They were 18 people, trapped against the odds, with little or no hope of reinforcement. For five months they laboured, with minimal resources, and that’s just the visual effects team! FXG caught up with Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Leven about the new Starship Troopers 2.
Starship Troopers 2 (ST2) was commissioned as a direct to DVD movie (a film version was produced for some markets and special screenings).
Leven was charged with bringing home 120 shots using an 18-man visual effects crew made up of five technical directors (TDs), six compositors and seven animators, of which six were “directly out of school”. To crew up for the feature, Leven scoured local film schools and took onboard a number of keen but inexperienced apprentices. Shot production at Tippett Studio lasted from June to early December, 2003. Many of the ex-students were paid close to California minimum wage, and to ensure the production didn’t fall foul of strict US Labour laws Tippett was forced to put a ban on any of the VFX crew working overtime.
One of two new bugs designed for the new movie.
Leven balanced this restriction by enlisting support from many other talented personnel working inside Tippett on other high-budget projects that were running simultaneously. Experienced artists working on films such as Matrix Revolutions, Hellboy and The Stepford Wives were keen to lend a hand with Tippetts sequel to the well-respected original, and volunteered help in their spare time.
The decision to shoot the film in high definition (HD) was a simple choice given the budget restrictions. The shoot would only last 26 days in comparison to the first films 122 days (Contrast this with Peter Jackson who spent eight months just shooting pick-ups for Return of the King!). Starship Troopers 2 was shot on two Sony HD F900 HDCAMs, recording all the material 16:9 1920×1080.To gain the level of separation that Tippett wanted, all the shots had large amounts of smoke pumped into the set. As Sony Pictures was bankrolling the film, it asked for Sony cameras to be used, although this resulted in some unforeseen expenses, after initial screen tests it became apparent that the Sony HD HyperHAD CCD was introducing a Moire effect on the detail of the Troopers uniforms, which had to be replaced. The Panasonic Varicam HD was used for some effects photography (miniatures, etc) in part due to its variable frame rate.
Only a small amount of miniatures could be afforded, and these were shot in two weeks with motion control that was “less than a perfect motion control system” jokes Leven.
The production shot only 2 days exterior and on location and did the rest in the dark – at night on stage at Manhattan Beach, “since you can hide things at night. This is a simple strategy that Leven recommends for budget filmmakers everywhere. You can hide things at night, said Leven, and if in doubt add smoke – if still in doubt, add dust!”
Despite the tight budget, Leven vastly enjoyed his time working on Starship Troopers 2. “I got to collaborate with film makers, with editors and really contribute” he points out. While films visual effects are becoming more corporate and more serious, Leven found ST2 to be a hands on, and “hugely exciting project”.
MatchMoving of the HD plates.
The VFX team embraced a positive attitude to solving their daily dilemmas over how to achieve seemingly unachievable FX shots.
In some cases it was a simple answer that solved their problems.
When faced with the challenge of generating a massive dust storm, – and no chance of devoting 3D resources to the problem involving simulation and fluid dynamics – Leven’s team reverted to analogue means. This involved rolls of cotton wool that were filmed with their own camera and cleverly composited into a giant storm front.
“All effects films come together in the composite, its the magic of the movies, said Leven. It is a great shame films schools don’t teach compositing as such – it’s just so important”.
The films pipeline was planned around using models of the bugs from the original Starship Troopers. But a problem arose from the fact that Softimage had been used as the main 3D application on the first film and the team now intended to use Maya. Unfortunately the Cardinal patches used for modelling in Softimage meant the textures no longer aligned in Maya.
Leven came up with an ingenious solution that allowed for the “stand-in” Maya geometry to be swapped for the original Cardinal patches inside Renderman. This occurred at actual render time and meant all the original textures could be used.
Rendered images were then composited in Shake.
The Starship Troopers 2 VFX pipeline was made to match Tippett studios normal feature film pipeline. So even though the material was all shot in HD 8-bit linear, everything was converted to 16-bit log file format. Tippett’s in-house format is known as “fpe” for floating point exponent type.
One technology that has improved production efficiency since the original Starship Troopers is the introduction of Level of Detail (LOD) within Renderman. In the original film every small model had to be fully textured, no matter where it was placed in relation to the camera. With thousands of bugs in a single frame this made a huge difference to the render times, (combined with faster Linux boxes) a typical mass bug shot was reduced from about 8 hours to 40 minutes per frame.
The film was storyboarded in detail by Phil Tippett himself, but there was a constant demand to edit pages from the script to contain the budget. Ironically, this resulted in one of Leven’s proudest moments, which came when Tippett discovered that a key shot of the films hero stepping into the scene for the epic final confrontation simply hadn’t been covered by principle photography.Tippett asked Leven and his team to completely make the shot, and in the final scene the character for a brief moment is completely CGI – as is the whole shot. “It was great being asked to do that, said Leven. That would never happen like that on a big film, we got to directly contribute and design and make a whole shot”
One interesting technique used by Levin was a particle burn. A Bug needed to burn – but the production had limited resources so two versions of the bug were made. A normal bug and a burnt bug. A particle system was then created that allowed an animator to draw on some seed particles. These then bubbled and animated up – producing a 3D wipe matte that could be used to wipe between the 100% normal bug and the burnt bug. The particles that were drawn on locked to the geo UV and then grew from there, given the animators a large degree of control balanced with a more natural chaotic feeling.
FOOTNOTES
The cast of Starship Troopers 2 includes actress Brenda Strong, whose character actually died in the first film. On the DVD commentary track. the filmmakers explain they could not come up with a plausible explanation for her miraculous return to life in the sequel and instead just gave her another character to play.