So, here we have the traditional deep-space opening shot
that I never wanted in the film.
But after a few previews
with an alternate opening, where we started inside the ship
with the Fry character, Radha Mitchell,
the audience was feeling disoriented.
They didn't know if they were in a laboratory or in a factory.
So we went back very late in the day and put this shot together.
It was the one model shot
that was shot in London, instead of here in the States.
- Right, Peter? - Yep.
We shipped the 9-foot miniature, one-sixth
over to London, and shot at Mission Control
against a green screen and then laid in CG.
Everything else is free rendering there, right?
It is good, because it does orient us to the multiple suns of the system.
There's a huge honking comet, right there
that shows you the danger the ship is about to enter
and the reason for the turbulence you see on the screen.
The two suns, early establishing...
Right, the two warm suns.
Peter kept saying, "We're in a system with three suns.
"Where's the third one?
"The blue sun?" Well, it's somewhere behind us.
If any of you are wondering, any VFX groupies out there
who want to know what Peter Chiang looks like,
he was in the number one cryo locker back there.
We should keep that quiet.
Sweat, boots, tool belt, leather.
Prospector type.
Free settlers.
And they only take the back roads.
And here's my real problem.
Mr. Johns...
That opening shot, we should say, was originally twice as long.
I think I only wanted a 20-second opening shot
because we were running titles at the end anyway.
And I kept seeing the animatics, and they kept slowing down.
Then suddenly it was a 60-second shot, then a 70-second shot.
I said, "Peter, you're killing me."
Because we were having length problems with the film anyway.
We started off just by worrying about the strobe on the...
Too fast a movement took away the scale of the ship
and we really wanted to convey mass.
You also generated these late in the day
the projected heads-up graphics here.
- Comped an illusion. - Yeah. Turned out very nicely.
These are micro-meteorites coming through. Peter did those for us.
By Magic Camera or by Double Negative?
Magic Camera. 3ds max.
Basically, all of our effects were being generated by two houses
both London-based houses.
Double Negative, which Peter Chiang is associated with
and Magic Camera
which I also have an association with, but...
It's not your house, it's part of the Mill empire
- the Ridley Scott company? - It is.
- Still? - Just recently, yeah.
The captain's dead.
And why do you go to them?
Basically, they handled all or most of our 2D work?
Yeah, we split basically the creature stuff and the 2D work up
suns, environments
to the creature work, Double Negative primarily handling the creature animation
all of the shots associated with the creature.
All of the other environments and green screens
were handled by Magic Camera.
Exterior. We're shooting the 9-foot model, as quick go-by here on a wide lens.
Then Peter is adding in all these atmospherics
even though Hunter/Gratzner Industries created the model for us.
And even though they attempted early to lay in atmospherics on the model itself
it needed more.
It needed something like that.
The feeling was that you open up the window and then you are on fire.
All of these had additional shaders, distortion effects added to it.
Really highlights, just to bring out the heat.
We talked a lot about really making it furnace-like.
That was an air brake shearing away there
and throwing the ship into this unwieldy spin.
This is a shot that Peter and I went back on a lot, the top shot.
I wasn't sure we needed it, it dissipated the energy.
It let the viewer off the hook
because everything else is so subjective inside here with Fry and her plight.
The big air brakes going up there, those actually worked real well.
The wider shots worked less well for me.
Just because it's objective rather than subjective.
They're also needed to establish the cloud element.
Where the ship is in relation to the planet, what's happening.
These are some of my favorite shots here.
And actually, those are wides, too.
Two scales on that.
Sixth scale foreground
and one-thirty-sixth scale miniature models.
I love these shots, because they have such depth
and dimension to them.
The jettison shots are some of the best ones in the sequence.
Lovely miniatures by Hunter/Gratzner.
What the hell are you doing?
I gotta drop more load.
PURGE ALL?
I've heard this rumor that on those jettison shots
that they actually put my name on one of the pod containers.
And I've never seen it, but they tell me it's there.
And maybe it just got covered up with spume and fire.
I don't know.
It's definitely there.
That's what the DVD is all about. I'll go and search for it myself.
All the contrails and all that work
would have covered it up a bit.
Early on, too, we made a creative decision
born of finances, but also one of those decisions that was good for the film, too
was to not show a big exterior shot
of the ship plowing into the planet face.
I'd seen a lot of those shots done before.
Although we did storyboard them.
- Did we? - Yeah, we just looked at it
as a possible...
Air-brake shearing off, that was nice.
That was a completely CG air brake coming right in her face.
It provided us the shot, an element to start off with
but we felt the dynamic wasn't quite right.
- Replaced with a CG burn-in? - Yeah.
This is our first look at Coober Pedy, where we shot in Australia.
These are helicopter plates that Peter shot.
And some of them got pretty low to the ground, didn't they?
A skiff actually hit the rubble on one pass.
I was with...
You're saying that the helicopter bottomed out?
It hit the ground in one take
and gave us a moment.
"Gave us a moment."
These are plates.
This is green-screen foreground
with fifth-scale miniature and Coober Pedy background.
- Same thing there. - Yeah, same miniature.
Old boots fly through.
A tribute to Star Wars, throw a tennis shoe through.
They kept saying, "Where's all this debris coming from, DT?
Where's this supposed to be..." And the AP goes,
"There wasn't that much debris in the ship."
I said, "Yeah, just throw it out. Just keep chucking it."
Anyway, in terms of not doing
the big "skid across the planet face" shot
it's been done badly before, we were in daylight.
We didn't have the benefit of night to mask problems we might have.
It's a very finicky shot. It turned out to be a very expensive shot.
It has to be, because it has to be done right if you're going to include it.
So I went to Tom Engelman, our producer, and said,
"Why don't we just keep everything subjective
inside the crash ship, for the most part
or entirely, during the actual crash
and go with it that way?
It'll help put you in the characters' shoes.
And we won't have this potential liability."
Every other film does that. I saw it in Lost in Space.
I saw it in a bunch of other films.
And none of them really does it well anyway.
So let's try to spend our visual-effects dollars more wisely than that.
Talking to Ian Hunter, who directed the model unit.
He was very keen that Chandler, who shot all the material
take the 9-foot miniature and actually throw it around in the car park.
Build a small sandy set.
- Literally launch it into the... - Get a real close-up of that.
- Would have been very sweet. - We did talk about that.
Did you talk about what wouldn't scale using that approach?
It would have been expensive.
God, that would have been a disaster.
That's the first I've heard of it.
Thank you for sparing me that.
Throw it around the parking lot.
I think it was the last shot with the miniature, so go out in a big bang.
I saw the miniature, actually.
I was at a visual-effects seminar a couple of weeks ago
where the Hunter/Gratzner boys were giving a presentation.
They had a booth there, and they had it hanging up with the other stuff.
There's Anestaphine in the med-lock in the back of the cabin.
Not anymore, there's not.
Get out of here, everyone.
Get out of here.
We're about to go outside here and see our first skip-bleach shot.
All the exteriors for this world were shot with a process where...
Normally, you go to the laboratory
and you have at least three baths that you pass the film through.
This approach is especially noticeable there
where you see the highlights blooming on her face.
Lesser on his, he's shot in the shade.
Where we see the highlights bloom and glow.
And it crunches the blacks down
and it blows those highlights on their faces to this sort of burnished look.
And it's a process that David Eggby, the DP, and I played around with a lot.
There you especially see it on Cole's face.
Especially the whitest of people, it's most pronounced there.
So we wanted to develop all of our exteriors that way
because we thought it helped lend an otherworldly feel.
This is a very nice shot, isn't it?
This is cool, because it has, again, so much dimension to it.
This is a big practical piece that they're all standing on, of course,
in Coober Pedy, in the middle of nowhere, 180 degrees of nothing.
