In
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Ben Stiller
reprises his role as night guard Larry Daley, and sets out on an
international odyssey to restore the powers of a magical Egyptian tablet
that brings the museum exhibits to life. Without the tablet’s sorcery
to sustain them, the various characters who have become Larry’s friends
will return to their former lifeless states.
Shaun Levy returns as director for this third film in the popular
series, with Erik Nash taking on the role of production visual effects
supervisor. Under Nash’s guidance, the task of breathing life into the
film’s many and varied characters fell to a collective of visual effects
facilities scattered as far across the globe as Larry and his
companions.
VFX supervisors from four of these facilities – MPC, Digital Domain,
Cinesite and Method Studios – are here to share their experiences on the
film, in this extended VFX Q&A.
MPC – VFX Supervisor, Seth Maury
How many shots did MPC deliver for the show, and how was the work divided between the different offices?
MPC delivered 250 shots in total. I was personally working on the show for about ten months.
The way MPC works is that all asset work – models, texture, rigging
and so on – is centralised in London and Bangalore. From look-dev
onwards, most of the work then happens in Vancouver. On
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,
Bangalore also animated some sequences and lit some shots; MPC are
bringing up the Bangalore division to be able to do those things.
How did you get involved with the show?
I got the call back in February 2014, when I was finishing up working on
Maleficent.
I was really interested in the show, because I like doing character
work. Also, my eight year-old son loves the movies. So I said, “I’ll do
it!”
So you were primarily involved with character work?
Yes. The first time I met the production VFX supervisor, Erik Nash,
he asked, “How’s your fur pipeline?” It kind of cascaded from there.
From the previous movie, we recreated animals including an antelope, a
boar, a moose, a mammoth, an ostrich, a rhino and an oryx. For the
British Museum scenes, we had a whole host of statues that come to life.
Before I came on the movie, the production art department had worked
with the British Museum to see what pieces they had that we could make
digital versions of. They had some cool little turtles, and some small
ceramic elephants that we made life-sized. We also made these pretty
metal peacocks – for those we started with the shape of one of the
museum pieces, then brought in our own colour and texture.
Natural History Museum – final composite
In revisiting the original animals, did you repurpose existing assets or create new ones?
We were given the final look-dev turntable models of some of the
original characters. We also took a bunch of stills from the previous
two movies for reference. A lot of times, that was a good starting
point, but essentially we started from scratch, because of the way our
character pipeline works and the way we do fur. Technologically
speaking, a couple of years between movies is quite a long time. The
modelling’s done in Maya and ZBrush. Then we use bunch of in-house
plugins that run off Maya.
Did the sculptural nature of the British Museum creatures bring a different set of challenges?
Yes. The first thing we did was faithfully re-create the actual
museum pieces, because we didn’t know how much latitude we had per
asset. As we went along, we established which ones we could change.
One challenge was that a lot of the pieces – the ceramic elephants,
for instance – were just a couple of inches long. When we scaled them up
to life-size, we realised the textures didn’t look quite right. So
there was a lot of translation from small to large. Erik was great about
that. We would show him work in progress – an early model, then stuff
at 50% and 75%. He might look at the feet on the turtles, for instance,
and say, “Look at the way those feet are carved – if they’d been carved
by hand at this size, the edge would be sharper.”
What about the animation? Presumably a ceramic elephant moves in a different way to a flesh-and-blood elephant?
A
lot of the style came from the first two movies. If something was made
of a material like ceramic or metal or jade, the director, Shaun Levy,
definitely wanted it to move as if it were made out of that material.
It’s a fine line between making that work and not having it look like
bad animation!
So, for example, while the ceramic elephant moves relatively stiffly,
he can swing his trunk and swish his tail, just not with the amplitude
or speed that a real elephant would do it. When he takes a step, his
foot has a little squash to it, but not as much as a real elephant. So
you get a subtle impression of all those things you’re used to seeing in
a real animal.
So do your CG models have the same skeleton and musculature as their flesh-and-blood counterparts?
By default, our rigging team put ribcages inside these creatures, so
that when muscles fired or when they took a big breath you would see the
impression of ribs. I would have to say, “No, actually we don’t want
that, because they don’t have that inside.” It was a delicate balance:
putting in a certain amount of realism, but taking out what wouldn’t
actually be there.
Which sequence gave you the most challenges?
At one point in the show, there are five or six shots of the monkey,
Dexter, doing an acrobatic aerial silks routine, hanging from two strips
of fabric suspended from the ceiling. We created a digital monkey for
that. We worked on the sequence pretty much from the beginning of the
project to the end.
