Interview with Brian Grill Visual Effects Supervisor for DIgital Domain on GI Joe

We came in to work on 2 sequences, one of them being the convoy sequence and the other being the Paris chase sequence ending in the Eiffel Tower being eaten by nanomites.

Did you work with other effects houses involved in the making of GI Joe?

THere were a lot of effects that were similar for other effects houses to work on. So earlier on Boyd Shermis (check spelling), the Visual Effects Supervisor, knew that there were a couple of facilities, Frantic was also working on some of the Nanomite effect shots that Digital Domain was involved with. Digital Domain uses a proprietary system so we couldn't just hand it across the board. We don't use the same software so it came down to us coming up with the best looking effect on our end. Then anyone else could copy it. So we were really fortunate that Boyd liked the direction we were going. Frantic's shots were similar enough and had the qualities that the director liked so that it really worked out.

What were some of the more difficult challenges?

Well for the accelerator suit the biggest challenge was making sure that our digital suit matched the suits that Shane Mchan at Legacy had made. Just a couple weeks after shooting in Prague, we came back for a couple weeks and I had we were able to do a side to side comparison of our CG character (Marlin) running next to the real Marlin. So the big part was making it look real. It became very important to see the characteristics of our actors, even when they were CG.

A lot of movies have been using actors in front of green screens so that they can create their own environment. Did a lot of the action on GI Joe take place on a virtual set?

We definitely had our share of shots over blue. Actually a lot of the shots in Prague and you would be surprised how much of it we had to replace. You can almost call a lot of the shots we did virtual because in any shot there would be between 5 and 9 cameras running, cameras on motorcycle, cars, remote control camera plane, and locked off cameras. Even after you got a shot off you would still have to clean up all the other cameras. Pretty much every shot had to be rebuilt. We knew that we were going to have to do a lot of clean up to change Prague into Paris as well.

We had gigs and gigs of photography. We had (Lid?) that was supplied to us and we literally rebuilt almost every shot. Background removal for either getting rid of cameras or cables or being on a certain street too many times so we had to change the environment to be a different street. So I would consider most of the shots virtual, in a sense.

Can you tell us about some of the dynamics that went into creating certain shots?

Pretty much everything was an (RBD?) In the scene where the Eiffel Tower comes down the supervisors decided on a cloth simulation because no one really knew what would happen if the Eiffel Tower was eaten. We talked to a couple engineers to get a view of how it would happen. But Ultimately its a Hollywood movie and what we needed was to make it look cool. In the convoy sequence, with the concussion cannon we used fluid dynamic simulations. Once we had the simulations we could apply them to multiple effects to move toward a more organic effect. There is a scene on a rooftop where the baroness shoots a concussion gun and the glass roof basically buckles, crushes splatters, and comes into the shape a glass wave. I think those types of dynamics are really important for storytelling because you want to see something that is recognizable, and because of things like the glass being shattered and coming like a wave the first thing that comes intro your mind is "woah its a wave of glass!" I think that's important when you hit those notes. Because there are quick cuts some of them only last 4 seconds and you need to get the full impact from them.