This box — right here — it holds one of the unsung heroes of Hollywood production,
the tool that makes War Machine suit look like it's actually there. It's a method that
started with a teapot and became ubiquitous. It's an essential part of a VFX film set,
but it's not a camera or a green screen. You have to search hard to see it in behind the
scenes videos. But this is not just a gazing ball that I bought for twenty dollars and
ninety nine cents. It's a key to making virtual objects look real.
In this scene, I was behind one of the pillars. My name's Leo Bovell, I'm a VFX supervisor
at Triptyc, been in the industry now for over 17, 17 years. So I've been at it quite a while.
In this scene, basically, Abraham, the statue and everything, we basically had to replace
it.
Obviously. Cut for them is like action for you in this situation. And you're like, I
have to scramble to get as many references as possible. Right between takes I get in
and I do as much as I can and then I get out of there. There are times where you can't
get in between takes because the creatives, they're in such a groove, they just got to
keep going.
One of the big problems VFX artists face in The Handmaid's Tale, Marvel movies, everything
is matching fake stuff to real light. And Leo scrambled in the real Lincoln Memorial
during the shoot because that information was crucial to create a realistic looking
Lincoln Memorial from scratch. As you can see in this BTS from Mavericks VFX. He used
an HDRI to figure out how to make it look so real.
A high dynamic range image. You might have an HDR option on your phone. It helps photos
to look less blown out in really bright spots. An HDRI captures data in a high dynamic range.
A normal photo might look like this.
You can't see anything, any detail or data near the sun or any trees in the shadows.
Using high dynamic range fixes that by meshing different exposures, different pictures of
a scene to let you see all the detail. Shadowy mush turns into visible trees and the sun
becomes clear again. Computer software can take that HDRI and use all that data to figure
out how light works in a scene. Make that a 360 degree panorama and you have enough
data to simulate the light in a mini world. Now you can add an object to that world and
it will look like the real light is hitting it with all the right highlights, shadows,
and reflections. HDRI is either use to light the object or is a reference for VFX artists
when they light it on their own, using manually added lights, making a bunch of tweaks and
adjustments. How does that HDR help you when you're actually off of this crazy shoot day
and you have to make something from it?
If we've captured the light on that day and then we take that light, we put it into the
computer, we get immediate feedback without trying to guess. The HDR really helps at the
stage where we are realistically applying shaders and materials to emulate the marble.
Getting an accurate HDRI really quickly is what causes all that scrambling on shoot days.
The first HDRIs actually used stuff like this: gazing balls, Christmas ornaments, anything
that was round and shiny and could help them get a panorama. The idea is that the picture
of the gazing ball gets unwrapped into a 360 degree picture when you put it in the right
software. I'm going to start taking some photos and that's going to help us capture all the
light in the scene and get it in this panorama. This reflective ball is one of three main
ways that people do it. Sometimes people will rotate their camera or use a lens that's really
wide. VFX supervisors like Leo might also use a 360 degree camera to snag these images
really quickly because they're in the middle of a hectic situation.
I use the Theta. It's a 360 camera and it's very small. So it's not intrusive. With the
Theta, usually it's a couple of seconds if you're doing a chrome ball. So you have to
set up a tripod, you have to put the ball down. That's a couple of minutes. This is
where the Theta makes all the difference in the world because it's such a tiny device
and you just plop it down and you get in and get out. When I'm just shooting bracketed
with the eight millimeter lens, probably a minute. Right between takes I get in and I
do as much as I can and then I get out of there. HDR is so mainstream now that I can
plop it into editing software and make an HDR photo.
I took some video without the chrome ball in it, so I put my 3D image in there. You
see, without the light, it looks fake. Add the HDRI though, and boom, suddenly it's like
it's there. Do you see the reflection of the trees or how the sun is glinting off of it?
Using a real environment to light a 3-D object started with work like this teapot. See the
windows reflecting in it? In the 90s, researcher Paul Debevec and colleagues pioneered the
creation of HDRIs from multiple images and then using those to light 3D scenes. Without
them, back in the late 90s, it was a lot harder. As his paper says, currently available techniques
for realistically rendering synthetic objects into scenes are labor intensive and not always
successful. They had to position lights, copy reference photos and program in reflections.
People still have to do some of that. But you can also let HDRI light objects in your
scene. Today, repositories of HDRIs let you download images and simulate thousands of
environments, like an old room or outside a small cathedral. This lighting often still
comes from a ball like this one, but VFX artists don't use that extra time just to chill out.
They used to work harder.
As a person who's thinking about light like exponentially more than the normal person,
would you rather hang out with Rembrandt or Newton?
Maybe Rembrandt, but ultimately, if I if I threw another name in there, it would be Degas.
Why Degas? Because he was just obsessive about his artwork, him constantly chasing perfection
is something that I think drives a lot of artists and also intrigues me at the same
time.
It is a national monument slash park. Because of that, we couldn't limit the public from
entering the space. It was an insane day. I mean, you had fans who showed up on the
day. You had some people who thought it was a protest. So they showed up. Again, they
couldn't close the set, so people start to actually sneak in to some of the shots and
pose, because on the day we had about roughly one hundred and fifty actors. So you had a
couple of fans started to sneak in. But obviously their their outfits, their garments, something
just looked off. So sometimes some of them actually got into the shoot and it was like,
wait a minute, something's off here. Let's get you out of here.