Bigger than Ben Hur

Montreal-based Oblique FX completed 140 visual effects shots for the two-part miniseries Ben Hur, featuring a naval sea battle, matte paintings of Jerusalem and other set extensions. We talk to Oblique visual effects supervisor Pierre-Simon Lebrun-Chaput about the work.

10Jun/ben/Raft_before
Green screen Photography
10Jun/ben/Raft_after
Final shot

fxg: Can you give me a quick history of Oblique FX and how you become involved with Ben Hur?

Lebrun-Chaput: Oblique is basically the former film division of Buzz Image Group. For the past two years, we’ve done mostly TV series and some movies. We just moved locations so we’re still unpacking the boxes and sorting out the network. Now we’re about 25 people. We had worked closely with a Montreal production company called Muse Entertainment and we do a lot of projects with them and the overall visual effects supervisor on Ben Hur, Mario Rachiele.

fxg: In terms of the visual effects for Ben Hur, what was the general look and feel that the production wanted to follow?

Lebrun-Chaput: In the early stages, we were involved with a historian on the project to make sure that the backgrounds and props used were as accurate as possible. The main reference was the original 1959 movie, but the director, Steve Shill, wanted to take a different direction and make it more personal and character-based. Most of the shooting was done in Morocco, with some sets and then post-production done here. We did a lot of concepts of Jerusalem and the naval battle sequence involving the Romans and pirates.

10Jun/ben/CGship_before
CG ships
10Jun/ben/CGship_after
Final shot

fxg: How did you plan the naval shots?

Lebrun-Chaput: The choreography of the naval battle sequence was quite complex to set up, so we sat down with the director and with little paper boats and he acted out the whole sequence, which we filmed. We then created about 60 animatics shots, just to establish the camera movement, boat placement and general actions. Then we gave that to the editor and then there was some back and forth to tweak the animatics. That helped to resolve a lot of problems before we even got to creating our shots.

fxg: How did you end up achieving the sequence?

Lebrun-Chaput: The wide shots were fully CG. On set they built the interior of the main galley of the ships. Most of the shots are of the characters inside the boat. They also built a very small section of the back of the boat where the Commander is. The shots on the deck were filmed against greescreen so we added the ocean and a matte painted background of the night sky. For wide shots, we had to manage four boats with about 20 people on each boat and a CG sea which was 24 kilometres long. We had an area in the middle of the sea that we could move our boats around in, but then we had to move our horizon line. After that there was CG fire, smoke and a matte painted sky. But because we’d done a lot of planning, we knew what we had to build. We broke it down into different assets to something that was more manageable. Mostly we used Autodesk Softimage for the digital assets and water, with Photoshop for the matte paintings and compositing in Nuke.

fxg: How was the water accomplished?

Lebrun-Chaput: We came up with a hybrid technique in which we used some 3D simulation for everything that is near the camera, then in the distance there’s a transition to an ocean that is driven by textures. We could create a very large ocean that way. The close up ocean is very high in geometry. We could move the camera around and get top shots, side shots, whatever we needed. We used ICE in Softimage, a simulation tool which is node-based so you can program complex simulations with very simple tools. The artists could easily tweak the parameters and get something out of it. It’s a bit like a toolbox that lets you build your results. Then we composited everything in Nuke. Some shots had more than 40 layers of the boats burning down in the sea, people in the sea, smoke, fire. The only things not CG were some practical smoke elements to help enhance the comp.

10Jun/ben/Cruc_before
Plate Photography
10Jun/ben/Cruc_after
Final shot

fxg: Can you talk about the Jerusalem city shots and set extensions?

Lebrun-Chaput: It was a fairly traditional matte painting workflow for those shots, as these had a more artistic approach. We had to do a lot of research to try to fine out what kinds of buildings were actually there. In the end, we probably made the city about ten times bigger than it would have been just to make it more dramatic. It’s a great to have it in full sunlight because you get so much contrast. It’s beautiful but at the same time the shadows are harder to work with.

10Jun/ben/J_01_before
Plate Photography
10Jun/ben/J_01_after
Final shot

fxg: Was there one particular shot that stood out?

Lebrun-Chaput: One daytime establishing shot involves the guards entering the city via the main gates. Then the camera is panning above a roof and revealing the whole city. The shot was broken down into three parts – the beginning is live action with the guards entering the city, then the rooftop is a CG rooftop that we matched with the live action set. We had to track the camera movement. We did a fair few animatics because the length of the shot kept changing. We had to track the shot and animate the camera, with a slight CG transition over the roofs. Then the whole city is CG. There were maybe 20 or 30 houses in the foreground that were all CG and then we had a matte painting projected onto the CG houses which helped with perspective shift. Then the background matte painting was done in 2D.

There’s a similar nighttime shot where we basically did a day-for-night on our matte painting. We also did some establishing shots for the chariot race sequence, which involved some crowd duplication, done mostly inside Nuke. It involved a lot of rotoscoping to isolate characters which were then mapped onto grids in the 3D environment of Nuke. It was a lot of work but those three shots helped sell the sequence because they give some scale to the race sequence.