On-set, they had the cutest little monkey called Crystal. In the
first two movies, they’d also used a digital monkey for some medium and
wide shots. When we started out, we had the same agenda. We were told:
“We’re going to have a digi-double, but you won’t see it in close-up.”
But we decided to future-proof the asset, just in case we needed a tight
shot, because it’s easier to build it high-res in the beginning than to
go back and upgrade everything later.
And did those tight shots actually materialise?
Yes. Sure enough, a couple of those shots ended up being a medium to tight shot on our digital face.
We’d done a photo acquisition of Crystal, and our CG supervisor, Mo
Sobhy, worked with look-dev to make the digital double work, refining
the textures and so on. It’s that fine line again – mostly in the
animation: “How would a real monkey do it versus a human? How can we
bring monkey traits to it, but still have it look graceful?” For
example, a monkey doesn’t point its toes when it’s hanging upside-down.
Can you talk about the planetarium sequence, where all the constellations come to life?
They built a beautiful planetarium set at Burnaby, near Vancouver – I
haven’t seen a set that big in quite a while. They built the first
floor of the planetarium up to about sixteen feet, and put a huge
translight around the outside to re-create the New York environment .
Our first job was to top up the set to the roof.
Hanging from the roof is a huge sphere – it looks kind of like Saturn
– and then there’s a circular walkway that goes up around the outside,
with all the constellations displayed. We re-created that, minus the
support structures that hold the sphere up. I feel like we did a really
good job with that – it’s pretty seamless.
The next thing we had to do was to bring these five constellations to
life: Leo Major, Leo Minor, Orion, Scorpio, and Cancer. As the show
opens, these characters made of stars kind of float up in the higher
regions of the planetarium and do a little performance.
How did you go about breathing life into what’s essentially just a pattern of stars?
The first reference we got from Erik was a picture of the Orion
nebula. He said, “I like the essence of this. See what you can make of
it.” So we started playing with modelling some characters, and got the
effects team working on what this thing might look like. Is it
transparent? Semi-transparent? Do I see nebulae swirling inside? Does it
have a hard shell? How well can I read each form, or is it just made up
of stars? That went round and round for a while, because it really
could be anything.
We put a few different ideas forward, and what we got back from Shaun
Levy was: “I really want it to be made of stars.” So Erik and I worked
back and forth refining that idea. We ended up with a character that’s
pretty transparent, but has a subtle surface impression of nebulae and
galaxies. It’s pretty cool, actually.
Given that Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is the third film in a series, did it feel as if you were covering old ground?
It’s funny, it didn’t feel like ground we’d covered before. That’s
the great thing about Erik and Shaun – those guys were up for fresh
ideas and bringing either a new look to something, or having characters
act in a different way. I think that permeated the whole project. We
didn’t have to just dogmatically match what had been done before.
For me personally, I had a lot of fun with the Dexter acrobat sequence. I’d just come off
Maleficent,
which has a very atmospheric look, so for the Dexter sequence I enjoyed
playing with light beams and spotlights to bring atmosphere to the
shots, which I don’t think we’d seen in other parts of the movie. Plus,
at the end of the day it’s just silly, and I know my son’s going to
laugh at it!
Cinesite – VFX Supervisor, Zave Jackson
What was Cinesite’s involvement in the show?
We were tasked with the enhancement of the golden tablet – both
look-dev and execution – showing the progression of its corrosion and
the green glowing edge detail. We also created the golden glowing tablet
shots. To do that, we referenced the first two
Night at the Museum
films to get an idea of the series’ vibe. We also looked at time-lapse
footage of various metals corroding, and explored imagery of rust
patterns and different types of tarnished metals. We delivered 87 shots
over the course of about five weeks.
What happens during the corrosion sequence?
As the damaged tablet starts to corrode, the magic keeping the museum
exhibits alive starts to die. There’s a close-up shot of the golden
tablet on the wall of the museum, in which we see the corrosion texture
crawling over its surface. The camera flies down on to the surface of
the tablet to an almost macro-photography distance, then follows the
decay as it advances. This establishes that the tablet is “dying” from
this disease-like corrosion.
How did you go about creating the corrosion shots?
