Trevor Hogg chats with visual effects supervisors John Bruno,
Phil Tippett, Edson Williams and Bruce Woloshyn about the making of The
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1:
"Bill [Condon] told me they were going to break it up in two parts
because the book was so large,” recalls American Visual Effects
Supervisor John Bruno of his initial meeting with the Oscar-winning
writer-director to discuss the cinematic adaptation of
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.
Bruno was intrigued by the concept. “Bella [Kristen Stewart] gets
married, has vampire sex, becomes pregnant, loses 30 pounds, gets sick,
is close to dying, they forcibly get the baby out of her, she dies and
comes back as a vampire in
Part One; in
Part Two, we get
to experience everything that happens to her as a vampire. I thought,
‘Well, that’s different. I like this.’” 1275 visual effects shots had to
be completed within a schedule of three months. “It was broken down
that the wolves would be [the responsibility of Phil] Tippett.” Beyond
refining the signature shape-shifting creatures there were two more
major issues. “The other things were the ‘Bella Effect’ and the Renesmee
Baby, which in the next movie grows rapidly [into an adult].” Bill
Condon needed to be guided through the unfamiliar world of visual
effects. “Bill said, ‘I trust you know what you’re doing,’” recalls
Bruno who had to address an overriding concern for the filmmaker; Condon
did not want the performances of his actors to be replaced digitally. “
The biggest thing in this whole approach was to never lose the expression and the emotion in the eyes of the characters.”
“In movie one, Bella was going to lose weight and look very bulimic,”
states John Bruno who utilized a combination of practical and CGI
effects to make the 200 ‘Bella Effect’ shots believable. Under the
supervision of John Rosengrant, the creature effects company Legacy
Effects made a series of appliances which were added to actress Kristen
Stewart during a three hour makeup session; they were designed to sink
in her eyes, and enhance her cheek bones, chin, and collarbones. Test
footage was shot and sent to Lola VFX which was responsible for
squeezing and thinning the image. “The main reason for using the
prosthetics was the hope that many shots would be good enough in camera,
and it would reduce the digital shot count,” explains Lola VFX Visual
Effects Supervisor Edson Williams who had previously collaborated with
Bruno on making Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Professor X (Patrick Stewart)
look 25 years younger in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). “It ended up
creating more work for us because the appliances stuck out at the
temples creating odd shadows that then had to be removed; in addition we
had to deform the prosthetics down to where Kristen’s natural temple
line existed.”
“
Altering Kristen Stewart’s body was incredible challenging,”
admits Edson Williams. “Fortunately, Legacy created an absolutely
amazing life-size puppet of an emaciated Bella; we constantly referred
back to it for the body deformations.
Most of the shots had both
facial and body deformations so we thinned up Kristen’s forearms and
legs, and added bony ridges to her knuckles.” The original reference
material had to be abandoned. “During our initial development phase of
the ‘Bella Effect’ we viewed images of starving young women. The images
were horrifying, and we immediately began to search for another source,
something much softer. We ended referencing thin fashion and runway
models with very defined jaws and cheekbones.” Adjustments had to be
made. “
John immediately noticed we were reducing the width of Kristen
Stewart’s jawline; once we restored the original width, she immediately
appeared more emaciated.” 3D head references were used for every
shot. “Lola VFX developed a trick to shrink wrap a 2D image onto tracked
3D geometry. Essentially, we had two 3D heads of Kristen Stewart, one
normal and one that has been emaciated in Z-brush. We projected the
plate photography onto the normal 3D model; then based on surface normal
transferred the colour to the emaciated 3D model. It worked because
both models had the same number of vertices, and we were only deforming
the orbital ridge and cheekbones.”
“Our biggest challenge was maintaining a consistent look across the
shots,” reveals Edson Williams. “Changing the camera position and slight
alterations in lighting created huge variations in Kristen’s face, so
we would have to adjust the amount of deformations between each cut.
Using a 3D tracked [PFtrack] emaciated Kristen Stewart, CyberScan was
critical to this consistency and it allowed us to maintain exact
placement of her orbital ridge and cheekbones.