And we bulldozed a rut about 50 feet in length,
dressed it in, no fire, no smoke
and then Peter Chiang added the rest here.
A lot of tracking issues, a nodal tilt at the end
just so the perspective doesn't change, so we can add all the elements in.
And a lot of tracking, black smoke from various pictures.
Who owns those smoke elements?
In truth, a lot of that stuff just gets combined
into a general library of smoke elements,
explosion elements, wind elements, cloud elements.
Always manipulated in some way to kind of set it into the scene,
rather than to just lay there on its own.
So we were talking about the skip bleach.
That's great for live-action stuff
but the visual-effects guys want to work with the cleanest elements possible.
And then they want to add any affectation back into it
once the comp has been done, right?
So, even though David Eggby and I were keen on doing it,
what did you think when you heard about the possibility that all those exteriors
would have to be skip-bleached?
Yeah, we talked about this a lot.
The visual-effects guys obviously like to work with clean plates with no bleach,
so we made the decision very early on to do the bleach process.
It was shot, originated on, 5245, which is a 50 ASA daylight stock
the output from certain CRT recorders, output onto the same stock.
So we decided to work with a clean...
First example of Riddick eye-shine there.
- Real quick. - Very late shot in the day.
- I think that came right at the end... - Very late.
The eye-shines.
It was originally decided that the eye-shines would be all done with lenses
that he would wear.
Which he did, like a trouper.
But, again, it just wasn't enough,
so we ponied up a few bucks at the end of the day
and gave Peter about eight key eye-shine shots.
That shot's interesting. It's made up of multiple Vin arms, twisting.
Yeah, the behind-the-back.
Excruciating shoot, against green screen.
On the set, he came pretty close to doing it himself.
He's actually a lot more limber than you may expect.
He got about three-quarters of the way,
maybe even a bit more.
But then you have to do a take-over, right, of his arms?
So we shot multiple arms separately and stitched them all together.
And the pieces look like some sort of...
But then you have to see the bone protrude as well, so...
Little morphs going on on the shoulder element areas
to bring out protruding bones and just to make the thing...
You always described it as a real knuckle-cracking sequence.
And then the rest is just sound effects.
That's what really sells it.
The crunch-crunch.
- The wet celery. - The celery, yeah.
So, going back, all the plates were shot clean
so that the bleach process could be dialed in at the end.
The process could be applied after the effects had been comped
which made it very difficult to get the gamma balance of the shot
before the bleach process to judge it.
We always needed to develop the shots in order to tell what the comp looked like.
So the turnaround time on the shots was two or three days
before we knew what the comps looked like.
And you had to find a lab in London to do it.
This is our infamous three-sun shot.
It was designed to establish the geography of it.
We felt like we never quite hit it right.
'Cause technically she's looking into a blue sun, she should be blue-faced.
The other people were backlit by amber, looking towards the blue sun.
But when you do what's right, it looks odd, it looks compy, right?
At the end of the day, we had to say,
"The front end is blue, the back end is warm.
"The b-side is warm, and..."
- Not my favorite shot. - Not our favorite shot in the movie.
But that's an example of being able to dial in
what you think are the correct color parameters on the computer.
And then you take it to the lab, skip-bleach it, and it goes wonky on you.
Yeah, it's very unpredictable, the process.
Very slight tolerances change the colors radically.
Here's a blue sun... You're augmenting the actual sun?
Yes, we always had a problem placing the suns into such a bleached sky.
So we tried to create, for the blue suns, a sort of blue corona,
to sit the white-hot center in
and for the yellow and red suns, a sort of orange corona
so that at least they had a base to read against the white-bleached sky.
There was some political fallout, was there not
to this skipped bleach stuff?
Because the set-up is this:
films usually do it at the IP stage
films like Se7en, and they do it to usually increase the blacks.
Here, we were doing it for exteriors only.
I wanted to be selective about it, didn't want to apply it to the whole film.
So that meant doing it to the original camera negative.
And that scares some people, doesn't it?
It terrified them,
because if you make a mistake,
the recovery process, everyone was very concerned
it would make it look very muddy.
And once you start screwing with your negative in any way
it has studios, exhibitors, everyone gets nervous.
So it was an obstacle to overcome, that's for sure.
Also, our lab was in Australia.
So I think the concern of an American-based studio
was just a lack of control of this process.
Kind of makes them nervous.
I made it clear in the post session, when we recovered a lot of shots
it really didn't make much difference.
You could re-introduce the bleach process in post
and recover a lot of the original negative.
We actually had to do that. Here's the first boneyard shot.
These are actually miniature bones. The actors are shot Moco.
One-tenth, foregrounds.
This is a 20 x 20 green screen out on location
shot motion-control, with a Milo rig.
This is on the original pass.
The first foreground bones are tenth-scale.
And then, extending on, we used smaller, twentieth-scale bones.
The last ones, way in the distance, are just a traditional matte painting.
Added a little heat shimmer, too.
- A little turb distort there, just to... - Give them a little life.
Very complicated shot in that there were multiple passes
that all needed to be stitched together.
So we did actually recover a couple of the skip-bleach shots
because a couple of shots were originally intended as live-action.
We had the need to manipulate them in the digital realm
so we had to go back to the lab, send it through the baths again,
dump the silver from the original camera negative,
make it look like a more traditional negative
and then digitize it and pass it on to Peter in London.
I remember in prep, we actually tested a couple of recovery shots
on our costume, make-up tests
to see what would happen, so we knew going into production
what our worst-case scenarios were.
It wasn't bad.
There was some difference that you could make out, but it wasn't bad.
There was also a cautionary tale
about not doing it to the original camera negative
but to wait until post-production
to do this to the whole film.
There's this little film down in Australia called The Well.
And they had shot the whole movie with a skip-bleach process in mind
to be done in post-production.
The cinematographer had made all these adjustments.
The costume people made all these adjustments.
When they're ready to roll out the release prints, the producer says,
"No. Sorry, no money."
So they had to print it straight.
And it is...
- Surreal. - It is a surreal experience, to see it.
- Blue skin. - Oppressively blue, not that this isn't.
The whole film was that way.
And the costumes were wildly garish
because the costume designer thought that the bleach bypass
as it would do, would tone that down, would mute it out.
And they were envisioning this very soft, painterly, pastel film
that they would have. In fact, their test showed that that would be the case.
But they had the rug pulled out from under them.
So the film doesn't look quite like they had envisioned.
So that was another reason to do it up-front
so that it was a nearly irreversible decision.
These are beautiful shots, where the skip bleach really works for us
especially on Fry's face.
There, those are wonderful shots.
Actually, this is not the actual distance...
Always wanted to give you that wide shot, and have you address more pinnacles.
Those are all practical pinnacles.
I always wanted Peter to go in and do it well.
The first pinnacle shots were all CG
the ones we first see when we step out of the crash ship.
And those were all Peter's doing.
These are all practical pieces, as are these here.
There was always the question of how far the pinnacles are from the crash ship
- that if we put them too far away, then... - They'd look too small, unimposing.
All practical bones here that Grace Walker, our production designer, built for us.
Captain.
We could also talk about, Peter
how it was to shoot in Australia
for me to post-produce in LA.
and for you to go home to London and generate the visual effects there
about how that worked and maybe sometimes didn't work.
Because it is odd to have all the effects,
even though it's becoming a smaller world, though we are linked
together with optical lines.
It was still something you had to get used to,
to have all the visual effects generated half a world away.
In hindsight, it worked quite well for us.
We worked during the day
because LA was eight hours behind, and download the stuff
via an ISDN line
to a piece of proprietary kit that we developed
where you could gain control of the shot, and jog through
and it would synch perfectly with
a station that's in London.
