With the Bake off for the Oscar Nominations this Thursday in LA, we speak to Iloura’s Peter Webb about the film Australia. One of seven films in the running for the Oscar’s three nominations for best visual effects. Peter was part of the team at iloura that handled much of the end of the film, including much of the bombing of Darwin.
Australia’s team was led by experienced visual effects supervisor Chris Godfrey, (ex-Animal Logic co-founder) and coupled with additional vfx supervision from Jamie Price (Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers, Time Machine, Enemy of the State). The team brought together a huge collection of vfx houses to deliver over a 1450 shots for the period drama Australia. Chris Godfrey supervised the shoot which was shot in the far north of Australia, with a small town in Queensland called Bowen, doubling for Darwin circa 1930s/1940s. The film also shot extensively at Fox studios in Sydney, intercutting the epic 100% live action plates from the far north remote shoot with the studio work often in the same scenes. The film’s climax occurs with the bombing of Darwin, – which proved to be Australia’s Pearl Harbor. Ironically not only was Darwin bombed by some of the same Japanese forces that attacked Pearl Harbor, but also the film Australia used footage of the ‘Japanese’ Aircraft shot for the film Tora! Tora! Tora! , directed by Richard Fleischer in 1970.
The overall approach taken by director Baz Luhrmann for the film Australia was nicknamed “Lean and Lucas,” referring to the technique of mixing the visual effects blue screen specialty with the epic nature of a David Lean.
Speaking in Time Out magazine Luhrmann is quoted as saying:
“On one hand I’d go out and do what people don’t do anymore and shoot with 200 people in the desert – that was the David Lean part. Then there was the George Lucas part – the studio special effects. Those came about largely because if you shoot in the desert at night it just shows up as black whereas in real life, if you’re there, it’s like Disneyworld and you’re Peter Pan with a silvery and surreal light that’s magic. So instead of photographing the truth and not conveying the emotion of being there, we’ve given people not what it is, but what it feels like to be there. The whole world of Australia is a heightened reality.”
Crossing the worlds of Indiana Jones and Star Wars with the stunning landscapes of Passage to India, Dr Zhivago, Lawarenece of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai fell to a range of primarily Australian visual effects houses, led by Animal Logic in Sydney and Iloura in Melbourne.
This week we speak to visual effects designer and compositing lead Peter Webb about Iloura’s exceptional work. Peter Webb is very well-known in the local film community for his distingished career which includes Luhrmann’s 1996 break out hit Romeo Juliet – still thought by many to be Luhrmann’s most powerful film of the now famous Red Curtain Trilogy.
In this week’s podcast Peter discusses the workflow and process the team used to show the bombed out Darwin Harbour and the epic visual landscape of Australia.
Bombed Darwin wharf shot reveal
As discussed in the podcast:
Below are frames from the shot Peter discusses in the latter half of the podcast. The shot is a giant crane up from a scene where the viewer – like Nicole Kidman’s character – can see little through the smoke and mess of a bombed Darwin Harbour, rising to reveal the digital ocean, digital pier and ship wrecks. The original plate photography was shot in Queensland’s Bowen – which was the basis for the period Darwin. The modern day version bears little comparison to the Darwin of the film both for dramatic reasons and due to the fact that the city was rebuilt after being mainly destroyed in 1974 as a result of Cyclone Tracy.
As one can hear in the podcast the plate photography provided ” a little bit of blue screen and a lot of roto” according to Peter Webb, The wharf at Bowen was much smaller than what was needed, so the wharf had to be digitally replaced, as well as the water. The team did complex simulations to get accurate and believable smoke and dust, the FumeFX plugin was used widely.
PART 1: Start of the Shot
PART 2: Midway through the crane shot
PART 3: End frame
Additional examples of shots from Iloura
The war planes shown in Australia are based on the planes from film Tora! Tora! Tora! As original B roll from the Fox classic film was used in the film Australia, the Zeros needed to be modeled to match the planes from that film. At the time of the original, it was not possible to use historically accurate planes that the Japanese had used to bomb Pearl Harbor. At the time of making Tora! Tora! Tora! real Zeros were not available and modified American planes were used.
The ending of Australia was reworked, and this added to the complexity of finishing the film. Here you can see the amount of smoke and fire that needed to be added to almost all the shots. This is a continuous 360 degree track around the character of King George.
The film was shot on 35mm, with Animal Logic and Iloura as the two biggest single vendors. Other vendors included Rising Sun Pictures, FuelFX, PhotonVfx, Framestore, Evil Eye Pictures, Post Modern, Complete Post, Hydraulx/Lola and several others including a “Home Bake” in house vfx team.
Note:
One member of Peter Webb’s Iloura compositing team was fxphd.com’s own Tahl Niran.