Up in the Air Step by Step

The signature image from Paramount Pictures' Up in the Air shows actor George Clooney framed in an airport window, gazing out at the tarmac. The shot depicts a meditative moment that any airline traveler can relate to, but it also exemplifies how digital collage techniques can deliver the perfect frame that director Jason Reitman desired.

"I think people have gotten used to seeing perfect movies," says Visual Effects Supervisor Jamie Dixon of Los Angeles-based Hammerhead Productions, which handled the 90 visual effects shots for Up in the Air. "We don't have to put up with many compromises any more."

Reitman had captured the original plate photography on a clear day early in the production, but he later wanted the shot to work as an introspective moment during a snow-filled sequence. "He needed this exact footage because the action of George Clooney was perfect," Dixon says. In addition to adding signs of snowy weather to the scene, Hammerhead had to remove a number of elements in the plate photography that distracted from the mood Reitman wanted.

"In the original shot, there's a catering truck driving around and a giant airplane that lumbers through the background," Dixon says. "That's the reality of a busy working airport. They shot the best that they could get, and we tuned it in post to give them what they wished they could have shot."

Even though the camera isn't moving, the plate needed to be stabilized. "There's always gate weave—it's the nature of film running through a camera—so we had to take that out," Dixon says. A filter was then applied to seven stabilized frames to create a still image that had no film grain in it.

"We would apply our own film grain later to match the film grain in the plate," says Hammerhead co-supervisor Justin Jones.

Jones was Hammerhead's hands-on supervisor for this shot, and he used Apple Shake throughout the process. "We had to create a frame with no vehicles moving around," he says. "So we took slivers from around 10 other frames in the shot that didn't having anything moving in them, and then we pasted those together." Armed with this clean background, Jones rotoscoped the moving vehicles and pasted the clean image over where those vehicles used to be.

"Once we took out any movement, we noticed that there were some windows across the tarmac where you could see the reflections of the moving vehicles that we had removed," Jones says. "That wasn't apparent until there were no moving vehicles! So we also had to patch those out."

Once all of the distracting elements were removed, Jones dressed the scene with snow to make it match the surrounding shots in the sequence.

"That's a classic matte-painting assignment," Dixon says. "We found a bunch of photographs of snow lumped against parked cars. The scale and the lighting were probably all wrong, but Justin reconfigured them in what was effectively a photo collage."

"I ended up using 15 to 20 different pieces from different photographs," Jones says. "I moved them into place to make the snow look like it was bundled up against the edges of the buildings and then painted on top of them to make it look natural."

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Another requirement was to make the dry tarmac that Reitman had filmed appear wet. "Typically, wet ground is darker and it has elements of the background reflected in it," Dixon says. "To do the reflection, you flip the image over and stretch it out and blur it vertically, which gives you the streaky look that you see in a wet street. Then you darken it down and make it splotchy so it looks like there are puddles." Jones also added airplane tire marks to suggest that planes had taxied across the slushy ground.

"One of the reasons that we did this work in Shake was that we knew it would be in the same color space as the rest of the image," Dixon says. "Obviously when Justin created the painting, he had to make sure that there was enough contrast and color and that the pieces he added to the shot would match the live action that he replaced. These days, color correction is a straightforward process. We got this shot at the level that the whole movie was scanned, and we effectively took frames out of the scanning that happens for the movie's digital intermediate. We don't touch anything in the frame except for the parts that we're supposed to be touching. Then we give the editor back something that's digitally equivalent to that. If it looked good in the scan, it would look good in the output. The editor could drop the shot into their DI session just like it was shot that way."

"We work in floating point linear space so there's no clipping," Jones says. "The scanned film that they gave us was in log color space and we converted that to floating point linear. Then we go back to log space and hand it back to them."

Hammerhead was careful to add film grain to the new elements that would blend with the original footage. "There are grain plug-ins for Shake, and we tuned those to match," Dixon says. "There's a 'perfectionizing pass' that we go through."

Dixon says he thinks the end result enabled the director to get exactly the shot he wanted.
"It's an incredibly valuable service in terms of a director's ability to tweak things, and it's also great practice for us to be able to slip one by the audience" he says. "We knew this was an iconic shot, but you never know how something will be used—it could turn into the poster for the movie."

Director: Jason Reitman
Director of Photography: Eric Steelberg
Visual Effects Supervisor: Jamie Dixon
Visual Effects Co-Supervisor/Compositor: Justin Jones