So for the while, downloading shots for us working during the day was great
because it allowed us to have huge conference calls
right about 7:00 GMT
and discuss the work
and the guys could get your input very early on to the shots
and then work on them the following day.
It was nice to be able to rock-and-roll the shot
and have you see what I'm talking about
because then I can address a specific frame.
I never got a damned pointer, where I could say,
"See that little shadow there? See how that fringes right there?
"That little matte-y thing?"
Never got the pointer. I need that next time.
And the box was up and running kind of late, I must say.
Yeah, it took us a while to get the ISDN lines sorted out.
I think that the bandwidth was really important.
We were dealing with NTSC, obviously, for the States.
And we would always download... We were dealing with video-res images.
And not a lot of lines support that bandwidth
in order to get that much information and data across.
So it took us a while
to get a line into your editorial place.
- But it was... - It took a damn long time.
It was just this box.
The box in London was sitting there inert for the first month of post-production.
We've now got a pointer and we've developed that.
And a single frame, so that you can paint.
- I can paint? - You can paint.
You can download it, take it into Photoshop
and scribble all over it and send it back to us
and tell us your thoughts.
I don't have Photoshop. I have Photoshop Lite at home.
Will that work?
- I'm sure Tom can... - No problem.
Oh, my God.
I thought I was the only one who got out of the crash alive.
Something vaguely sexual about that.
If you say so.
Peter just has no comment.
That's actually a stunt coordinator, isn't it?
No, that's Vin up there.
- Is that the... - No, he meant the survivor.
- The survivor. - Yeah, the guy who got shot. Correct.
The short-lived survivor.
Sorry. I thought I heard something.
Like what?
It's amazing how the bleach process...
Dan Muscarella at CFI did an amazing job of timing all these shots.
They were shot all over the place
and he had to pull them around to be very consistent.
Just back to the communication for a second.
I never felt that we truly had
a real-time dialogue ability.
First of all, the process seemed to work best
when you had a little more staggered opportunity to do your thing
let David respond, with a little bit of time to contemplate.
But I'm looking forward to the time where you sit in an editing room
and it will really feel like real-time activity
going back and forth on a shot across the world.
Basically, we want full access to your hard drives.
So we can rummage around in your computer while you're sleeping.
You don't want to rummage around.
You should see the stuff I see before you two see it.
Are you talking about the autopsy photos you sent me?
Editorials.
What was that for?
That's just a lot of reference for
what we named the "chud" shot.
Chud shot? No, that was for the pilgrim shot.
The pilgrim getting chewed up.
Which again was an additional shoot after the principal photography.
Now, we might talk about this shot coming up.
Yeah, our first Riddick POV.
Yeah, a tough thing, because you need readability
and you need it to bleach out.
You talked about reversing the whole idea of the white sky against...
- Dark against light and... - Is that what we wanted to do?
We just took a bunch of shots at this and finally said
"We give up," I think, is mostly what it came down to.
So the idea is that he is photophobic, he is light sensitive.
He is a creature of the night himself
having had this back story of being a long-term prisoner
in just a black hellhole of a prison
where some of the inmates choose to enhance their night-vision capabilities
so they don't get clubbed over the head in the middle of the night from behind.
So we had to utilize that.
The reason I'm introducing this into the script is because
I know we're going to get into a lot of creature shots.
I don't want these bald, naked looks of the creatures.
I always wanted to fuse how we see the creatures.
And that was a really good way to do it
even though Riddick is supposed to see into the dark better
than other humans can.
Still, it's a veiled look.
And I think it's a pretty cool effect, really.
It has sort of a purplish tint
which is based on the color of the pigment redoxin.
He's basically had all his cones polished out of his eyes
so he just has rods, which are for night vision
low light levels.
And we decided to go with that purplish tint.
However, back to those first Riddick POVs on the ground
I think that the logic of the dark sky
of the bleached-out object
there was something about that that didn't quite work in terms of the rules
if you look at the other shots.
It was the right color schemes.
But we didn't quite, at that point, have
either the energy or the time, really, I think.
A couple of eye-shines here are good. One.
Two, on the turn.
We built a 3D cone of an eye,
literally, physically, 3D in Maya,
shone a torch through it, to really get a more three-dimensional effect
rather than a 2D sort of enhancement.
And otherwise, Vin is wearing these completely mirrored contacts,
which tended to be thick in his eyes.
I'm sure he'll tell us more on the actors' commentary track.
But it was a big pain for him.
And a slow process getting them in and out
because he wasn't used to anything like that.
We thought that would be enough.
But, it turns out, no.
See, it would be nice to have
just a little shimmer there in his eyes when he sat down.
I think we had another 10 or 15 shots that we never got
that in low-light shots would have been particularly nice.
The lair sequence was designed to get to the creatures faster,
even though we are still in daylight.
So we have our first...
The first look at exterior, and then we jump to interiors.
So, looking out were all interior shots
shot on a stage with a set, rather than actually on location.
We couldn't find a decent creature lair in Coober Pedy
except for the hotel rooms.
So the first creature shot is the go-by coming up here?
Or is it on the walls?
It's on the walls.
Just a rack-focus over the shoulder.
This was an effective set, though, for that introduction.
I think it really helped, having the creature
with plenty of appendages to it
to really confuse the audience into what its actual premise is.
Yes, because they are, at times, called octopussy.
They are, at times, called something like a panther, something like a...
There's one shot here that makes them look like a poodle.
See, that shot. It's actually very good, I like it now.
But when it first came to me, it was half that size.
My first reaction is, "Was that a poodle that just went by?
"Should we be scared of a poodle?"
Visual-effects guys love to go on long-winded technical explanations
about how it's technically right
how that's the perfect size, the scale is perfect.
And I said, "But you know what, Peter? It just ain't scary."
It ended up being about a 20-foot elephant size.
That was what screamed past the camera there with the lens.
- Those are lovely shots. - They are.
A little grainy.
But the animation's very nice, and they're creepy.
You get just the right amount of a look at the creatures
which is not too much.
Sheila Dunn animated this.
She did some lovely animation on the sequences.
Some of those creatures have dust elements dropping off their wings
as if they've been slumming in there for quite a while.
Looking at the live-action footage around it, there's a lot of dust.
We felt that we couldn't get away with
the creatures not generating some sort of dust trail.
So are the dust elements CG or are they shot?
They're practical.
They were done with Particle System, and we shot a few practical.
When you shoot something like that, can you get away with shooting it on video?
Not really, it depends how big the final image ends up on screen.
Video, we're dealing with 720 x 576
so if the resolution fits into...
All of the visual effects were 2K outputs.
If the mattes work to keep the resolution up
then video is okay, but normally
we'd like to go back to 35 mm and shoot elements.
There is one example in here of where you shot a reflection for Fry
of her face in the cryo locker.
Yeah, that was a video of just a cover on set.
But I think that because the reflection was diffused
we only saw it as a percentage of the final image
we could get away with the resolution being what it was.
But primarily, we like to go back to film
because then we've got the flexibility to go to 4K or 2K or whatever.
That was so fucking stupid.
I don't know what the fuck is in there,
but whatever it is, it got Zeke and it nearly got me!
Scamper-bys.
This took a while to get, because
you loose perspective when you look down.
Also, this is one of the few test shots we discussed
the studio and the production company
how much you see in this movie and when
and how fast they were, what color they were,
what size they were, all of that seemed very important at the time.
We used to wonder logistically whether the creature would actually
run through the light, rather than run round it.
The answer is, he wouldn't. Then you wouldn't have a shot.
- Kind of, artistic license took over. - Definitely.
And the problem with them getting in and out quick
because they do it in our night sequences...
But remember what happened when they went into the light in the later shot
where they flutter through the beam of light, and you hear lots of screams.
