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Berney talked with IESB about his latest work as Visual Effects Supervisor on "I Am Legend", hitting theaters this Friday, as well as where he'd like to be taking his talent in the near future.
{sidebar id=1}Jim Berney has a pretty impressive list of credits to his name. In the past few years, he's been involved with the special effects for "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe", "The Polar Express", both "Matrix" sequels, "The Two Towers" and the first "Harry Potter" film among many, many others.
IESB: Could you talk a little about what your job entails, specifically?
Berney: The job is kind of cyclical. You start on a project that's about 18 months so you start with a script and you break it down and you figure out what effects could be done digitally and what would be done practically and camera effects and things like that. You work with the director and the producer on the production side, budgetarily how you'd want to approach these things. Then you come up with ideas on how you'll shoot it and eventually you'll come to that day when you start shooting. You look over the shoulder of everybody while they're filming and make sure that your needs are addressed as far as, you know, stuff like the green screen. You keep track of all the camera data so you monitor tracking and whatnot. Then, the more creative aspect is doing the creature designs and the environment designs and things like that. Also working with a crew like at Imageworks. They come together with all the technical aspects of it. We're still [just out of] the infancy of this whole industry. Years ago, we were trying to figure out how to do marble and things like that and now the hardest things have been figuring out [how to make] fire better and smoke and things like that -- skin and eyes and things. They're all getting better and quicker and animation is getting better and quicker but there's still some new technology on each project that has to be worked out. Usually by the time you wrap up shooting you're getting into the R&D aspect of it. Then you're starting to build your creatures and whatnot. After that, you're doing just your basic day to day; cleaning up shots, putting effects in.
IESB: What drew you to working on I Am Legend?
Berney: It actually offered a wide variety of effects. It was challenging and interesting to make Manhattan look deserted and abandoned for three years. Of course, the creature work. I like doing creature work. There was the opportunity to also do the rats and the dogs, which was kind of creepy. The perfect full-blown digital human is, I think, still left to be done. We've been using doubles for years and we're getting better and better. This, I think, might be the next step in the evolution of the digital man. I mean, they didn't have speaking roles, but every aspect of them was human.
IESB: Originally, though, they were going to be shot practically?
Berney: Yeah, that's how we started. We were a month into shooting and we were doing the deer chase and things like that when we came to the scene where they run across Washington Square Park and that was the first scene where you actually saw them. We had the stunt people in makeup. It just clearly wasn't working. You had these people in a park at night. They covered themselves in ash and soot to protect themselves from the sun. You have these creatures -- regardless of how scary they were with the light on them -- when you just cover them in white and throw them out in the dark and you're trying to expose for the shadow and the trees and the park itself, they just glowed. Visually, that probably could have been overcome. We tried a few things, trying to make them darker. But the idea was that they were supposed to be just fierce, amped-up like on PCP and they don't care about their well-being. They're going to do what they can to get across the park. These stunt people are pretty full-on but you can only get them to run so fast and take so many hits to themselves. Just the kind of grossly violent body movement we couldn't get from the stunt people. So we decided to go CG. We were going to go CG on some of the set performance, like what happened in the lab. But even as those days came closer and closer to shooting, we didn't know what we wanted the creatures to be but we knew it was a little bit more than what you can get out of make-up and costumes. We wanted to be able to see the underlying human structure. We wanted to see the muscle and the bone and the tendons and things like that. We wanted to see the light transmit through and the pulsing veins and things like that. So it was around the end of December, when we came to our Christmas hiatus, that we made the decision to go just completely CG. So that's what you get. In the movie, there aren't any practical infected humans. It's all CG.
IESB: I know it was important for Francis Lawrence to get a lot of the empty New York done practically, but how was CG involved with the aging and destruction of buildings?
Berney: Most of it was all shot on-location in Manhattan. There were a couple of sequences that were full CG. When we get to shooting in Manhattan, we got to a point where pretty much every shot involved a paint-out of people and traffic as well as any signs of life -- electrical lights and things like that or interiors of office buildings. Then, as it went broader and wider, we would add looting or christmas decorations or we usually replaced the skies. There was a random burned-out building here and there and that would be done either 2-D or 3-D. In the instance of the Times Square sequence, none of that was -- we could couldn't lock down the actual Times Square and it wasn't practical to paint out all these signs. So that was shot green screen. What you had was basically Will Smith walking around the ground playing with any weeds or grass around him and some abandoned cars But most of what you saw was CG. We came up with the lighting and gross geometry of Times Square and then we kind of aged it a little bit and had some of the signs falling down and whatnot. We took location photography and stitched it all together, painting out the signs of life on that, aged it and then projected on that to get our texture. But all in all, we had to come up with a 3D Time Square because Neville needs to move through it. We had to reflections and whatnot. It required it to be a 3D environment.
IESB: You've had a real varied history of films you've worked on. How did I Am Legend compare?
Berney: Well, I do a lot of fantasy work but a lot of what we do is photo-real or at least that's what we strive to do. But what is photo-real when you're working in fantasy? In the world of fantasy, you can kind of push it a little further. In this one, it's real different. There's photo-real humans and even these creature-dogs but we never wanted to push the bounds too far because it would just pull you out of that. We didn't want to get into fantasy-horror and we wanted to keep it as realistic as possible. There were a lot of elements that were, themselves, kind of subtle. It wasn't hundreds of years later. It wasn't a full overgrowth of the city or completely collapsed yet. It was three years later. It needed to be Manhattan, very real. The people themselves, infected, we didn't want to go too far even with them. Then they just became too fantastic and it wasn't scary.
IESB: Were you always planning to do the dogs and the rats CGI?
Berney: They were always CGI. The gross-motion of both of them, we knew had to be CGI. The dogs would be chasing and jumping on Neville. They were always planned to be CG.
IESB: What about the helicopters?
Berney: There was a mixture. For the most part, the helicopters were CG. The Apache flies in and that's real. The orange one, the dolphin, that was real here and there. But that whole evacuation scene -- just to get the feeling of a mass exodus from Manhattan -- we had many helicopters flying back and forth. Most of the boats, and to do that you have to basically replace the water with reflections and whatnot. Throughout that whole sequence, you have a lot of digital clouds that we added and, of course, had to edit out all the traffic on the FDR and replace that with a traffic jam.
IESB: Sony Imageworks is going to be working on Justice League. Is that something you're going to be involved with?
Berney: No, I'm not on that, actually. I'm currently working on, with Jim Rygiel. He and are working on "Eagle Eye" and then he's going to be doing Narnia 3, "The Dawn Treader". There's nothing official on this but I'm hoping to do "Dawn Treader".
IESB: That's my favorite of the books.
Berney: That's everybody's favorite of the books! It's going to be pretty cool. I did the first one. I didn't do the second one since I was doing this, but there's a chance -- that's what I'm kind of angling to do is part three.
IESB: Outside of that, do you have a dream project that you'd like to someday work on?
Berney: That's funny, I don't anymore. Years ago, actually, Narnia was it. I always thought that was the next Lord of the Rings type of thing so I was really happy to be able to get onto that. I always wanted to do digital humans at some point so I was actually glad to get a chance to do that. I'm glad they didn't have speaking roles just because of the short time-frame. The added animation of a speaking part would have probably pushed us to our boundary at the time.
I Am Legend opens this Friday, December 14th.
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