We began by building an accurate CG model of the practical tablet
used on set: a golden slab with nine square sections engraved with
Egyptian hieroglyphics. The squares rotate on spindles, like an ancient
abacus. We knew we’d need to get extremely close to the model, seeing
the fine scuffing of the polished gold surface and the more complex
detail of the corroded parts, so we went through a detailed texturing
process. Additional texturing work was required for the corroded
version.
Next we created the intricate, organic movement of the corrosion’s
green, glowing edge as it progresses over the tablet’s surface. The
animated leading edge was created in 2D, using fractal noise tools. We
turned the resulting animation into masks that were UV-mapped back on to
the geometry. We also used the masks to displace the geometry in the 3D
render, giving volume and depth to the edge of the corroded section of
tablet.
For shots which didn’t need to be animated, our solution was to
object-track the tablet used in the shot. We created a predetermined set
of directional lighting passes, texture passes and utility passes based
on a generic lighting set up and rendered using V-Ray. It was then up
to the compositors to balance the lights to make the new corroded tablet
fit into each shot.
Did working on Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb teach you anything new?
We learned that, given a body of shots that were quite similar and by
using the right methodology, it’s possible to deliver a fairly large
number of shots with just one person handling the lighting, and a small
compositing team.
Method Studios – VFX Supervisor, Chad Wiebe
How did you get involved with the show, and how many shots did Method Studios deliver?
I’d worked with Method’s VFX producer, Genevieve West, on several Fox
films prior to this, so we were confident we’d be the right fit for the
Fox team, including the production VFX supervisor, Erik Nash. We
delivered 209 shots, over an eight-month post schedule, with a crew of
around 70 people.
Watch Method Studios’ VFX breakdown reel from Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
:
What was your main contribution to the film?
Our animation supervisor, Erik de Boer, has extensive experience with creature animation – he worked on
Life of Pi and
The Maze Runner
– so we were interested in continuing to build our animation and
creature repertoire. For that reason, we focused on the sequence where
the lion statues in London’s Trafalgar Square come to life, and the
scene in which Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) and his gang battle Xiangliu, a
nine-headed snake creature. We also contributed shots involving Jed and
Octavius (Owen Wilson and Steven Coogan), including the scene in the
ducts, and where they’re watching kittens wrestling on YouTube.
How did you go about bringing the lions of Trafalgar Square to life?
During the London shoot, we were able to photograph the actual lion
statues in many different lighting and weather conditions. This gave us
texture and modelling reference, which proved immensely helpful.
Together with what was shot on the day using the production’s Red
cameras, that got us off to a fast start in building the lion assets.
What was your approach to animating these huge statues?
It was an interesting challenge. We wanted to respect their original
scale and weight, but for shots where they chase a flashlight and
wrestle, they also needed to have a kitten-like appeal and playfulness.
So we keyed off the YouTube kitten clip, as well as a ton of real lion
footage. To preserve the sculpted look of the animals, we skipped
dynamic and harmonic skin sims for a more controlled blendshape approach
in the face and body. By doing this, we matched the look established in
the previous movies.
The lions’ manes needed a custom deformation toolset, created by
James Jacobs and his creature team. By simulating underlying strips of
geometry representing the mane, we were able to have sections sliding
over top of each other and driving the deformations of the single mesh,
creating more complex deformations than traditional weighting would have
allowed.
Did you take a similar approach with the Xiangliu?
There was a physical build of the nine-headed snake coiled in a
sleeping pose. This was scanned and used as the basis for our CG build.
It was also used in-shot, which proved to be extremely useful lighting
reference.
From an animation standpoint – as well as visual – we wanted a
creature that not only stayed true to its statuesque origin, but also
fully reflected the real-world attributes that make snakes such amazing
creatures.
How did you choreograph the action?
The sequence was extremely well-thought out – we were provided
post-vis which was very close to what the director wanted from a
blocking standpoint. Using this as reference, our animators were able to
move full steam ahead with a clear target, pushing out some amazing
animation in a very short amount of time.
From there, our lighting team got a very clear indication of where
our creatures would be in the environment. This was a big plus, due to
the challenges associated with trying to light nine reflective, tubular
shapes all competing for screen space. For example, we noticed very
early on that the most minor position change of one snake would have a
dramatic impact on the lighting and reflections of all the others.
Animating nine heads simultaneously must have been quite a challenge.
The key for the snake animation was finding the balance between
managing the shapes with animation controls, and maximising the
usability of the rig for the animators – making sure it didn’t become
too heavy or counter-intuitive. We wanted strong, broad shapes with
solid, serpentine motion, and a real sense that the heads were driven
and lifted all the way back from the tail, which was connected to the
sculpture’s base. Our creature TD, Paul Jordan, created a very
successful rig for this that allowed us to design the overall motion on
one level, and to twist and sculpt on several lower layers.