It does seem to cause them distress.
I want you to remember this moment.
The way it could have gone and didn't.
Here.
A little in-camera trick was speeding up Vin's action
just sufficiently
so that he felt human
and yet slightly more powerful
slightly more vicious, and slightly faster.
We probably cranked them out, some of those grab shots.
There were five or six grab shots in a row.
And I undercranked at 18 frames,
16 frames, maybe even went down to 12 frames a second
to speed up the action.
And then I skip-printed them in the editing as well.
Here.
Peter shot this. I like this shot a lot. 8 mm?
It was actually a 14 mm turned into an 8 mm
using just a little warp.
I think you always described it as sort of a 180 shot
in order to register the three suns there.
Because we decided the three suns would be
when we did the geometry and the physics of it all
about 110 degrees apart from each other on the horizon
and rotating around each other.
And that was designed to, again, show the geography
to show that the blue sun was setting
and that the two warm suns were coming up.
That visual effect, on the water drop
- was brilliantly done. - It was all practical.
All practical.
Often the best kind.
These are additional monitor inserts
which were also shot just to enhance...
I remember we grabbed all the tapes from the art department
and did a little monitor shoot in London.
You did?
Just to give you additional graphic material.
Thank you.
You can't get enough of that stuff.
Thirty-five kilos each, huh?
Beautiful ship by Grace Walker.
The prop was fantastic.
We called this "the skiff"
the small craft left behind by the previous settlers.
Very nice ergonomics.
The neon lights up top always...
The fluorescents, you mean.
What are you going to do?
We wanted the look to be accessible to the audience.
It was not the look of the Star Trek series.
It was not the look of Starship Troopers.
It is more the look of the Mad Max films,
just down-and-dirty and near apocalyptic.
Because sometimes technology can be so off-putting to an audience
and distance them from the characters.
I wanted a shotgun to basically look like a shotgun.
I wanted a spacecraft that looked like a train
so that you have instant identification and instant access to the characters
and that you don't have to hurdle this wall of technology
before you get to the characters.
Oh, man.
All praises be Allah, for His many blessings to us.
What?
It's the winner of the look-alike contest.
This had its own history, those shots of...
Tough shot to get.
Very hard, because they had keyed off this entire sequence
to help you understand that because a tarp had been taken off in a previous scene
that a solar light was activated
which set the mechanism in this storage room
to this drilling room, to open
to put the animals in sunlight
which caused our first death in this compound.
I'm more confused than ever, Tom.
That's what producers do.
Green-screen shot.
The hatchlings went through a development process
basically a scaled-down version
of Patrick Tatopoulos' design.
Right, that's the first look at the hatchlings there
which are thought to be newborns of the creature
thought to be the same species as the larger ones that we see later on
that we've seen earlier in the lair sequence.
But they are the first out of the nest when night comes
as if they're trying to get away from their own kind.
And we took great pains to try to distinguish them
or try to find ways to distinguish them from bats.
But at the end of the day, some people just said, "Hey, you know those bats?"
Yeah, we tried to increase the sort of frenetic activity
and to highlight a lot of the crown blades
the little miniature razor blades.
If you do look at the individual frames, they have these great ax heads
that look just like the big boys.
I think, to the normal audience eye, it's just moving too fast.
Yeah, it obviously is.
But I guess it's enough to say that there's more than meets the eye.
You have a transition coming up here, Peter
between the dead pilgrim and the blue sun.
Also shot late in the day, also shot in London.
Yeah, Magic Camera, they built the miniature of
basically a dummy, and
grabbed a skull and put meat all over it...
and really grislied it up.
I think we sent you later Internet photos.
Those were the autopsy photos. Thank you very much.
I think it was just a shock element
that needed to be added to the film.
That's a tile plate.
In all the instances, we never wanted to commit to the speed of animation of a shot.
We always shot tiles so that we could determine the moves much later.
You did some nice shakes as they were moving towards camera.
Sort of buffeting of the wings and things.
Imam?
We also had to get rid of the original character in the foreground
before we could place this object in.
You'll notice that Al-Imam does jump.
- You mean... - Across that shot.
There's a little glitch in his motion.
It just is what it is.
The reason we jumped through these hoops, as I recall
was that the original pilgrim wasn't grim enough.
It didn't look like there was enough destruction had there, so...
Because it was only a model.
They're looking down the coring shaft...
- That's right, that's your... - A miniature flare.
That's yours, a CG shaft, right?
Added in.
I'd forgotten.
Truly, I'd forgotten, it blends so well
that I had it as a live-action movement.
So maybe we ought to talk about Patrick Tatopoulos
and his contribution.
Yeah, great design of the creature, I think.
He was on the picture a lot earlier.
He had already done a lot of initial designs.
And I think that what he did successfully was
add elements to the creature that
distinguish it from
all of the existing alien creatures that are around.
It looks pretty individual in terms of its appendages
and bipedal split tail
all of those elements.
The big ax head with the outriggers.
You originally put me together with Patrick.
Yeah, I had met with him on Godzilla, on another project
when he had his shop open.
And I realized that, beyond a great fabricator
he really had a tremendous artistic lead.
He had also done ID4
and had quite a bit of experience making alien animal life.
I tried not to give Patrick a predisposition of what the creatures look like.
In the script I just suggested that
they were creatures of the night, they were sharp, they were furtive,
they were at times powerful, that they flew
and that they saw by echolocation
without ever really describing them.
I described their attributes, really
and never tried to describe what they look like.
So with nothing else to go on
but those lambent descriptions in the script
Patrick came back with some original drawings.
And I remember the first drawings looking somewhat dragon-like.
And they had a very...
Because he had just finished Godzilla.
So we told him at that point
he must omit the Godzilla from this animal.
And what came back is very close
to the final version of things.
I think the only thing that I may have helped him on was the outriggers
pulling those out, because predators have eyes facing forward.
I said, "If this creature is otherwise blind
and it sees by echolocation, then it's going to have sensors that face forward.
Where are they?
And the greater spread you have on those sensors
the more 3D information you can gain."
So I said, "Why doesn't it have these dedicated outriggers
these sensors at the end of these outriggers
almost on a 3-foot spread?
And combine it with this ax-blade head that you had thought..."
That Patrick came up with.
I think it's both graceful and frightening at the same time.
Patrick, from the very beginning, was a good fit with the production
because he understood we were all trying to make something that felt logical
that felt like what had produced it made some sense, why it looked the way it did.
Between David and Patrick, I think, there was always a question going,
"Does this make sense within the rules we've created?"
The design also, because of its sparseness
in terms of its long legs
really, once the highlights were added to it that appeared in the dark
it made it a very evocative image.
So that the audience didn't really know...
It looks like different things from different angles, doesn't it?
Patrick had always posed them upright.
And upright, they'd be about 4 feet tall, I guess
maybe more standing upright.
You started to pose them in lower
crouching, more predatorial stances, didn't you?
You found that was more effective when you animated them?
Yeah, we did a lot of early tests
while we were shooting
the four workstations out in Australia
to help us develop the character traits
before we got into post.
So it gave us a leg up into post
and we were setting a lot of motion tests going on while...
You were creating a library of moves for the creature, right?
Really creating its look and style
the way it feeds.
And very early on, we discovered
that a stalking creature
predominantly wants to keep in a low attitude
in order to conceal itself.
And we felt that it also added great power to the creature
in a lower stance than a very upright walking stance.
Patrick's drawings, very early on, reflected a much more balletic feel
to the way that the creature moved.
It was great, those early renderings.
It jazzed us all.
Should we even go into the split tail?
Just to say that it's a late addition.
Late addition, suggested if not mandated by the studio
pissed me off no end that some exec that I barely knew
was getting his hands dirty with our creature design.
