Shutter Island Step by Step

In Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's new thriller for Paramount Pictures, the Oscar-winning director demonstrates a film fan's love for Hitchkockian shots that yield chilling revelations. One exemplary shot follows Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Teddy, as he scrambles from a forbidding insane asylum towards a lighthouse on a rocky island shore.

"There's a slow, creeping camera that moves up over the edge of a cliff," says Ben Grossmann, who supervised the effects created at Southern California-based CafeFX. "You can see the lighthouse, but its base is hidden by the cliff in the foreground. Then as the camera creeps over the edge, it reveals—in almost a Hitchcock Vertigo way—that the tide is too high and the path to the lighthouse is cut off by violent waves crashing on the rocks below. The shot revealed that Teddy couldn't walk to where he needs to go. We called it 'the point of dismay.'"

"Marty described all his creative directions to us in terms of story points," Grossmann says. "That left us free to determine what elements we should shoot to hit the emotions he wanted."

However, when Visual Effects Supervisor/Second Unit Director Rob Legato and Grossmann were shooting the visual effects background plates, the lighthouse had yet to be designed by Scorsese's longtime production designer Dante Ferretti. "We didn't know exactly what that was going to look like," Grossmann says. "But we had found a steep shoreline in Acadia National Park in Maine that had the kind of jeopardy Marty wanted to see. We spent several days shooting plates with a giant construction crane and a spider cam."

Once back in California, CafeFX began temping a virtual version of the shot for editor Thelma Schoonmaker to use. "We just tracked a little miniature rock island into the shot and let them edit from that," Grossmann says. "We needed to make a digital version of the miniature lighthouse so we'd have more control to match the principal photography that was shot on the cliff in Maine." CafeFX used Autodesk 3ds Max to create the CG and Andersson Technologies SynthEyes for tracking.

Once the basic composition of the shot was determined, CafeFX worked with model makers at New Deal Studios in Marina del Rey, Calif., which had crafted a miniature lighthouse that was more than 10ft. tall. "We measured our original camera move from Maine and then replicated that move as close as we could," Grossmann says. "In case there were any natural characteristics in the photography that we needed to replicate digitally, we would have a reference for them. We could judge the amount of parallax and the way the light moved over the lighthouse—all of those details."

None of the camerawork was motion control, Grossmann says. "Because then we would have been totally locked to a camera move," he says. "Marty and Thelma didn't have a tendency to feel constrained by the camera moves that were actually shot, and we knew that this would be a shot where we might need to do a tilt-down or a re-frame or a punch-in.

"Whenever you have a shot that isn't 75 percent 'there' in-camera but is comprised of several pieces, you know that no one piece represents more than 25 percent of the final shot. In this situation, Marty had the freedom to move the camera wherever he wanted, so it wouldn't have made sense for us to lock in a motion-control move. We shot the miniature with high-res digital cameras and with motion picture film stock to capture the same tonality as the rest of the shot. We had to have the ability to rotate the lighthouse and scale it and make it match whatever camera moves we wanted to do. In this particular case, we shot the miniature and then put the image onto the geometry of our digital model."

The next challenge was to integrate the lighthouse with the crashing ocean waves. New Deal Studios had built a base for the lighthouse that was a specific piece of rocky architecture, and CafeFX had to surround it with appropriately roiling seas. The water footage they had gotten in Maine wasn't turbulent enough to suggest sufficient jeopardy for DiCaprio's character, so Grossmann went in search of more treacherous seas.

"We scouted cliffs along the California coast and found an island of hostile and jagged rocks near Big Sur," he says. "It was about the right size for a lighthouse. At high tide, it was unconnected from the shoreline, but at low tide you could walk out on it. So we got really lucky—we found exactly what Marty had in mind. The cliffs from Maine would be the foreground, and the rocks from California would be the base for the lighthouse model."

Legato and Grossmann shot the California coastline on the same motion-picture stock Scorsese had used for principal photography. "That way, we'd have to spend a lot less time in compositing trying to get it all to match," Grossmann says. An exception to this rule was a bluescreen shoot done with actors playing security guards, which would also be composited into this shot. They were photographed with digital cameras because they would appear very small in the frame.

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To composite all these variable elements, CafeFX used Nuke (from The Foundry). "We had the rocky island from Big Sur but we still didn't know how big or small the lighthouse would ultimately appear on screen, so we needed the freedom to move things around quite a bit. Since we were compositing in Nuke, which has an in-depth 3D capability, one of the approaches we used was to create a [virtual] dome or a 360-degree environment," Grossmann says. "We could composite a montage of different live action plates so it created a total domed environment. We could put a camera in Nuke that matched a camera from the set, and wherever we pointed the camera you'd see a fully functioning live-looking version of that location.

"At Big Sur, we had put the camera up on a crane and shot large tiles of the entire area. We'd point the camera straight at the horizon and then roll 10 or 15 seconds of film for each quadrant. We'd pan and then re-set and shoot. So we could load all of these overlapping pieces of photography into Nuke and create a panorama of moving footage that was 180-degrees in any direction. If Marty decided to tilt up or reframe the camera, he had plenty of resolution in any direction."

In the end, Scorsese's Hitchcockian shot was a combination of many elements shot over many months. In addition to the foreground cliffs from Maine, the Big Sur rocks, the lighthouse model and bluescreen security guards, the shot included CG birds and ocean spray and skies shot by Grossmann in California. "I went out with a digital still camera and a special panographic head we'd made that allowed me to shoot large high-resolution skies in 360-degree domes," Grossmann says. "The sky was definitely separate from the rest of the plates. There was a ton of color correction involved in marrying all these elements together to make a water plate from Maine match one from California." The team at CafeFX made extensive use of Adobe Photoshop as they stitched these disparate elements into a whole.

Throughout it all, there was never any question that these elements would be as real-world as possible and not computer-generated. "Marty and Rob Legato are passionate about the old school," Grossmann says. "If we could capture something in camera, we did."

Director: Martin Scorsese
Visual Effects Supervisor/Second Unit Director: Robert Legato
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Production Designer: Dante Ferretti
Miniatures: Matthew Gratzner, New Deal Studios

For CafeFX:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Ben Grossmann
Compositor: Can Chang
VFX Producer: Jonathan Stone
Composing Supervisor: Alex Henning
CG Supervisors: Adam Watkins, Luke McDonald
CG Artist: Minory Sasaki
FX Artist: Brandon Davis
Matchmoving: Emerick Tackett
Roto/Paint work: Mike Ek, Micah Gallagher