Film forgery & vfx tricks: Now You See Me

Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me was the surprise hit of 2013’s summer releases, bringing in more than $300m globally and spawning a sequel to be directed by Leterrier. We talk to visual effects supervisor Nick Brooks about how the effects work and practical magic ‘forgery’ worked hand-in-hand.

fxg: Now You See Me seems to fit into the invisible effects category, although there’s a lot of work in the film.

Brooks: Well, there are three types of visual effects in my book. There’s forgery, there’s fantasy, then interior sights. And Now You See Me fits into the forgery aspects. It was almost 950 shots – it’s a medium to big film – and a lot of the stuff we did there should be invisible. The magic itself, the base of the visual effects in that, was to make it invisible as much as possible. There’s a philosophical structure there where if you’re doing a film about magic, you can’t make it an obvious visual effect. It has to feel like it was performed or done. And in many cases, a lot of the tricks that were done were actually just enhanced but were essentially physical acts of magic.

So a lot of what we were doing there should be invisible, but it was also almost what I call ‘wallpapering’ which is to put audiences in seats, do various things to trick you into believing that you’re in the environments. There was a lot of environment work to up the production value of the film.

Above: watch Modus FX’s reel for Now You See Me.

fxg: Where did you draw reference from for the tricks?

Brooks: David Copperfield very much influenced a lot of the tricks. As a master of televised magic, his style helped us with staging and ideas about how to show magic through a medium that didn’t involve a live performance with an audience.

fxg: One of the environments would be the arena in the Las Vegas show – can you talk about the visual effects there?

Brooks: It was a 9,000 set arena and the performers are in the center, with moving spotlights and everything. I think the maximum crowd we had in there was probably about 600 people and maybe we had another 600 inflatable dummies. We could just about handle a 30mm shot of left and right which was fairly close but we couldn’t handle the three levels of this place, plus the monitors. Rodeo FX in Montreal did a really great job of the shots.

The old standard techniques would have been motion control, multiple passes and moving the crowd around. Also there could have been CG crowds, but these can get expensive. We had about 180 shots in that sequence and we used a technique where we shot either a lot of crowds from different perspectives and projected them onto the geometry, or we shot isolated crowd members and just populated them with live action. There were some difficult shots in there, but it was a perfect example of invisible wallpapering, where we just really shot crowds with different reactions, different lighting positions and environments for the show.

And the thing that really made it possible: we turned off all the lights apart from those in the foreground. So we used a technique to composite the people which was more like double exposure. If one plate you have is black and you add something to it, it’s straight image processing math. You’re adding 0.5 to black and it stays 0.5. If you add a crowd to black, they look pretty good. So we didn’t have to do tons of greenscreens or anything like that, we could keep the natural lighting environment of the sets. And I’d say 50% of all the rock ‘n’ roll lighting that we had was live, and then we just added flares for effect. So it was a very natural, organic process to get people into the seats. Rodeo did the heavy lifting and they were excellent. Then we have another company called Savage who picked up a lot of other work.

Above: Watch Rodeo FX’s crowd duplication reel.

fxg: What about when the money is seen falling in the arena?

Brooks: We had both practical and digital money. For the big wide shots, it’s all CG notes. But we also dumped physical money – there were big air movers above the set and we dumped a lot of money on empty sets, which gave us something to match. And then a lot of other shots are with real money. Visual effects is often about waving the handkerchief in front of the viewer, so they look at the big red handkerchief and meanwhile we’re in the pocket foraging around the back of it. So it was always about mixing it up. Real: you buy it immediately. If it was all-CG, it would be – you can do a really great job in CG but it’s more fun to mix it.

Philosophically, working with magicians is really great for a VFX team because you get to see the way that magicians work which is a lot of bluff, a lot of fronts. The trick has always happened before you think it happens. That idea of when you show the big trick, it’s real, and yet for the last three minutes we’ve been doing CG. So at that moment you go, I completely believe it. The pay-off is real.

fxg: When the trick is revealed with the fake safe and the flash paper burning the cash, that effect felt more like a ‘reveal’ and almost a CSI-type recreation.

Brooks: Yes, Louis wanted the story to keep moving ahead and ahead. So physically shooting that flash paper was an impossible thing. It’s a filmmaking conceit, because the amount of heat generated by that much flash paper would be so intense – it’d be an inferno. So what we wanted to do was show some detail, and find the ticket and the card below the flash paper money in the gap, which proved what they’d done. So really we approached it from a design point of view of making an ‘atomic moment’ – a moment where you see and learn everything in a very short burst. It was quite an elaborate shot. Modus in Montreal did that shot and did a fantastic job. That is a flourish and a flair, but it’s a drum roll and we designed it to be more dynamic and like a high-detail atomic moment.

fxg: Then there’s some more supporting effects for say David Franco’s character throwing cards as weapons and escaping the police – can you talk about that?

