Enabling Mike Nichols

Whodoo Efx used Autodesk Flame to create the seemingly endless refugee camp in Charlie Wilson's War using elements shot on location in Morocco and in California and incorporating CG crowd elements as well as textures shot with a high-resolution still camera.

Visual effects guru Richard Edlund says his second collaboration with director Mike Nichols on Universal Pictures' Charlie Wilson's War had a “much different gestalt” than their first gig together, on HBO's Angels in America in 2003 (see “Making Angels”). Angels, Edlund says, was a theatrical fantasy-based project for television, produced by Nichols, who brought Edlund onto the project after it was well underway. Charlie Wilson's War, on the other hand, was made for the big screen on a strictly controlled studio budget with a creative need to authentically replicate real historical events and locations and engage in grueling location shooting across the globe.

Still, there was a basic similarity between the two projects in terms of Edlund's contribution as visual effects supervisor.

“[On Angels], I learned how Mike wants to shoot, and through experience, I learned to let help him have it his way — to figure out how I could allow him to shoot things the way he wants to shoot them, and then be able to do whatever we need to do to successfully create his desired effect,” Edlund says. “He's brilliant, but with that brilliance, he can be somewhat eccentric in his approaches. So you have to find out what he needs — and you eventually figure out he's right, and you do whatever is necessary to make the movie better. I functioned as Mike's enabler on this movie.”

In the case of Charlie Wilson's War, the film's approximately 200 digital effects shots included the need to build realistic but stylized views of the Las Vegas Strip and Washington, D.C., circa 1982, and a fantastic view of the Capitol's monuments as seen from Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson's apartment complex, looking across the Potomac. It also included the creation of photoreal, Soviet-made Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters and violent rockets and Gatling gun explosive rounds fired from those helicopters, which literally vaporize fields of fleeing Afghani Mujahideen fighters. The most significant requirement was the creation of the film's turning-point shot — a wide view of a seemingly endless refugee camp teeming with activity on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That view illustrates the moment in the film when Wilson's attitude profoundly changes.

“In the shot, Tom Hanks [playing Charlie Wilson] is on a hillside near the graveyard on one side of the camp and turns and looks across the camp and it goes on to infinity,” Edlund says. “With my friend [Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, BSC, ASC], who was also the cinematographer on Angels in America, we shot day plates for that [on location in Morocco].”

Edlund says the weather in Morocco was so unpredictable that the crew rebuilt at Mystery Mesa, near Santa Clarita, Calif., where they shot more camp-activity elements with hundreds of extras. “It was all pieces of great material,” he says. “So the art department and set decorator created another block square camp shot at Mystery Mesa, and fortunately, on the day of shooting for dramatic effect, it was very windy, so we had tents flapping in our matte shot as far as you can see. Mike felt that the foreground of the plate was lacking dramatic effect, so we took a big number of production vignettes — shots from both Morocco and Mystery Mesa — and put them into the foreground area. As Charlie gapes at the unbelievable scene he's witnessing, we pull out wide.”

“During the pullout, we rack focus and pull out extremely wide, which signals the shift in Charlie's viewpoint,” says Helena Packer, visual effects supervisor on the film from Whodoo Efx, Santa Monica, Calif. — the sole digital effects boutique used on the project and a close collaborator of Edlund's. “You cheat the perspective by making things a little larger than they need to be up front and do a very slow ramp pullout. It's not literal, but sort of like impressionistic art, and it was all [digitally stitched together] out of pieces of things we shot. There are some [digital people] in the distance in the crowd, but most of the people you see are rotoscoped extras. We did the whole thing in [Autodesk] Flame.”

Packer set up the project to have all 3D work and compositing done upstairs from Edlund's office in Santa Monica, with all of the CG work done in Autodesk Maya and all compositing done in Flame and Adobe After Effects. Edlund and Packer emphasize that, thematically, the vast majority of the work involved a similar approach as the refugee camp — the photographing of images and textures that were then digitally pieced together to fit Mike Nichols' specific creative needs. Even the CG Hind helicopters were skinned with strategically dented and roughed up metal textures from the one real Hind used during the production.

