Step by Step: Land of the Lost

When Land of the Lost was a '70s TV series, the creatures were guys in rubber suits. For Universal Pictures' update starring comedian Will Ferrell, computer creature animation plays a major role, but the production has kept enough of the rubber-suit aesthetic to generate laughs. One such creature is the lizard-like Enik, who guards the steps to a time-space portal that Ferrell and company must climb through to return to the real world. To generate the look of that climactic scene, director Brad Silberling relied on the digital effects team at Los Angeles-based Hammerhead Productions.

"The actors were shot on an illuminated platform against a black background," says Hammerhead Visual Effects Supervisor Thomas Dadras. "But they're supposed to be in a vast world, with a horizon that stretches far into the distance and with 30ft.-high glowing crystals rotating in space. When the time-space portal gets turned on, smoke rises up and swirls like a turbulent mass around the steps leading up to it." Through the smoke that rings the portal, you can see an image of Ferrell's vehicle back in the real world where he started before entering the Land of the Lost.

The set pieces that were photographed with the actors were sparse. The practical platform on which the actors stood held some illuminated steps for them to climb, and there was a table holding some crystals. Everything else in the shot had to be digitally generated with a combination of 2D and 3D effects.

Hammerhead began by cleaning up and tracking the plate photography. Using Apple Shake and the studio's own proprietary tool Ras, rotoscope artists removed the legs of the table so that it would appear to float. "The practical stairs also had to be removed so they could be replaced by our smoky-looking stairs that lead up to the portal," Dadras says.

"The camera was moving, so there was quite a lot of tracking as well," Dadras says. "We had really good reference photos and camera data, but tracking was difficult because of lens distortion. We used [The Foundry] Nuke to figure out lens information and undistort the plate, and we got better camera tracking once we did that. There was definitely plenty of massaging."

Once the plates were tracked, Hammerhead could begin to integrate digital elements, such as the horizon that rings the scene and the crystals rotating in space. "We had specular highlights on the crystals, which catch glints of light as they rotate," Dadras says. "We used an inhouse 3D tool called Z for doing the crystal look and for propagating the horizon. The horizon was developed with shapes done in [Autodesk] Maya based on production design artwork. We created little cities of crystal in the distance, which were shrunken down onto the horizon. These elements were then propagated out using Z, which renders out the images in [Pixar] RenderMan. The look-development process was challenging because we didn't have things in the real world that we could reference."

At the center of the scene is the portal that will take Ferrell and his companions back to the real world. The portal is composed of several layers, including footage of Ferrell's car that was integrated as a 2D element. "We put it on a card and tracked it into the scene," Dadras says. "But even that was manipulated heavily because the director wanted it to have more movement than there actually was in that footage. He wanted it to appear that if you jumped into this portal, you'd get back to a real place, not some foggy, misty apparition. So our compositing supervisor, Dan Levitan, put time-lapse cloud footage into the shot of the car and completely altered that image."

The smoke ringing the portal and the steps leading up to it required extensive experimentation, according to Dadras. "We presented lots of different design ideas to the director, and we ended up with smoke that crawls up the stairs to the portal," he says. "The director didn't want the smoke to look like it was flowing down like dry ice. He wanted to convey the feeling that the actors were being sucked up and drawn into the portal. When they finally jump into the portal, it collapses around them. The smoke that rings the portal was done with Maya Fluids and rendered in Maya. We also had some practical smoke elements that we then textured onto the warping, turbulent stair geometry that was built in Maya." The background images of the portal and the stairs were rendered in mental images mental ray. Compositing was done in Shake.

Integration of all the digital elements with the live-action actors was a key challenge. "When the characters are climbing the stairs, they stir up some interactive smoke," Dadras says. "For these footfall elements, we used Maya 3D particles."

The final touches involved making sure that all the glowing crystals in the scene appear to belong there, whether they're giant crystals floating behind the actors' heads or small ones on the table that refract the image of the distant horizon. All told, Hammerhead spent five months working on Land of the Lost. Without such attention to detail, Dadras says with a laugh, "I could have gone on vacation a lot sooner!"

Director: Brad Silberling

Visual Effects Supervisor: Bill Westenhofer

For Hammerhead
Productions:

Visual Effects Supervisor: Thomas Dadras

Visual Effects Producer: Les Hunter

Compositing Supervisor: Dan Levitan

Compositor: Jon Doyle

Animators: Manny Wong, Aung Min, Didier Levy

Prep Artists: Derick Dressel,
Deborah Hiner

Tracking Artists: Dan Mellitz,
Chris Hopkins