Luma Pictures Creates Invisible Effects Robert Benton's "The Human Stain"

Boutique VFX House Creates Innovative and Invisible Visuals for Film Starring Kidman and Hopkins

December 3rd, 2003

LOS ANGELES - Luma Pictures recently completed nearly 100 visual effects shots for The Human Stain the upcoming Lakeshore Entertainment release starring Academy Award-winners Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins-and the company will be delighted if no one notices. The boutique visual effects firm primarily produced what it calls "invisible" effects for the film, visuals that recreate realistic production elements with such accuracy that they are virtually impossible to distinguish as digital fabrications.

Among other things, Luma's 3D matte paintings enabled the producers of The Human Stain to change existing scenes, and add new scenes to the film more than a year after the production had wrapped-providing results that no one thought possible. Additionally, by accomplishing the painstaking work on home-grown desktop technology and in the context of a low overhead boutique operation, Luma enabled the filmmakers to obtain the visuals they needed within the context of a fixed budget.

The Human Stain is in fact exactly the type of "non-effects" film whose visual effects needs Luma aimed to serve when it was founded last year. "Virtually every Hollywood film employs some degree of digital effects, but films that aren't oriented around big visuals, especially those from small to mid-sized studios, often lack substantial budgets for effects production," explained co-founder and visual effects supervisor Payam Shohadai. "Our company offers such films a solution, a way to accomplish all of their effects needs cost-effectively and without sacrificing quality."

"Payam and his crew came through with visual effects for The Human Stain that we never thought would be possible," added Christopher Tellefsen, A.C.E., the film's editor. "Every challenge was met with a keen eye to solving the problem in the most efficient and creatively satisfying manner imaginable. We were constantly surprised by the results. I can't recommend the quality of their work enough. In addition to the craftsmanship and sensitivity of the work, Payam's unwavering patience and tenacity puts Luma Pictures in a league of its own. I can't imagine doing another film without them."

Luma's most impressive achievement on The Human Stain involves several scenes that weren't even in the movie's script. During post production-more than a year after principal photography was concluded-it was decided that a couple more scenes needed to be added to the film to further tell the story. While the setting for the new scenes already existed in the film as practical locations, the director and his producers concluded that time constraints and continuity considerations made it impractical to return to the site, which was in Canada, to shoot the new scenes. Instead, Benton filmed the two actors against green screen with Shohadai supervising the shoot. Luma later used the 11 shots to composite Kidman and Hopkins into a three dimensional virtual sets that replicated the practical locations.

"We were fortunate to find the slimmest of windows when both actors would be available at the same time. However, because this window was identified at the 11th hour, there was insufficient time to construct practical sets," recalled James McQuaide, post production supervisor on The Human Stain. "Shooting the actors against green screen and building CG sets in post not only made the shoot possible, it also gave the director and DP the ability to design any shot they desired and, in the final analysis, saved the production at least half of what would have otherwise been spent if the sets had been constructed on a stage. And, the most amazing thing about it was it that the sets Luma built in CG are absolutely life-like - there's another scene that takes place on a porch and I defy anyone to identify which one is real and which is CG."

Luma Pictures feels the technique has wide application in filmmaking providing directors with a practical, cost effective means for adding narrative scenes in post production. "Directors often find during the editing process that there are scenes they would like to add or re-shoot, but time and budget usually don't allow for it," observed Luma Pictures co-founder Jonathan Betuel. "Now, there is a viable solution. This technique opens new doors."

Luma's only references for creating the virtual sets were the few other scenes where they appeared in the film. Although those were mostly brief glimpses, Luma's team of visual effects artists built a recreation that was visually and proportionally accurate and precise in its details to the knots in the wallboards. "For example, in a particular shot looking over Anthony Hopkins' shoulder, we had noticed a certain prop in the corner of the room. Since our CG shot was to start tight on the actors and pull out to a wide view of the virtual scene, we knew that we'd have to include that object to ensure continuity," Shohadai explained. "From clues like that we created a virtual reality indistinguishable by the naked eye from the real thing."

Luma's 3D environments included both interior and exterior views of the porch and the kitchen, as well as large amounts of furnishings. "There was little room for imperfection," explained Justin Johnson, lead artist on these shots. "The porch and kitchen scenes together amounted to a few minutes of brightly lit 3D sets with moving cameras. By the time we were done we had over 100 elements that needed to be seamlessly integrated into and around the lead actors without the audience noticing any effects work whatsoever."

The only real life elements in the lengthy shots are the two actors and their reflections in the set's virtual windows. Shohadai captured the latter with inserted glass, backed by black felt into the appropriate positions in the green screen set where the actors were shot.

The longest shot in Luma's effects package was a 75-second (1800 frame) sequence set in the dining car of a moving train. The scene was shot against green screen... Luma's team was assigned the task of creating a night time countryside environment in 3D, and color correcting the original footage to match the night time lighting. At one point, the train passes through a tunnel and the view out the window turns black except for the occasional interactive lighting effects meant to suggest lighting fixtures attached to the tunnel wall.

Another series of shots involves a truck journeying along a snow swept road. In this case, the production footage was shot on strips of asphalt roadways that had been newly plowed. Luma artists replaced the real roadways with digital matte paintings depicting the roads with tire track laden snow and integrated it with the adjoining landscape.

In each case, the point of the effects work is not so much to make the audience's collective jaw drop, but rather to extend the filmmaker's narrative tools and ability to control the environment. "It is not unusual to put actors into an 'unreal' scene," Betuel said, "but it is a much more challenging task to place people into a scene that an audience must accept as everyday reality."

"On the face of it, a serious drama like The Human Stain is not the kind of picture that you would expect to have benefited from nearly 100 VFX shots. However, in the last couple years, as the quality of work has increased significantly and the price of this work become very reasonable, VFX are no longer the sole domain of sci-fi and fantasy films but rather simply another tool in every film-makers toolbox," concluded McQuaide. "With Human Stain, we did everything from comp backgrounds (some practical, many CG) into traveling shots to adding snow to a roadway (when to have done so practically would have made a stunt too dangerous to execute) to adding a rim-light to an actor's head so that his side more closely matched the reverse. The unfortunate thing for Luma is that they did such an expert job that these VFX shots will go unnoticed by most movie-goers. However, by the same token, I can't think of a greater compliment than if they do."

The Human Stain