Thought it would be more frightening if it didn't have a tail like a lizard, or something.
The context for all of it was that we had a problem.
I think everyone came to look at the problem, which was:
Did this mouth need more teeth?
It was out of those conversations, we were saying,
"Okay, what's wrong with this critter, now that we're X weeks into production?"
So it was, "Is it a problem with the outriggers?
"Does it not have eyes, and that's a problem? The teeth?"
And I think the split tail became the easiest thing to say to the studio,
"Fine, if that's really something you guys care about,
"we can adjust that"
which seemed the least deconstructive of any of the outside comments
besides our acknowledgment that maybe teeth would be better.
Maybe.
They had teeth, but they wanted more teeth.
More aggressive teeth.
We had a plate of what felt like razor-sharp material.
- And that plate was not reading... - Aggressive enough.
With a focal point of terror for the audience.
I must say, in hindsight, the tail added
- another animation element - Alien.
...for the animators to play with.
Lovely flicks.
Just to mention, the previous shot of Cole Hauser's character injecting his eye
was in fact a practical gag
and not a computer gag.
Yeah, well, look to thine own ass first. Right, Carolyn?
Captain! Captain!
I'm not your fucking captain.
So here we begin our eclipse sequence.
Lovely shot, one of my favorite close-ups,
the way she blooms with the skip bleach there.
We chose not to show what she sees
until this shot.
We see our first look at the dual rings of the planet.
That went through a few designs.
We were doing a frame with JPEGs in Illustrator
to work out the astronomical illusion of the rings.
Did we begin with a single ring, or did the double-ring structure come later,
like everything else?
I think you always had envisaged a double ring.
Whether the movements were in the same direction
or counterclockwise, that was a...
They're counterpunctual to each other.
But always the distance apart
and the particulate matter that the rings would be made up of
was always under... What color they should be.
How far advanced, as well, we always talked about that planet.
If you notice the rings, they start off very vertical
and slowly rotate.
They slowly keel over towards the horizon.
The speed of the movement in the close-ups also
was really significant.
How fast we were watching these planets move at the beginning.
Very nice shot, because it gives scale.
It's one of the few shots where it really says, "That's fucking huge."
And I believe, if that thing gets in the way of the suns
you'll be in darkness for a long time, so that's why it's so important.
All that planetary stuff, Magic Camera again, correct?
Yes, all of this sequence is Magic Camera.
Again, working it out pre-bleach
was difficult to get the densities right
so that they'd look correct after the bypass was added.
This is a foreground green screen.
She's always been a little contrasty there.
This is nice because we're doing an aperture stop down
actually, a shutter change here to affect the light change on her face
because you can't do with lights what you could do with the real sun.
This is nice. The punched-in close-ups are excellent.
You see the rings working
- in counterpoint to each other. - Very dynamic.
You see that there's some electromagnetic activity on the face of the planet
that kind of looks like a borealis effect.
These are some of my favorites here.
I think we worked them out that the first shot
the close-up, was the red sun disappearing
and then followed by the yellow sun,
so that there'd be a progressional sort of sequence.
And the progression of anything is hard to do in film.
Let me tell you.
It's starting to rain, and you want to see that slowly, that's hard to do.
To show light slowly diminishing, very hard to do
because not only do I have to decide, "When am I ending the skip-bleach processing
"and going to non-skip bleach for nighttime?"
I have to figure out where we're going to stop shooting...
The DP has to figure out where to stop shooting with the 50 ASA daylight stock
and go over to 200 ASA
which has completely different properties and responses.
So we're trying to get all that to work over the course of a one-minute sequence
where the lights go out.
I think even in the in-between shots
we did a digital bleach representation
to help bridge that gap from bleach to...
Here are the first hatchlings. That's your sky, right?
Yeah, this is all stills
of pinnacles and a lovely particle system
written by one of the animators
and little, individual pieces of animation tied into the particles.
What's the animator's name, David?
The animator?
Stewart Sargaison wrote the particle system.
- That's good to know. - Rick did the animation.
I must say, there's one shot that was not your visual-effects shot
and it was that one shot of Shazza screaming, "Shit!"
It's actually a sky replacement done by CFI Digital Department.
Sorry.
They had a better price.
I was desperate.
They did a good job.
I think it was also their first job ever.
So they wanted a little test.
They needed some negative to play around with.
That's nice, where you see rings in the background.
These were joint-venture shots between Double Negative and Magic Camera.
Obviously, Magic Camera generating the eclipsing suns in the back.
Double Negative providing the animation in the foreground.
So we worked very closely to get the elements into
the sort of flow graph of the two companies.
One sequence that we cut out was the whittling shot.
The whittling down of the blade.
For monetary reasons, we had to get rid of a few of the visual-effects shots.
So you'll actually see Vin here, the Riddick character
he throws away a little bit of something
and it's actually the handle of his bone blade
that got whittled down by the creatures.
Right there.
What is that little piece of shit?
Shazza's death went through a few iterations.
It was always a fast, frenetic sequence to try and read the dismemberment.
From the very subtle to the most graphic.
What was it originally?
We had a side shot through the container
where Shazza was rotated left to right.
She was just going to be lifted away, and it wasn't deemed grisly enough.
So you had these odd conversations... Riddick's POV, the big boys coming out.
These odd conversations about how to kill people in grisly fashion.
I must say, it's really unbecoming when you step back
and look at the conversations you're having on the film set. That's lovely.
Hard to make them look big and imposing.
Here's the "world goes dark" shot. One of our favorites.
It's in the trailer, and some of the TV spots, and some of the key art.
We spent a lot of time at Magic Camera getting that wink-out.
What sells it is how the shadow of the planet
sweeps from left to right over the rings themselves, right?
It all works.
Back to that shot of the big boys, the predators coming out of the pinnacles
hard to make those things, since they're so far away
feel like they're big and have mass, right?
Yeah, we tried to convey the scale of the creatures
by reducing the amount of wing movement
so that very much the larger creatures glided
as opposed to the fast, frenetic activity of the hatchlings.
And if you noticed that shot
they very much flew out of the pinnacles
and then the wing movement stopped very quickly.
Here we are in a sequence where the characters are learning
the sounds that these animals make, that they emit.
And all these creature sounds were generated by Tom Myers
and his group up at Skywalker.
He did a really good job for us
because we knew early on that we could afford to place sequences before.
Creatively, it would be nice if we had some sequences
where the threat was just sound and sounds in the dark
and that the movie traded on that.
As a matter of fact, I think it should have traded on it more
in the final analysis.
And he did a really good job
of creating these echolocation bursts
that the creatures put out.
The idea is that they get some information reflected back to them
and they interpret that.
Later on, we'll actually see what the creatures see.
Put "see" in quotes, meaning we see what they perceive
in the way of these black-and-white images.
Make sense? Have you seen the film?
Sounded very producorial to me.
You have to look at the film one of these days, Tony.
We went back and forth, really for months
on the sounds
veering from a kind of goosy quality
to a lion quality.
I think you go through those stages
because the sound-design people will always start with other animal sounds.
And whether that is the right approach or not, I'm not sure.
One of the most fascinating sounds we heard...
Do you remember, during production
they were actually extinguishing an arc light?
And it was making this screechy, screamy sound
that, really, you could not gauge.
It always stuck in my head as a sound
that I wish we had sampled and kept and brought back.
Here's a nice moment.
You see the big boy feasting on the little boy
which tells you they're cannibalistic, they're voracious.
And Riddick is...
I like the way Vin plays it. He's just biding his time.
He's not totally uncomfortable in their proximity
which is cool.
These shots, really effective.
But we had to switch courses in midstream in terms of how we lit them.
- We decided that backlighting... - Here's the first predator POV.
...was the way to go, even though the plate was side-lit. Correct?