Edlund, a world-class still photographer whose work over the years has graced record album covers and been exhibited in galleries, photographed many of those elements himself using a Nikon D200 10-megapixel camera. Virtually all the pieces of the nighttime, stylized shot of Washington, as seen through Wilson's apartment window, were captured by that camera. Edlund arranged them as a collage, and pieces that did not fit the creative intent of the shot were then painted out or manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and in Autodesk Flame at Whodoo, and then inserted into bluescreen plates, which had been shot on a stage at Paramount Studios by Goldblatt's team.

Those background plates were filmed against a gigantic bluescreen, which was designed by special effects coordinator John Hartigan, and interlaced with red, blinking LEDs arranged into 4'×4' grids to create hot-tracking points for the Whodoo team to use during the compositing phase. Whodoo then added moving water, cars, and twinkling lights — all animated in Maya.

“At 10 megapixels, the camera gives you the equivalent of a 4K scan, and the chip is the same size as a 35mm film frame, basically,” Edlund says. “So I got a number of those images out of the camera, and when we put them together, we wound up with an excellent 16K image.”

For the shot illustrating the view of the Las Vegas Strip, the filmmakers couldn't use modern still photos because the Strip has changed so dramatically since the early 1980s. Instead, they painstakingly researched the look of the Strip back then and had artists Michelle Moen and Roger Kupelian create a sophisticated matte painting. They then added CG elements — particularly for blinking neon signs — and combined that with stock footage from that era of cars driving down the Strip.

It was all put together via “some extremely fine compositing work” at Whodoo, according to Packer. Tracking was more complex for that shot, because there was no opportunity to use the kind of bluescreen that the Washington shot featured. Packer says her team used PFTrack (from The Pixel Farm) and Flame to track elements to the background plate.

Still, Edlund suggests that a background in still photography is crucial for this kind of visual-effects work, and he says it is a skill and knowledge that is sometimes lacking in today's industry.

“The whole intent of visual effects is to create shots that are believable — that look like they were shot with a movie camera at 24fps,” Edlund says. “You have to create them and intercut them with shots that really do come from a 24fps movie camera, so you better understand what is going on photographically to make the shots match. … Supervisors who have a background in computer science, and hopefully art, need to see the classic movies, like Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai, and study the photographic artifacts and understand the tricks you can do with photography to fool the audience into making them believe what you want them to believe from the shot. That's why it is better, when possible, to shoot high speed, or shoot miniatures, and then mix or intercut that into [digital shots]. I prefer to use reality as much as possible for such things.”

At the same time, illustrating reality and achieving a filmmaker's aesthetic needs have to happen simultaneously when working for Mike Nichols. Therefore, one of the film's most prominent effects — Russian helicopters gunning down fleeing Mujahideen and Afghani villagers — was intentionally crafted to have an almost video-game feel to it.

Edlund and Packer say the tracer fire, dubbed “the hose of death” by Edlund, pictured in those scenes is both realistic and stylized at the same time.

“The Russian pilots and gunners were flying over fleeing people and villages and literally hosing them down with the rapid-firing, multiple-barreled Gatling guns, which spewed tracers, explosive rounds, and lead,” Edlund says. “In our research footage, it looked like they were watering the lawn.”

Indeed, Packer emphasizes that their research indicated that video of real helicopter attacks very much evoked that video-game aesthetic.

“We saw lots of real video footage from combat in Afghanistan during this period, and that is what really happened — people were instantly obliterated when they were hit,” she says. “There was very little left of them — some smoke and rubble, and they disappeared, except maybe for a body part here or there. At the same time, Mike Nichols did not want there to be lots of blood and gore or body parts in those shots. …

“But the tracers actually did shoot out and ricochet around and obliterate people. The 50-caliber guns actually fire at such a fast rate that looks something like that. And the people who manufacture those tracers actually have different formulas for the phosphorus in them, so they can be seen best at different times of the day or night [in order to allow planes to see the direction of their bullets]. We styled it around the sunset formula, actually — a reddish/orange color similar to what they really used at that time of day.”