Tell us more about the rig.
The big challenge was creating a rig which would allow extreme poses
and actions without compromising the look of the snake or overly
distorting its geometry. We also had to come up with a way to have the
snakes’ scales behave in a realistic manner. Paul developed a follicle
system that would allow each scales to slide over the next. That way,
they stayed as true as possible to their original size and shape.
Did you bring anything new to the miniature characters of Jed and Octavius?
One interesting new bit of technology we employed was “focus
stacking”, which created a much more realistic marriage between Jed and
Octavius and their full-size environment.
When shooting macro-photography with traditional cameras, you
typically have a very narrow depth of field. When compositing actors,
this can typically result in a visual mismatch. For
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,
we created our background plates by shooting footage in which we racked
focus from a locked-off camera. We then compiled all the in-focus areas
into one image. This allowed us to do something that’s traditionally
not possible in miniature photography: create an infinite depth of
field, and then adjust it to taste.
By this process of focus stacking, we were able to control and match
the two opposing elements, allowing us to make the backgrounds look as
though they’d been shot through tiny cameras in scale with our miniature
characters. It also allowed us to preserve all the great detail you get
from shooting real-life objects instead of building giant props, which
can create its own visual challenges.
Digital Domain – VFX Supervisor, Lou Pecora
How many shots did Digital Domain deliver, and which sequences do they feature in?
Digital Domain executed around 340 shots. I started on the show after
principal photography had wrapped in late summer, so we did this volume
of work between August and November.
We were lucky enough to get the Escher Tablet Pursuit sequence, the
Pompeii diorama eruption, the Greek statue encounter, and a smattering
of complex 2D split screens with double the Stiller!
Let’s begin with the volcanic eruption. How close to reality did you stick?
For Pompeii, we studied lots of real volcano eruption footage to
figure out which parts we could keep and which we had to lose. For
instance, most of the real oozing lava we studied didn’t flow nearly
fast enough to be as threatening as the sequence required, but the
eruptive elements spewing out of the caldera were more true to life.
Many films have used the splitscreen trick to duplicate actors. How did you go about twinning Ben Stiller?
For the “Ben and Ben” splitscreen work, we went back and watched
Multiplicity. There’s some phenomenal work in there – work that definitely still holds up today.
The scenes where there are multiple Michael Keatons in the shots at
the same time that don’t interact were really good; however, two shots
in particular stood out to me. The first is where Michael Keaton’s
character takes a cigarette out of a clone’s mouth, who then blows smoke
back at him. The second is the scene where the original Doug keeps
refilling clone #4’s glass with Coke. These shots where they interact
with each other, and interact with the same objects, were the most
impressive, so that’s what we aimed for.
We have a few places where Ben’s Larry character and his Laa
character touch each other – patting each other on the back, touching
faces, and so on. That really sells the effect, and it definitely was as
difficult to execute as you would imagine.
Can you describe the Escher Tablet Pursuit sequence?
The whole process of bringing this piece to life was one of the more
interesting challenges I’ve faced in my career. In the sequence, three
live-action characters end up in the M.C. Escher lithograph called
“Relativity”. In this world of multiple gravities, a chase ensues with
the characters all trying desperately to lay their hands on the tablet.
How did you set about transferring M.C. Escher’s mind-bending artwork on to the screen?
We studied the original artwork and other Escher pieces to make sure
that the etch treatment we put on the photographic elements was
authentic to his style. Taking a static piece of lithography and turning
it into a cinematic experience brought all kinds of things into
consideration – things one would never think about. For instance, how
would we deal with motion blur, depth of field, and moving shadows?
These were all design details that required lots of trial and error.
Then, based on solid previs from Proof, our VFX supervisor, Swen
Gillberg, shot all of the action on a small greenscreen stage in
Burnaby, Vancouver.
How did you make your CG set look like the original lithography artwork?
We came up with complex shaders that dynamically resized the pattern
density based on factors such as distance to camera and size in frame.
Our CG supervisor, Tim Nassauer, devised a very clever way to achieve
this by using multiple interlocking patterns that would increase the
density and fidelity of the etch lines as the surface moved closer to
camera.