Yeah, we started off by lighting it...
We took a lot of careful references of the lighting set-ups in the scenes
and tried to mirror that in the creature.
It wasn't as effective as once you started to cheat the light more
and rake highlights off of the creature's anatomy.
So these went through various lighting issues.
This guy's still a little sighty.
These are the blades that the creature has tucked up its sleeve.
We never actually envisioned the creature being that big in CG
in some shots.
I like any of the shots where the creatures are tussling with each other
because it tells you it's just not, "We're here to eat humans.
We're here to eat anything."
This was a tough one, too. Really effective, though.
Tough, because you had to cheat the size up again.
When the creature's running along, we got it into a sort of low mode.
And Vin being 6 feet tall
makes it difficult to see the creature after he's disappeared to camera left.
Is it alive?
We had to, sort of, cheat a leap
into Fry's light.
This is one of our dropper units, created by John Cox down in Australia.
The creatures were designed by Patrick
but the puppet versions were fabricated by John Cox
who has a creature workshop down on the Gold Coast.
John won an Academy Award for Babe.
He'll be pleased for the plug.
So we got one cutting torch,
we got two hand lights.
Yeah, he did a lovely job of creating air bladders on Fry's torch
going over the creature's body.
- You added steam. - And added steam and blisters.
- Some blue blisters. - Blue blisters to the shot.
Very effective to sell the burning quality of the light.
We get the four cells back to the skiff, we're off this rock.
I hate to ruin a beautiful theory with an ugly fact.
Did you notice that shot of Fry was soft?
It annoys the DP every time he sees it.
Do you have or will there be the technology
to "crispen" a shot?
To make it crisp, any shot that's out of focus or slightly soft?
The technology's always being developed.
You can do a certain degree of sharpening
but it always increases the contrast in all of the areas.
Basically, what it does is averages the pixels
into a much more contrasty coloration.
Then you run something on it to decrease contrast
- and suddenly it looks like a digitized shot. - It increases grain a lot.
- It's not a tool to be used. - The insert that wouldn't go away.
This shot was shot three times
with her behind, having some sort of couch or stool, or whatever that was.
How much you weigh, Johns?
- What's it matter, Carolyn? - How much?
- Around 79 kilos. - 'Cause you're 79 kilos
of gutless white meat. That's why you can't think...
Is that fucking right?
This is just about the cargo sequence we've just seen before.
There were questions about the size of the creatures
inside the cargo container as well.
How big they should be.
Whether they should be the medium-sized adolescent creatures...
They were supposed to be adolescents? Mid-sized creatures?
- They kept getting bigger, didn't they? - They did!
Over the course of the film.
"Which one is this?" "He's a big one!"
"We had a big one." "This is bigger."
"Give me a big boy."
You didn't hear about the medium boys, did you?
- Just the big boys. - They're all bulls.
They're all bull predators.
This is our first nighttime shot.
There was also talk about whether
we should scramble predators all over the shots.
Scramble them?
Yeah, put tails ducking around
- and little hints of activity. - In the dark, yeah.
Sure, we had that budget.
Riddick.
That should have been an eye-shine shot, right here.
Didn't have the bucks for it.
Looks clear.
The flyaway there was a shot that had many iterations.
How fast should it go?
- The leap-out is nice. - Real nice.
Here's the Abbott and Costello.
I'd had discussions with Mr. Eggby about, "How black is black?
"How dark is the dark that we're seeing into?
Are we trying to simulate what the human eye sees
or are we, as filmmakers
showing the audience things..."
Sometimes the camera, in other films, chooses to see in the dark
chooses to show things that you can't see as a human being.
So how black is black?
Initially
I was a proponent of
blacking out everything.
I said,
"Let's let the actors light themselves.
Give them torches, flashlights, fiber-optic cables...
What you don't see immediately lit, falls off to black."
He gave me the strangest look.
He said,
"Let's just go film this in my backyard."
He wasn't completely wrong about that approach
because every once in a while
you need to see more than just what the human eye would see.
It was always a balancing act for us
and for me, to decide how far into the night we should see.
Is it 2 feet, 3 feet?
Or you see 20, 30, 40 feet? Do you see the horizon?
Eggby argued that, after a while, the eye would be fatigued
by seeing nothing out there
and that it might look too cheap.
So we feathered in, eventually, in these night sequences
a night horizon
that was just a soft glow out there to give you some sense of depth.
There was a very simple cut-out of the landscape as well
that surrounded the interior set.
Yeah, for the most part
from this point forward, we're shooting on a stage.
This fiber-optic was
- a somewhat last-minute gasp. - The bane of our existence.
Another one. Another bane.
How to light these guys inside a stage that had some interest...
That wouldn't show the walls of the stage.
See the creatures lining up behind them?
This is a difficult shot, in knowing how much of the creatures to show
in that wide.
If they can only see 5 feet, should the audience...
- Should the audience see 30 or 40 feet? - ...see more of the creatures?
You just saw the creatures' point of view of one of the characters.
It pulses back and forth
to mimic the echolocation wave.
They were always shot with special lighting conditions
so that we could extract
a partial 3D image.
Though I think you and I both feel
we would have liked to get more extrusion out of it.
Yeah.
There's a sort of play off
between the lovely organic noise that we try to generate
to the readability
of what the creatures are actually seeing, for narrative purposes.
There was always a fine balance to get that degree of readability right.
This is one of everyone's favorite shots
that made its way into the trailer as well
and sold no small amount of tickets, I think.
I was supposed to die in France.
I never even saw France.
A shot that was re-shot and re-designed...
Very nice. Notice how we cheat the light fall-off there.
We keep it up much longer than it actually would be, but it's effective.
And, yes, sort of slapped together and conceived of at the last minute.
But even when we first saw it on the ISDN box,
we knew it was a very cool shot.
You just know that quickly.
I like these Riddick POVs in here, too.
I like going off the green light to the violet Riddick POV.
Good aggressive animation here.
All these creatures going after each other and fighting over the scraps of Paris.
And the excited little tail wags.
Paul Franklin did the animation to that shot.
It's hard to keep, the three predators at the end
their attention on Jack
to make sure that narrative read.
Wanna tell me what the hell's going on?
Here's the horizon in the background. You see it in these shots.
It's just a simple plywood cut-out back there
that has a little rise and fall to it to simulate hills.
Canyon ahead. I circled once to buy some time to think.
I think we should go now.
I don't know about that.
That's death row up there.
Especially with the girl bleeding.
What?
What are you talking about? She's not cut.
Not her.
Her.
We got the movie we wanted once we were into torches.
It was a lot of very low-level lighting
where sometimes we did use the torches as the sole illumination.
This look, combined with the horizon line back there, is a good way to go.
I'd do it again, I think.
It's just the fill light that annoys me sometimes, when you resort to that.
It's like, "Where's that fill light coming from?"
But to a large extent, the actors did have to light themselves in these sequences here.
Eggby was constantly reminding them
that they were supposed to be lighting themselves.
I was wrong. I admit it.
- Can we just get back to the ship? - I don't know, Carolyn.
Nice breeze, wide-open space.
I'm starting to enjoy my fucking self.
That's a nice look, there.
Half the face falls off into darkness.
My life is a steaming pile of meaningless shit anyhow,
so I say mush on.
The canyon's a couple hundred meters, after that it's skiff city.
So why don't you butch up
stuff a cork in this fucking kid, and let's go.
She is the captain. We should listen to her.
Listen to her?
She was willing to sacrifice us all.
In the shadows, are creatures. They're on the horizon lines to suggest...
Just to keep the presence of creatures all around them in the darkness.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we utilized sound
where we didn't have the bucks for visuals.
Which, as David said, was a real working concept for the whole movie
born out of some necessity, but also just effective.