Eyes were always
problematic because we had to sink them back into Kristen’s face without
making her look ghoulish. Bill Condon was very particular with the look
of Kristen’s eye region. We ended up reducing our initial work so
the sunken eyes would not draw too much attention.” John Bruno was
pleased with the final result. “Over the last 35 minutes of the movie,
one of the characters says, ‘You look terrible.’ Kristen is a good 10
pounds thinner. You would have to A/B the [before and after] pictures to
see that. Then there’s a scene where she stands up, lowers her rob and
stares at herself in a mirror; her bones and ribs are showing. It gets a
gasp from the audience.” Bruno observes, “It’s the big reveal in the
movie and it pays off quite well.” Helping the visual effects supervisor
was the courageous support of the lead actress. “
Kristen was a great
sport. What we’re saying to her is, ‘We’re going to make you look not
good.’ As an actress her whole thing is about beauty and looking great;
what we were going to do was beyond her control and she let us do it.”
Matters become worse for the pregnant lead character. “Bella is
screaming because the baby is breaking her bones and she collapses to
the floor; they throw her onto a gurney and take the baby out. It’s
bloody,” recounts John Bruno. “The only thing we didn’t do in the book
was to have blood spewing everywhere.”
Kristen Stewart sat at a 30
degree angle in a chair situated underneath the examination table; left
exposed was her torso, shoulders and arms while in front of her was
placed the life-size puppet. The sequence is shot from the perspective
of Bella. “Bill wanted the birthing event to be as visually realistic and emotionally riveting as possible for the audience.
It was important for us to use Kristen Stewart as much as we could while shooting the scene. We wanted the audience to experience the birth with her which everybody says they did.” A
Pulp Fiction
(1994) moment occurs in the sequence. “There’s a point where Edward
thinks she dies; he takes out a big horse syringe full of vampire venom
and stabs her in the heart. We did that as a medium-wide shot. When the
film went out for ratings Bill called me and said, ‘We’ve got an R
rating.’ I went, ‘Oh that means I’ve got to lose my favourite scene.’
The whole idea was that if you go through vampire lore you stab them
through the heart to kill them but this was stabbing Bella through the
heart to revive her. He said, ‘No, all the blood, and birth is fine. We
have to cut back the sex scenes.’”
Lola VFX also digitally manipulated the face of the newborn baby.
“Renesmee was based on the performances of over 30 babies captured using
the Lola projection rig,” remarks Edson Williams. “We ended up using
small bits and pieces of about 5 of these babies to created the final
look, like a patchwork quilt Franken Baby.
The eyes were CG and based on the actual eyes of baby Kristen Stewart.”
A CG baby was created for the scene at the fireplace when Jacob does
his imprinting; he looks into the future and sees her age into a grown
woman. The revelation sets up a key plot point for
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2
(2012). “All the Renesmee shots are based on a 10-year-old actor named
Mackenzie Foy, this proved challenging when we had to make this
10-year-old look 18,” states Williams. “To accomplish this task, we shot
an 18-year-old model running though a park, and then captured
Mackenzie’s performance in the Lola Projection Rig. Using Flame
software, we modified Mackenzie’s facial featured to look much older,
and then modified a CyberScan of Mackenzie to match the older
proportions created in the Flame. The older looking Mackenzie image was
projected onto the older looking Mackenzie 3D geometry, and then this
combined data set was tracked onto the model running thru the park. To
create an accurate representation of a future Mackenzie, we used the
same techniques used to find missing children. It was fun trying to
guess what a child would look like in 8 years, and these were the most
enjoyable shots we worked on. In 8 years we get to find out how accurate
our 18-year-old Mackenzie shot really is.
During the premiere of
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1,
the visual effects veteran witnessed for the first time in his 30 year
career 7000 audience members screaming. Questioned about the final
installment, John Bruno remarks, “
Breaking Dawn – Part Two starts
one minute after the last shot of this movie. We shot one and two at
the same time in 31 days.” The sometimes the only difference onset would
be a change in the furniture or the paintings on the wall would be
switched. “The Wolf Clan joins the Cullen Clan to fight the Volturi
Clan; it’s a giant battle in the end to kill the baby.” Phil Tippett
remarks, “The shooting schedules on theses things are absolutely insane
and we were shooting two movies,
Breaking Dawn – Part 1 and
Breaking Dawn – Part 2
back-to-back, which I do not recommend anybody doing because it’s hard
enough to make one movie.” Tippett agrees with the studio decision to
not follow a current technological trend sweeping Hollywood. “Summit
knows their audience. The content doesn’t require 3D.” He adds, “Bill
didn’t worry about technical things and was only concerned about the
dramatic and story aspects of the show so all of the discussions were
very creative.” Bruce Woloshyn believes, “The nice thing about
Breaking Dawn is for all of the different vendors it ran the gamut of, ‘Wow, that’s a visual effect!’ to tons of stuff that’s invisible.”
