Step by Step: Watchmen

Phantasmagorical effects abound in Warner Bros.'' Watchmen, which isn''t surprising given its origin as a graphic novel about superheroes. But alongside the film''s otherworldly visual effects, Director Zack Snyder employed effects to recreate—with notable twists—famed events in history. Among the milestones depicted in Watchmen is the 1963 shooting of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

For this, the film''s Visual Effects Supervisor John “D.J.” Des Jardin called upon CIS Hollywood.

“Zack wanted to recreate iconic moments and show how they''d be slightly different in a parallel world inhabited by superheroes,” says Bryan Hirota, visual-effects supervisor at CIS Hollywood. Of course they weren''t able to go back to Dallas'' Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was shot, so Des Jardin simply filmed a presidential limo and the actors in a parking lot. It was then up to Hirota''s team to recreate a big-screen version of this event.

The signature images of Kennedy''s assassination are from the grainy home-movie footage captured by bystander Abraham Zapruder, and that''s where Hirota began. “We took the Zapruder film and stabilized it so we could get a really good look at it,” he says. “We also looked online for as many photos of Dealey Plaza as we could find. We wanted to see what kind of cars were parked there and where people were standing on the grassy knoll near the road where Kennedy''s limo was driving. We used Google Maps to get a street view, and we panned around to get the layout of the land. Aside from the size of the trees, it''s still the same.”

The shot Snyder wanted starts with Kennedy''s motorcade arriving, with the camera dollying around. “It''s a God''s eye view because you actually see Zapruder filming the scene,”
Hirota says. “Then you see the impact of the shot, and the camera pans around and you see the limo speed away.” Snyder''s twist on history was to include the superhero character The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as a player in the scene, embodying the belief of conspiracy buffs that there was another shooter besides assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “Our camera pans over, and you see The Comedian on the grassy knoll going behind a picket fence,” Hirota says.

CIS Hollywood used a combination of 3D CG elements and 2D matte painting projections to re-create Dealey Plaza. Hirota''s team used Adobe Photoshop for matte painting and Autodesk Maya to build 3D elements and to do the matte painting projections. “We built 3D geometry where necessary and we rendered it in [Pixar] RenderMan,” Hirota says. “Because the camera was moving so much, we''d then take an image and project it back onto the geometry that we''d built and see how it all worked. When we had it in 3-space, sometimes we''d have to clean up the painting projected on the 3D models to make sure that there was no stretching. The moving camera is why we couldn''t just track in a 2D matte painting. The camera is both moving in 3D space and it''s panning around. The camera travels down the road as well, so the environment had to be 3D.”

To block out the scene, Hirota employed several guides. “In between Google and all of the ‘conspiracy nerd'' sites online, we could get accurate measurements. From our matchmove of the scene—and knowing how big the limousine was—we could figure out how wide the roads were,” he says. “To do matchmoving, we used a service company in Bangkok,
Thailand, called Yannix Technologies. Yannix is run by an American named Xye who''s written his own tracking software. He used to work at Sony [Pictures] Imageworks, and when he went to Thailand, he hired top graduates from a university there to do matchmoving. Xye''s custom software is flexible enough that his people can program snippets of code to augment whatever is needed to finish a shot. They do such a good job that it works out better for us to contract matchmoving to them. For this show, we gave him the original scan and had him track the camera and track a proxy object for Kennedy''s limo.”

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CIS Hollywood produced a Maya animatic to show Snyder and Des Jardin how it would play out. “It had stand-in geometry that showed where everything went—the roads, the cars, and the trees,” Hirota says.

To clean up the original plate photography shot in the parking lot,
Hirota faced a massive rotoscoping effort. “There''s a tremendous amount of crew and miscellaneous gear in the shot, so we needed to replace pretty much everything except the limo and extras,” he says. For rotoscoping, CIS Hollywood primarily uses
Silhouette software.

The physical impact of the shooting itself was done digitally, using a track of the head of the actor playing Kennedy. “Whatever Zack
Snyder could see in the Zapruder film was what he wanted,” Hirota says. “Based on that film, we set up a little dynamic simulation of the destruction using Maya dynamics. We used some rigid body dynamics for the bigger fragments and a simpler particle simulation for the blood.”

All of the digital elements were rendered in RenderMan as separate passes, which enabled Hirota to be flexible during compositing, which was done in Apple Shake. (CIS Hollywood acquired the source code from Apple in order to continue using the software.) “We generally try to render in passes if possible just because somebody always want to tweak something or another, and it''s almost always better if you can do that in the comp when you''re near the end,” Hirota says. “It saves everyone''s sanity.

“The key challenge with this shot is that it''s an iconic moment in history. You have a certain amount of leeway with a fantasy environment that obviously doesn''t exist. But because everyone is familiar with this image, we had to approach it with a different sensibility. We had to make sure that everything fit together in a way that your eye can''t detect.”

Director: Zack Snyder
Visual Effects Supervisor: John “D.J.” Des Jardin

For CIS Hollywood:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Bryan Hirota
Visual Effects Producer: David Van Dyke
2D Supervisor: Patrick Kavanaugh
CG Supervisor: Diana Miao
Lead Compositor: Randy Brown
Matchmoving: Yannix Technologies