It was a good call.
Ain't all of us gonna make it.
Just realize that?
Six of us left.
Really, some of the big shots we talked about
that we could have put in the movie...
and that we excised because they were perhaps too expensive
did we really miss any of those big shots?
What others were there?
There was the exterior of the crash ship in the beginning
hitting the ground.
I don't miss that. I'm glad we don't have it.
In the ending, there was the storyboarded version
where they plow through a million predators
a big wide shot of that.
The ending plays fine without it.
I would just argue, from a producer's standpoint
I felt that if we had had a bigger ending
by 10% or 15%
there would have been an added charge at that point.
You'll never know, and it played well enough
but I would have liked another $500,000 of ending.
The animators were all itching and we talked a lot about
getting a really big wide so they could really go to town with the activity.
This is the skiff plowing through... Step back, big proscenium shot
skiff plowing through hordes of predators.
Clinging on like a monkey chain as the skiff takes off.
We built the skiff in 3D
so it allowed us to get that geometry, so the predators could crawl all over it
and a really big wide, to show the immensity of it.
Here's the big wide shot, forget that one
the one that I wanted, I mentioned this to you before.
It was in the middle of the night, and you hear these creature sounds
and you think you know what's out there
you've seen the hatchlings, you've seen the big boys
you know what the threat is
and then, "Boom, boom, boom."
You turn your meager flashlights into the dark
and you see the hide of a gargantuan beast crossing your path
right in front of you.
That is, in effect, one of the boneyard creatures
that the predators killed off mostly in the last cycle.
And on this creature's hide, you see a dozen predators
just clinging to it, attacking it, ripping open the hide
trying to kill the creature as it passes in front of you.
- That's a lovely idea. - That would have been spectacular.
- I would have done both. - Extraneous.
It's lovely to account for the bones
all the boneyard and the creature bones with skin on them
so you see, just re-emphasized...
Speaking of fudging with the fill light...
I don't know. We added a bit.
We had some 10Ks going down on these guys.
That's the shot I really wanted.
Because it's unexpected.
The other ones we're talking about are kind of expected.
That's why I don't want them in.
If it's unexpected, it's like this huge freebie that the audience gets.
It's like, "What the..."
But I think that what I'm talking about is the sense of payback
the visceral sense of payback.
I think you get that anyway in the end.
It's clearly there.
You were really bad-ass.
I was always surprised that as many people got this gag with the red shell.
Or if they didn't, it didn't matter.
I think that may be it.
We call this
the crawler?
We haven't...
Speed crawler.
Yeah, that's a nice Riddick POV.
The infamous chud shot.
"Chud" was out of
an expletive that comic people use.
Paul Franklin. He ended up shooting the chud shot.
Very apt.
There was a lot of discussion about how the human anatomy reacts
when one's skull is split open.
I remember, the first time I saw you lining up to shoot the plate for that...
The green-screen element.
He wasn't moving enough.
It was like he spit or something.
That's how much his head moved.
I said, "Peter, we're going to splice this guy down to his sternum, aren't we?"
Yeah, we did ask for more movement on the body.
Those are the kinds of discussions you have as filmmakers.
This was a last-minute shot.
It was last-minute because there was a sequence before this
of Vin stumbling across these bones.
There was a "false scare" moment that didn't play very well
that wasn't shot very well by me.
So we sort of came into the scene halfway through
and to make a more provocative introduction to it
we asked Peter to turn this into a Riddick POV.
Think someone can spend half of their life in a slam
with a horse bit in their mouth and not believe?
Think he could start out in some liquor store trash bin
with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck
and not believe?
You got it all wrong, holy man.
So we're coming up to the gauntlet.
Awash in visual-effects shots and Peter's work.
What were some of the toughest shots for you to pull off in this sequence?
Yeah, I think that the interaction between all of the predators
and the number of predators
made each individual animation very time consuming to get right.
That shot I like, because it drew the curtains open on the gauntlet.
That's what that was designed to be.
Here we're playing with a lot of sound, but now we've got to show the predators.
A lot of John Cox's work as well, with the droppers
as the predators start killing each other.
When you're dropping those things on the set, it's like,
"This will never work. Nobody will believe this."
But then you overcrank it, you shoot it at 96 frames a second
You get Graeme Revell's music swelling
you see Riddick coming through the dropping viscera
and you say, "You know what? Damn, this works."
- It has mass. - The shit you can get away with.
Once in a while, you support it with Peter's shots.
Not support it, vice versa, really.
One of my favorite shots is the hatchlings catching fire.
That's Phil's buffeting of the camera.
That's a nice shot we added.
It's not storyboarded, but we just grabbed it on the set.
- Lighting on fire. - This reverse shot.
We call this the Exocet shot.
Looks like an Exocet missile.
- You're a bit more safe when you work there. - Yes.
Here we go.
Nice, they're fighting and killing each other.
A spray of blue blood there, for you DVD people.
That was three layers of critters?
- There was the... - Multi-plane level.
We played with the readability of that, not to distract from the foreground action.
Here are the droppers, John Cox's effects.
This is the deadfall. I'm not sure people understand this.
The deadfall of bones that the sand cat knocked down
coming through the daylight sequence.
Looks like guts being thrown.
Here's a shot of a creature's head rearing back.
A last-minute editorial double-dip.
It was actually the shot of the creature dropping its hammer on Johns
and his death shot.
I said, "Peter, just reverse it, then I can help out this sequence here."
There.
"Just reverse it, and make it yellow
and I can use it."
Reverse it, speed it up.
Here's a great shot.
This shot.
The animation by Derek Wentworth.
The interaction of an actual prop...
But the mass of it, and the quick tilt-up
and it ties them together, it's huge, on her, you get it.
So, a good example of how we mix puppet pieces with this foreground stuff.
That's a puppet piece
with Peter's CG work.
All this, puppet wings and tails flying around.
Not animatronics, just parts we're whipping around.
A Peter shot.
John Cox.
Riddick grabbing the puppet head.
That's a puppet head. That's Peter's work.
That's Peter's work.
Those are puppet hands.
That's a CG creature.
Rearing back, just to be the same action as...
All puppet pieces.
He's actually touching it, cutting puppet pieces.
I like that shot.
That is a CG head, and that's the puppet head right there.
So back and forth very quickly.
Good example of how you can blend the two
if you do it right.
A head-dropping shot, very nice, because it has mass.
We shook the camera.
We did a little CG dust element kicking up at the same time.
It's actually a practical element that we shot.
We just felt that we needed to shoot against black
rather than add supplementary stuff to it.
There's a lot of good soft-body work by Elie Jamaa
the shoulders moving, the rippling of the muscles of the creature.
Speaking of progression
so hard to do, it starts to rain.
Then it's got to get bigger and bigger.
It seems like the easiest thing to do, but it will vex you when you get on the set.
So, where the hell's your God now?
Much easier to open a door and have it raining.
It's a function of how you choose to light the rain.
It has to be side-lit or back-lit.
And in some shots it will read more than other shots.
Even though you're on the set thinking it's enough rain
you see the dailies and then you realize it's not enough.
Just tell me that the settlement is right there.
We can't make it.
This we conceived late in the day
about how we would dispose of pilgrim number one.
Pretty effective.
It was interesting to cheat the scale of the set
so that it gave the predator more time
to crawl up the slope.
We found that if we did it for real
he was gone in 12 frames.
So we really shrunk the predator down
to really increase that length.
Separate green screen again
so we didn't commit to the speed of the predator up the wall.
There were some stupid discussions about how to get rid of that predator early on.
And somebody, I forget who
was a big proponent of having the predator
jump out of a 6-inch puddle on the ground
and take him away, and drag him back under.
I said, "I think they just ran through that puddle.
