on the strength of Black Swan. He won Best Director Film Independent Spirit Awards for both Black Swan and The Wrestler.
