Buffing up on X-Men and Nutty Professor 2

It’s a heady time for C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures. The Toronto-based company’s visual effects work will soon appear on screens across North America in two of the summer’s most highly anticipated blockbusters – X-Men and Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.

Advance information on X-Men (opening July 14) is as tightly guarded as bullion in that Kentucky depository, but c.o.r.e. acknowledges being one of half a dozen effects shops that contributed to the motion picture debut of the Marvel superheroes.

c.o.r.e. president Bob Munroe is reticent as to exactly what his six-year-old company is doing on the film, but offers, ‘We’re doing a few map-room sequences, but beyond that, I really can’t tell you too much.’

An educated guess would be that New York City serves as the battleground for the film’s climactic confrontation between the X-Men and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and the 3D map might be used to illustrate the latter’s villainous designs on Manhattan.

Munroe is more forthright about c.o.r.e.’s work on Nutty Professor 2 (opening July 28), the sequel to Eddie Murphy’s hugely popular comedy-fantasy.

‘We’re doing a sequence where Sherman Klump [Murphy] has come up with what he thinks is a youth formula, but something goes awry and a normal-size hamster is fed the formula and turns into a giant, terrorizing rodent that wreaks havoc at a press conference,’ he says.

Although movies with such eye-popping digital creations are c.o.r.e.’s biggest revenue-generators, Munroe insists 80% of the shop’s work is actually on films where audiences are not even supposed to be aware of the effects work.

‘The trend is to use our skills and technologies [for] everything from crowd duplication to stunt people to vehicles to changing or modifying environments,’ he explains.

Munroe points to a couple of examples of recent c.o.r.e. projects in this realistic mode: Finding Forrester, in which Sean Connery plays a reclusive author who mentors an athletic African-American student; and The Caveman’s Valentine, starring Samuel L. Jackson as a schizophrenic homeless man who believes he knows a murderer’s identity.

‘You wouldn’t think of them as ‘effects films’ at all,’ he insists.

The Natali association

In the more spectacular genre of science fiction, c.o.r.e. is currently participating in tests for Splice, the proposed follow-up film from Toronto writer/director Vincenzo Natali, whose debut feature, Cube, was a major hit in Europe. Cube, produced through the Canadian Film Centre’s Feature Film Project, tells the surreal story of a group of strangers who find themselves inexplicably trapped in a room which is part of a massive, danger-filled cube floating through space.

A major factor in Cube’s success was the ambitious visual style the filmmakers achieved on a low budget, thanks to c.o.r.e. providing all the digital effects work for free.

‘We built the exterior of the cube [in the computer], plus we did a number of shots of the cube’s movement through space and a number of the booby traps,’ Munroe explains. ‘Vincenzo is appreciative of what we did, and we’re appreciative that we were involved in that film. It’s been a phenomenal success and I think has launched the career of somebody who’s going to be in the long run a fabulous Canadian director.’

The goal of c.o.r.e.’s capabilities test on Splice is to convince potential producers Robert Lantos of Serendipity Point Films and Bill House and others at Alliance Atlantis Motion Picture Production that a credible sci-fi creature – the film’s central character – can be built digitally.

‘We’re showing them how it’s going to move, what it’s going to do, and all that kind of stuff,’ Munroe says. ‘We’ll be done soon and hopefully get a full green light for the movie. It’s going ahead very well.’

Apple Final Cut Pro

c.o.r.e. also recently collaborated with Natali on a promotional campaign for the Sci Fi Channel in the u.s. On that project, as on Finding Forrester and The Caveman’s Valentine, Munroe, as on-set visual effects supervisor, used Apple Final Cut Pro software in an innovative way.

‘I took my PowerBook on set, grabbed the video feed off the film camera, recorded everything we were shooting – it was effects-oriented – and in every case did a quick, down-and-dirty version of the effect [with Final Cut Pro] right on set to show the director,’ he says.

This exercise has been especially useful for blue- and green-screen shooting. For example, a shot in the Sci Fi Channel promos required five separate plates to match despite the absence of a motion-control system. Munroe took the five plates from the video feed and did some quick compositing to demonstrate that everything lined up perfectly, leaving the filmmakers confident as they left the set.

A sequence in The Caveman’s Valentine called for the addition of cg moths, which Munroe had previously animated and rendered and which he brought to set stored in his PowerBook’s hard drive.

‘Even though we hadn’t had the background plates shot yet, we knew the moths were going to be basically moving along with the camera, so there was no specific action other than the camera’s in the middle of this flight path,’ he recalls. ‘And then after we shot the background plates, as we were there, we composited those moths on top to see what the effect was going to look like.’

Munroe also found uses for Final Cut Pro beyond the pre-visualization of effects. Being on set all the time but not always busy supervising effects sequences, he would grab every shot from the video-tap footage and edit entire sequences for his own amusement. The results turned out to be very beneficial.

‘Some of the directors saw that and thought it was absolutely fantastic,’ he says. ‘Vincenzo went nuts – ‘I could no longer make a movie without this stuff.’ And continuity supervisors just loved it.’

Munroe notes how the software allows him to quickly respond to directors’ spontaneous requests. One shot in the promos had actor David Hewlett riding an elevator and staring at the numbers counting down, with the idea that in the final shot the numbers’ reflection would appear on his glasses. Natali skeptically asked Munroe if he could perform a quick rough version of the effect.

‘And five minutes later he walked back and I had the numbers reflecting in David’s glasses,’ he says. ‘Final Cut Pro was able to do it.’

As Final Cut Pro is a recent acquisition for c.o.r.e., Munroe has yet to put the software through its paces as a broadcast-quality visual effects system. c.o.r.e.’s studio is equipped with all Silicon Graphics hardware, and the software they currently use includes Houdini from Side Effects and Maya from Alias|Wavefront for 3D work, as well as Discreet products, Avid Media Illusion, and Alias|Wavefront’s Fusion for 2D.

HD and digital projection

So which technological developments is Munroe paying the most attention to?

‘The thing that’s really piqued my interest is seeing footage shot at 24p high definition, specifically, but certainly not limited to, what George Lucas is doing with the next two Star Wars movies,’ he says.

Although Munroe reports that hd has had no effect on c.o.r.e.’s business so far, he anticipates the impact will ultimately be ‘huge.’

‘We have a number of projects of our own in development, [including] one with a major Canadian broadcaster which is all live-action, and I’m fairly convinced that 24p is the way we’re going to go,’ he says. ‘If 24p can either replicate that seemingly tactile feeling [of film], or come up with a look that is so superior that you forget it doesn’t have grain, I won’t miss film as much.’

Munroe is excited by the prospect of hd origination, because in dispensing with film stock, developing, and prints, the film industry will save millions of dollars which it can reinvest in star talent, further script development, and better production design. Visual effects houses such as c.o.r.e. would benefit by a quicker workflow.

‘The place that’s the bottleneck right now is going from film to digital,’ he explains. ‘We have to take [footage] to a film scanner, it has to be scanned and turned into digital format, then that has to be brought on digital linear tapes to the office, and we download those onto the hard drive. The process of going to hd at any resolution will be made simpler, and there’s really no other equipment to buy other than maybe a tape deck that plays those tapes.’

He adds that the inevitable arrival of digital projection means effects houses will no longer have to output their shots to film.

‘It’s $1.50 to $2 a frame to output to film, and when you look at a movie like Nutty Professor 2 that has 250 effects shots and you’re outputting each one on film three or four times for temp screenings and what have you, there’s a big cost-savings.’

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