Doug Liman Blog: Previsualizing a VFX Moon Rover Chase

Share on Facebook posted 10-04-09 by Doug Liman

So we’ve also started some storyboarding and previsualization — it’s called “Pre-viz” — on my still-nameless Moon movie. It’s part of the process of figuring out whether to even make the movie. In the case of Jumper, the producers pre-vized an action sequence, and when they sent me the script they sent me the pre-viz and part of what sucked me into the movie was how cool some of the stuff looked.

When you’re talking about a film as visually complex as Moon will be, you will ultimately have to pre-viz every shot on the Moon because, as you know, it’s 1/6th gravity on the lunar surface, so that every person who steps on its surface instantly possesses what amounts to superpowers. You can leap huge distances, you can lift massive objects, and you can lift a car up over your head and throw it. An actor can’t lift something that heavy for real, and an actor can’t leap that far for real, so we have to use visual effects to create that action. The animated character in the previsualized shot can do anything you want it to do. When you’re happy with the shot, or the edited sequence, you know what you need to make it work. You’ll then go shoot the elements you need for that shot.

For example, there may be a scene with three people and a Moon rover. You could shoot all three people separately and the rover separately, and then in the pre-viz you can separate each element out and decide that you need person one to do some particular kind of movement, so he might need to be strung on wires, or be bouncing on a trampoline. Or maybe he’s stationary and the camera’s moving. Until you play with this creatively, you don’t know what’s going to work.

For example, one shot I might get by sending a crew to the desert to shoot it for real, in slow motion. I can’t make any two shots the same. I’m going to have to mix techniques, because if I shoot the whole movie one way, people will eventually start to see the effects. Sort of like a magician: If the audience keeps seeing a particular magic trick over and over and over again, eventually they’re going to figure out how you’re doing it. So you do have to keep changing it up, like a magician changing his tricks.

This whole process has started and involves two elements: working with storyboard artists to start something with raw concepts of shots and blocking, and working with a pre-viz team that basically makes animated movies. We’re doing that for a week or so, and then these materials will be used to help with the visual conversations and in the budgeting conversations.

This image is an example of a 3-D imaging program that’ll allow me to place the cameras at different angles in our Moon environment. It’s the first step toward animating a full action sequence. Click here for larger image.