Brooks: When Dave Franco is throwing them – well, he was taught by a magician to actually throw the cards. He was taught to fan the cards at the beginning and then throw them. We had a guy with us, David Kwong, who could basically slice up an arm with cards from twenty feet. So Dave Franco knew what to do but we beefed it up by adding some more cards. When he’s throwing, about 50 per cent of them are real and then others are choreographed to make an impact or hit somebody in the nose or slice a bit of skin to make it look a bit more dangerous. So we would amp it up.

In that sequence when he runs out of there, he cuffs a bunch of FBI guys outside and he does this choreographed move taking their cuffs. David Franco’s character is a pick-pocket. We figured out what the motion was and we put CG cuffs in his hands, which would have been impossible to choreograph that for real. If you look at the actual geometry and how long that chain would need to be, it’s nonsense. So, again, we were just waving the handkerchief and emptying the wallets.

One of my favorite tricks is that right at the beginning of the film, Jesse is pulling cards and he says name the card that you see, which is the 7 of diamonds which appears on the building behind him. Pretty much 80% of the audience will see the 7 of diamonds, and that’s what’s called a ‘straight force’. And here we did a little bit of VFX maybe 2 or 3 frames, but it’s pure. That’s the beautiful thing about magic, there’s the being the audience and going yeah, I see the 7 of diamonds – how did you do that? And then there’s the magician side which is fascinating. It’s completely fascinating.

fxg: There are perhaps some more obvious but still magical visual effects moments at the Savoy performance, when Isla Fisher is in the bubble.

Brooks: That’s the Savoy magic montage. Everything was fairly traditional there in terms of effects and Louis wanted to make something fairly magical, so in essence Louis had this idea of a magic fantasy. So we had the bubble trick with Isla, and there are people who do these kinds of tricks. We did this with a wire rig that you don’t see because we removed it. But we shot a lot of real bubbles. We would make these big soapy bubbles for reference and then Rodeo did a great job of the oily dynamics and the reflectivity and the wetness of the bubbles.

fxg: And then how did you amp up the effects even more for the traffic chases?

Brooks: That was a chase through Chinatown up the FDR to the Queensborough Bridge. A lot of the shots through China Town up to the bridge were shot in New York and we had to add ‘near-miss’ cars and chaotic traffic to that scene. For the most part it was real stunt driving, shot in February. Queensborough Bridge was very difficult to shoot on and we couldn’t flip cars on the bridge, so we shot on the bridge up to the point where the car flips. And added oncoming traffic. For the flip, we shot it on a bridge in New Orleans where we could shoot a car flipping – we created the super structure of the Queensborough over the shot bridge – so we would have shadow lighting, girders. Various other shots from perspective of main actors, Isla, Woody and Jesse and Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent – they had more CG in them – CG rolling cars, shot on greenscreen and built out environments, and others shot on New Orleans bridge and mixing them all. ILM did a lot of the heavy lifting here.

fxg: At Five Points, what were some of the projection and environment effects you had to do there?

Brooks: Modus provided crowds and helicopters and Rodeo did a lot of the projection work, building projection animation for that sequence. How we approached that was that when we shot we didn’t really have a plan as to what the projection was. We just shot aerial plates and the action. There’s a chase happening around the building. There are three or stages and it’s a now you see it, now you don’t – are they dummies? Fakes or projections? What Louis was talking about was, well, if magic is energy, then we have to have energy to show the geographical positions where they are. It’s almost like we built a central nervous system for the building that we would project onto it – which was the energy of magic.

The basic design ideas were replicated from other magic sets – some bad boy system of rock and roll lighting. When an object appears on stage, it’s already there – so we use black light a lot – projections. There was this idea – there was a huge pile of money that was on a water tower, but no one could see it because of the way it was lit. But when the projectors turn on, the three horsemen are there projected onto until the helicopter comes along and blows the money off as the dive. So it was just a nice idea, all about a dramatic escapology.

fxg: How did you approach the mirror breaking shot because that was such a big reveal-type shot – not just a straight kind of shot?

Brooks: The original idea of that was to have this view in front of you that seems perfect, until it shatters and reveals a second reality. So we just played around with the idea of reflections, and there was such a great reference from that medicine cabinet scene in Contact. We were riffing on those ideas of seeing one reality and realizing it’s not a reality. We did a number of shots in that regard, such as kaleidoscopes, watching this hammer approach and then watching the real hammer enter the frame and then realize you’re seeing the reflection. This was done by Modus.

 

Now You See Me is now available on DVD, Blu-Ray and on iTunes.