"It went up to their ankles.
"Now the predator is going to spring out of it?"
- I think that was your idea, David. - It must have been.
I think the idea was that the lairs of the predator
are all over the planet.
Underground.
And one of the larger predators leaps up out of the ground to grab...
Nice shot, because we rise up in to it there.
Feels like Riddick's POV. I love this because there's no light on Vin.
I shot a version of it with a fill light, where you could read his expression
and at the last minute said, "Get rid of it."
Eggby wasn't sure about that.
He said, "You'll never use it in the film."
Guess what? It's my favorite shot.
This was all candles as only illumination.
Yeah, and I like it. I like it for that reason.
You can do that in a contained environment like this
not so much out in the open.
One of my favorite sequences, by the way
when the flame's going out, and we just listen to the creatures outside.
They aren't terrified either. It's like we've done that enough.
It's just us listening.
Interesting shot, because suddenly you think you're into movie lighting.
It's dark.
So you're going, "That's kind of a drag," but then you recognize that
that's what the whole scene is about.
My God, who's going to talk about the glowworms?
Our third major bane.
These were little acrylic silicone things
that we had injected with a luminous liquid called Cylume.
And that barely had any exposure to David Eggby's light meter.
But just enough to think we could get away with it.
But we found out also that once you had injected the silicone worms
same thing here
and put them up on the wall
the Cylume would lose its impact in the course of 20 minutes or so.
And since it took far more than 20 minutes to stick those things up on the cave wall
we were sort of sunk before we started.
Eventually, that first glowworm reveal, where we tilt up and see them overhead
Peter went in there and enhanced all the light for us.
- Did you not? - Yeah, also to add some movement to it.
Magic Camera built a 3D glowworm.
Same with the glowworm bottles.
In most of the shots, Peter went in after the fact and added the glow.
That's enhanced.
Even though we thought we could get away with
the original exposure of the Cylume bottles, couldn't.
It looked like she was carrying around a milk bottle.
So we scraped up the money somehow.
You just had to believe that this light had enough protective quality
to these animals that are photophobic
that they wouldn't just be food
going outside with these bottles.
There was a lot of problems for this shot.
That's nice, by the time we put the starburst pattern on, too.
That's a live-action bottle.
But I just blew it out in the timing.
One of my favorite shots.
- It's scale. - Yeah, it's nicely framed.
But that's an example of what the bottle looks like unenhanced.
I admire that in a woman.
I promised them
that we would go back with more light.
Did you?
A lot of days of rain on this set.
I didn't mind that, though, I didn't mind the mildew
and the constantly being wet
even though, obviously, we weren't as wet as Radha and Vin.
Didn't mind it. It all seemed in service of good stuff.
Then just give me more light for them. I'll go back by myself.
From under his umbrella, he said.
Didn't bother me at all.
I ran out there a few times.
We had promised the very game actors
that the water would always be kept at Jacuzzi temperature.
And of course, this lasted for about five minutes a day.
And then these kids were just out in the cold.
It got very chilly in that water.
You've got to get big raindrops, too.
Eggby wanted big drops, because they read.
Little drops do not read.
You got out there and could get pummeled by those things.
You'd get beaten up by the rain.
Take my hand.
Come on.
Look
no one's gonna blame you.
Save yourself, Carolyn.
Come on.
That's it. That's it.
Did we end up enhancing the lights at the back of the spaceship?
No.
- Those were just practicals? - Yeah.
On the fade-down
we sort of timed it.
Later on, when the creatures come in?
Just animated the shot element.
I am the captain of this ship
and I am not leaving anyone on this rock with those fucking things
even if it means...
- Get that thing off my neck. - Shut up!
- You'd die for them? - I would try for them.
All the rain made it...
Manuel Kramer wrote
really nice wet shaders, to enhance the creatures' surface.
So the creature needed to have several different looks.
One, obviously, the night look.
And then one once it gets rained upon.
And we spent a lot of time shooting
separate elements to enhance...
Just to make the creature look wet?
Little drops and splashes
which were practical elements, rather than CG elements.
I like that look a lot.
There are good examples of it coming up shortly.
It just looks black and leathery and sinister.
These are nice
Peter's enhancement on the glowworm bottles.
Very nice. I love these shots, overcranked.
Actually, a very sweet overcrank.
As they go by, it speeds up.
Again, creatures fighting each other, very effective.
Let's do it.
Couple of creatures looking like, "What's this coming at us?"
Don't stop. Don't stop!
So you're actually digitizing all these shots to deal with the glowworms, the bottles?
Now, some of my favorite shots.
That's a big boy.
Camera rocks.
Love it, and love this, too.
That last shot was never a visual-effects shot.
Yeah, it's just a shot of Vin scrambling up the muddy rise.
The creature was never thought to be in it.
But when we did the big boy dropping down in the frame, it's like
on the reverse, where is he?
So we just gave it to you
and without any information...
This is nice, too, one of our favorite full shots of the creatures
because he's got scale.
We called this sequence the snake dance.
It's him realizing that they have a blind spot and exploiting it.
There's that water...
Texture map, the lovely map.
Showing those water droplets rolling all over the predator.
Close shot with real drips and wet shader.
- Eye-shine. - Nice.
Solved this very complex idea of a blind spot very well.
Yeah.
Show the two creatures homing in on him.
You can see the stunt double for Vin.
We had a fine line between not giving that away and meeting Ric.
Come.
Now.
So, back to that other shot.
We had a shot of Vin scrambling up the muddy rise, live-action
shot without any, I wasn't even locking down the camera, as far as I know,
and we gave it to you, and you tracked in the creature
flawlessly, as far as I can tell.
There was a lot of work in working out how far it was from the camera.
We had the lens information, that was the only thing.
We built 3D geometry of the slope
to really place it in there.
There was a lovely subtle 2D comp
that Rudy, one of our comps, did
where the mud actually warps to suggest the footprint
of the creature.
Lovely detail.
So here we are, coming up on Fry's go-away shot, Fry's death shot.
and originally it was thought of as...
It was shot and conceived as live-action
just her and her alone
being jerked away into the rain.
And I kind of liked that, and I still wonder if we did the right thing
or if we just lost our nerve
and added the creature just because
just because we could have.
It happens to develop into a beautiful shot
because it does look kind of like an angel of death of some kind
the wings on her.
It is poetic.
The "dark angel" shot, you could call it.
It's nicely done, I'm just wondering if it's really necessary.
I think it is. There was always the question as to
the light falling on Fry
whether you should see the creature there.
And I think it's a good explanation of the close vicinity of the creature.
With so much prayer to make up for, I scarcely know where to begin.
I know where I'd start.
There's some very nice work coming up.
The best eye-shine, for what it's worth, for those of us counting,
I think, is coming up here.
I really like the creatures you did that fade down on the entrance.
That eye-shine is great.
It's steady, even though the light around him is changing.
And I do like these approach shots very much.
There's a late plate in the day.
First question was how many predators should be in the scenes.
We wanted the skiff to be crawling with them, but obviously...
It's nice because it goes to white, it blinds the eye
and then comes back and resolves after.
It's almost like your eyes are adjusting.
So that's why I like that shot so much.
This is effective, it gives you the sense, and the audience gets it,
that he's plowing through thickets of them.
- These are all CG shot, correct? - 3D skiff, yeah.
These are all green screens.
Shooting Riddick against a green screen here
and some lovely dimension on the planet and rings there.
Which was not conceived early on, was it?
These are late additions again
just to add more vision to the view out of the skiff.
We went through a number of iterations to see
how much they should fly towards the two suns.
Very nice.
Very nice, the breaking light over there to the left on the upper ring.
Just a hint of sun.
Well done, Mr. Chiang.
Well done, Mr. Twohy.