Studying the Escher artwork taught us that shadows aren’t just darker
areas due to light being occluded, but rather a more dense arrangement
of the lithographic pattern that’s present in surrounding areas. This
led us to render a full set of the denser pattern to be revealed through
shadow mattes; these were either generated in the scene, rotoscoped or
keyed from the plate photography. Our compositing department, supervised
by Francis Puthanangadi, was ultimately tasked with blending these
various density passes to attain the appropriate line density and
fidelity.
It sounds like a highly technical challenge. Did you also have to make a lot of artistic judgement calls?
VFX always involves a balance of technical acumen and artistry. This
sequence definitely provided its share of technical challenges, but most
of the journey was spent making artistic decisions and creative calls.
The etch treatment applied to the photography, for example, was very
finicky and sensitive, depending on how large or small something was in
frame. There was no real formula for it, only artistic instincts on what
looked right: pattern angles; how many different sections we would
need; how fine or coarse the pattern should be; how heavily the effect
should be printed in. These would all have to be dialed in on a
case-by-case basis, sometimes animating them throughout a shot if we
were going from wide to close or vice versa.
Did the same apply to more conventional effects such as motion blur?
Dealing with motion blur, depth of field, and so on is usually very
straightforward. In this case, however, we had to make a lot of artistic
calls on how they should be handled. Do we put the etch on before the
defocus and let the lines get blurry? Do we let the etch treatment get
motion blurred, or do we put the motion blur on before the
treatment? There were many variables and decisions to make along the way
and our comp lead, Brian Rust, and look-dev artist, Joe Spano, ran
through the gamut of these variables – and many more – to achieve what
ultimately became the look for the sequence.
For the most part, there’s some semblance of reality that one can use
as a metric to see if an effect looks “right”. The design-oriented
nature of this work made that more difficult, as we had to rely so much
more on our far less concrete artistic intuitions. In the end, that was
what made it so satisfying as it all came together.
What new personal challenges did this show set for you?
The bulk of my experience is in compositing – I was a compositing
supervisor for years before becoming a VFX supervisor. So I never had
much exposure to animation – particularly character animation. This show
gave me a lot more experience in that arena.
Working closely with our animation director, Phil Cramer, and
animation lead, Frankie Stellato, I was exposed to both traditional
keyframe hand-animated work, as well as Digital Domain’s new cutting
edge Direct Drive facial animation system. This was a fantastic learning
opportunity for me that I took full advantage of.
I was extraordinarily lucky to be a part of the fantastic team that
put this film together. Across the entire spectrum – the executives and
internal team at Fox, director Shawn Levy, production VFX supervisor
Erik Nash, the entire team at Digital Domain, and our counterparts at
other VFX facilities – I was lucky enough to get to work with old
friends … and make some new ones as well. For me, the most important
part of a show is the team of people I’m working with on a daily basis.
We spend most of our waking lives at work in this business, and long
weeks away from home, and to be surrounded by people who are supportive,
collaborative, creative and downright fun to be around makes going to
work every day a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying experience.
Special thanks to Jonny Vale, Karl
Williams, Adam Brown, Melissa Knight, Ellen Pasternack and Rita Cahill.
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb photographs TM and © 2014
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for
sale or duplication.
Rep.
Gowdy has said he wants to avoid a media circus, but press attention
will never be more intense than it is when Clinton finally appears
before his committee. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images) He grimly went about repairing the damage, insisting on Face the Nation
Sunday that “when Speaker Boehner called me, he never mentioned
Secretary Clinton’s name, not once.” Salon, a left-leaning website,
described Clinton as “visibly outraged” by McCarthy’s admission,
although her outrage surely was tempered by the recognition that this
was the best possible thing that could have happened to her. A Clinton
campaign memo on “Friends and Allies Talking Points,” obtained by Yahoo
News, advised her surrogates to argue that McCarthy’s comments proved
that the committee was a “partisan plot to turn the taxpayer-funded
Benghazi committee into a front for Hillary Clinton” — a plot that “went
all the way up to the speaker of the House himself. And it invoked the
charge that Gowdy sought to “politicize the deaths of four brave
Americans at Benghazi for the sole purpose of trying to damage Hillary
Clinton.”But
politicization was part of the committee’s DNA from the very outset,
when Boehner reluctantly authorized it at the insistence of his most
conservative members. As a creature of the institution of the House,
Boehner considered a select committee unnecessary, indicating that the
five standing committees with jurisdiction (plus two from the Senate)
were adequate to the job.But
as time went by it became apparent that the committees weren’t finding
what the right-wingers expected. The final report of the House
Intelligence Committee, 
