Real Dilemmas in a Surreal World

Wednesday, April 01, 2009
By: Ron Magid

John DesJardin talks about how he handled the super challenging task of recreating the graphic-novel universe of Alan Moore’s Watchmen for Zack Snyder’s movie.

Adapting one of the first, and arguably most important, graphic novels to film is a daunting task, no matter how you look at it. Despite his previous success bringing Frank Miller’s 300 to the screen, director Zack Snyder found that Alan Moore’s Watchmen, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, was a very different animal.

“Sin City and 300 had very strong graphics, something to latch onto and try to duplicate visually,” says overall visual effects supervisor John “DJ” DesJardin (The Matrix sequels, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3), “but Watchmen’s style is linked more to how the story is told—there isn’t as extreme a color palette or a look to duplicate.”

And with 1,100 shots mixing superhero fantasy with real-life events and environs, ranging from digital environments and characters to miniature fire and water gags, the job was particularly demanding for the effects houses involved, including Sony Pictures Imageworks, MPC, Frantic Films, Intelligent Creatures and CIS.

One of the project’s tougher assignments was animating the Owl Ship rescuing people from a raging tenement fire and crashing into an ice shelf in Antarctica. “MPC did a fantastic job creating this really nice movement, a little bit helicopter, a little bit Millennium Falcon,” DesJardin says. “I’m glad we ended up doing these interactive environment scenes with a CG Owl Ship rather than trying to craft it as some huge miniature. We got really specific with the choreography and that’s a feather in MPC’s cap; they did a great job of integrating lots of CG water, snow and breaking stuff.”

One of Watchmen’s cooler characters is the enigmatic Rorschach, whose muslin visage features ever-changing inkblots. Frantic Films did the original movement tests and helped determine how to shoot the ink-blotted one, portrayed by Jackie Earle Haley, wearing a prosthetic makeup to create the proper contour of Rorschach’s head beneath a stretchy mask with a coarse texture and numerous tracking markers painted onto it. “The mask, developed by costume designer Michael Wilkinson, didn’t cover Jackie’s entire face—his eyes were visible because we wanted to translate his emotions into the CG animation, which was handled by Lon Molnar’s team at Intelligent Creatures, who would then paint out Jackie’s eyes.”

But it was the blots that worried DesJardin: “That could’ve been extremely iterative, and I didn’t want to get locked into a complex procedure. Zack wanted a slow boil with an occasional surge timed to dialogue or action. Intelligent Creatures’ animators knew the target shapes to hit, but not necessarily the exact timing, so they animated hundreds of frames of blots in Maya which could then be sped up or slowed down, and if they had to re-animate them completely, all the roto would stay intact and they could turn it around within a day, even if the shot had already been finaled.”

DesJardin points out one of the movie’s more unpredictable problems: “We couldn’t use the actual Rorschach blots, they’re apparently copyrighted, so we had to make our own. The art department came up with about 10-15 Zack Snyder-approved fake Rorschach blots.”

Supersizing Billy
But the biggest challenge—and the first thing Snyder and DesJardin talked about—was the oversized and very blue Dr. Manhattan. “How do you get a guy who’s yoked beyond normal human believability and is also a good actor and doesn’t mind being painted blue?” DesJardin wondered. “Almost immediately, Zack and I discussed making Manhattan a CG character. We could get the look we wanted and have a really good actor drive the performance.”

That actor was Billy Crudup, who wore a suit and skullcap covered in blue LEDs and didn’t mind being completely replaced by his digital alter ego. There were some scale issues, since Manhattan towers at 6’2”, while Crudup is 5’7’’. DesJardin’s solution: “We made sure Billy’s eyes were positioned where Manhattan’s eyes really would be. Sometimes we’d put him on an apple box when his feet were out of frame so he’d be the right height. Then we’d do another pass of him standing on the ground wearing shoes with LED lights in their soles to get the light and ground interaction.”

For SPI’s supervisor, Pete Travers, and DP Larry Fong, the power of having Crudup interacting with the characters and providing a light source on set instead of in post was awesome. “There are really nice surprises, like when Janey Slater [played by Laura Mennell] takes Manhattan’s hand and a little blue shimmer crosses her lips. You’d never think of adding that—not when you’re doing a thousand shots.”

While Manhattan’s face was essentially Crudup’s geometry, his body was scanned from a photo model which was built to the proper scale and proportions. “We had tracking markers on his face and not a lot on his body, which gave us some automated movement,” DesJardin reveals. “We had a version of Dr. Manhattan that was Billy’s size, which was the target for all that on-set work. Then that would get re-targeted to the scaled Dr. Manhattan version, which is 6’2”, which involved a combination of software and hand re-targeting.”

So… does Dr. Manhattan look real? “I get asked that a lot,” DesJardin admits. “Well, he looks as real as a six-foot, really yoked, glowing blue guy probably can right now.”

Warner Bros.’ Watchmen is currently playing in theaters across the U.S. and Europe. The film made $55.2 during its opening weekend in March.

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