Some of the stand-out shots in Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet occur in the time bending fight sequence effects, seen as the character Kato utilizes his martial arts skills to dispatch the bad guys. We take an in-depth look at how these shots were created by CIS Hollywood.
Bending time
In the film’s fight scenes, Kato is able to size up the threats of his assailants and then act on each of those threats with absolute precision, seemingly by slowing down time. On screen, this time bending was represented by Kato moving in fast speed while his attackers are in slow-motion, or sometimes the reverse. The film’s overall visual effects supervisor, Jamie Dixon, says the concept for the fight scenes came straight from director Michel Gondry.
“Michel had done a really awesome little piece of test footage before I came on the movie,” says Dixon. “He claimed that this had got him the movie, actually. It was a really cool little scene shot with a Phantom camera against black of a couple of guys having a fight with chairs and flipping et cetera. Then he’d gone in and messed with the speed of the characters, and I think he used a Flame for that. So one of the guys would be going at normal speed and the other guy would be going in slow motion. And then they would switch roles, and the guy who was going normal would suddenly be going slow, with the other guy moving through at a blurred speed. It really had this interesting mind-bending and arresting look to it.”
For the film, the fight sequences were orchestrated as stunts on locations without the use of any bluescreen or motion control. “We shot with the Phantom camera,” says Dixon. “Some of the scenes we shot at 300 frames per second and some at 150 frames. It turns out that on the very wide scenes it was completely fast enough to be going 150 frames per second. On some of the close-ups, say where someone would be breaking a bottle over someone’s head, then we would go 300 fps on that.”
A rough editorial compilation of the footage was then turned over to CIS Hollywood. Visual effects supervisor Greg Oehler took on many of the shots himself, quickly settling on a purely 2D approach using Flame, both for its fast turnaround times and ease of review. “From my point of view, Michel’s idea was all about a transference of energy,” says Oehler. “Kato would be moving at one speed very fast, hitting a villain going much slower, kind of transferring that energy to the villain. So you’d have this hand-off of a nasty punch and then the villain re-coiling and then arcing back into slow motion while Kato resumes his normal speed. There was kind of a sine wave of motion.”
Each of the characters in the scene was articulately rotoscoped, with clean plates made where passes had not been shot. “We had to reconstruct environments and people and all the action as fully as possible,” notes Oehler. “Once you had that you could start with working with placing the characters. They all had to maintain a continuity of positioning and general choreography while going in and out of various speeds.”
CIS took advantage of the fact that the photography had been overcranked, giving them a lot of information and frames to work with to speed the action up and slow them down. “Because it was shot on the Phantom,” says Oehler, “we had a different format and size (1712×1432) from normal, so they were kind of like 1K images. But that helped actually because it meant we didn’t have to push around a huge amount of data.”
Oehler made use of The Foundry’s Furnace plug-in for Flame to help align the different passes of cars in the scene and other environments, as well as tracking, deform and distort tools to massage the elements and for motion blur. The timewarping tool was used to gain curves, which were then applied in The Foundry’s Kronos for finer results.
In one shot, the camera makes a near 180 degree arc around the brawling characters, then arcs back in the opposite direction. “This was completely concocted after the scene had been shot and was essentially taking the entire sequence and turning it into one shot,” reveals Oehler. “For that we had to do a lot of patch tracking, morphing, warping and clean-up on the characters and we had to try and be a little clever to integrate people into positions they shouldn’t be in. All this stuff was really taken to the edge of being broken before you could move on with the shot.”
The telescoping effect
Another significant aspect of the Kato shots was a telescoping effect on objects in the scene as the character is about to make a dramatic fight move. “In the first fight scene, Kato sizes up the attackers and then jumps on the car which then telescopes out towards the camera,” explains Oehler. “They shot this with two cars next to each other. The idea was that the cars would shoot out behind him and you would have the background going off into the extreme distance. Through editorial, they reversed that and he jumps on the car and it jumps out towards the camera.”
To achieve the shot, CIS re-built several cars and patched them in, replacing almost the entire scene with the car, a background matte painting and even part of Kato himself. “He only takes two steps in the original footage and here he’s running 10 or 12 steps,” says Oehler. “I had to turn him into a consistent loop. Then I stacked up all these cars on top of each other, so as soon as he hits the first car they all telescope out towards us. Again, none of this stuff was anything fancy effects-wise but I thought it was really successful because you’re somewhere between reality and non-reality.”
Kato-vision
Kato also demonstrates an innate sense of the world around him during the fight sequences when he is able to slow down time and identify his assailants and their weapons in precise detail. “Kato’s character doesn’t have any magic superpowers but he’s just slightly more perceptive than the rest of us,” says Jamie Dixon. “He can look at a moment and figure out what’s going to happen and he knows exactly how to target his response to that, specifically with that receptive power of his.”
That power was represented by a push-in to Kato’s eye and then a pan around to the other characters with red outlines appearing on knives, bottles and other objects before Kato pounces. Again, Flame was the tool of choice for these shots, which were dubbed ‘Kato-vision’.
“I started by building a little retina for Kato’s eye,” says Oehler, “so when you turn around you have a little 3D eyeball moving and we have these red outlines that come in past camera and lock onto the objects of his intention. Those were just simple roto’d objects split apart flying in from camera and locking onto a gun or tyre iron or other weaponry, but very quick and precise. It’s as if he’s coming outside of himself.” The eyeball was a group of painted textures mapped onto a sphere with some particles coming up the veins of the eye. “That was just added over the scene with some holdouts for the darker areas because we didn’t want to obstruct the main pupil area,” notes Oehler.
Not to be outdone, Britt Reid later acquires Kato-vision and advanced martial arts and time bending skills for the film’s climatic fight scene. “Seth was heavily involved in that,” says Oehler. “We went back and forth between some of the stunt passes and mixed them with the real Seth. At one point he does a dive roll and we added a chair that he trips over, which was one of the only CG things that we put in. At the same time he is able to take the base of the chair and hit somebody with it.”
Significantly, CIS worked closely with Michel Gondry on all of the fight shots. “We had a few marathon sessions to knock out whole sequences,” says Oehler. “I could go and do low-res temps and use very loose garbage shapes. It was all extremely rough and tumble but Michel could see past the rough edges and just get the pacing right. By and large Michel was very involved and paid keen attention to how these things were put together. Once he was happy with the general timing, he moved on to something else.”
Overall, CIS Hollywood completed about 130 shots for The Green Hornet, which included the fight sequences and other re-timing and compositing work. The Kato shots, in particular, were also deconstructed into appropriate mattes to allow for stereo dimensionalization. “I don’t think there was anything radically new or unusual about the work, just a lot of elbow grease and a fresh way of using them,” concludes Oehler. “I felt like there was almost a visual nostalgia to the Kato effects, almost like having visual effects if you had them in the 1960s. It’s not that you can see all the detail going on, but you know you’re in a different world, which is what Michel Gondry was aiming for.”