Two Shots From the Aviator
Manhattan Skyline of the Past
Recreating the 1930s for The Aviator required a fair number of matte paintings that historically represent recognizable locations—the New York City skyline, for example. Visual effects studio Digital Neural Axis (DNA) was asked to add a view of Manhattan as seen through a window of Pan Am executive Juan Trippe’s office high atop the Chrysler Building.
Considerable attention was paid to the historical accuracy of the shot of Manhattan that includes the East River and Queens in the distance. Reference pictures were found on the Internet, and DNA also shot 35mm still pictures and DV footage from the Chrysler Building. One of the video images, shot while zoomed in on details, yielded a boat element that was used directly in the matte painting.
Meanwhile, the pictures shot at the Chrysler Building were used to start building the basic comp for the shot, even though they contained modern buildings. Simultaneously, a rotoscoping team was also at work making the masks for Juan Trippe, played by Alec Baldwin. Separate masks were created for the hands, arms, neck, head, and torso. This left a clean window and beautiful set in the Art Moderne-style office designed by production designer Dante Ferretti.
Tim Sassoon of Sassoon Film Design also helped out on the project, specifically with the digital matte painting. At this point, DNA founder Darius Fisher added additional elements to the work done by matte painter Patrick Mullane. “I added birds in flight, steam rising from chimneys, enhancing the little sparkles of reflected light and shadows moving up and down Lexington Avenue,” he says. “For the final revision we were asked to make some minor changes to exposure, clean up some of the rotoscoping of Alec Baldwin, increase the speed and motion of the steam and smoke from chimney stacks, make the water on the East River move more, and add some boat traffic.”
One important aspect of the approval process was the use of the HDLink card. “We used the DeckLink HD Pro and HDLink to stay in sync in HD with each new edit of our sequence that came to us from Martin Scorsese’s editor in NYC,” Fisher says. “Being able to review our effects shots in HD in the context of the surrounding shots, and as the edit changed, really helped us to refine the shots so that they worked in the story. HDLink’s color precision and audio features enabled us to display coloraccurate HD versions of the 2K VFX shots on our 23 inch displays synchronized to ‘work in progress’ audio and story lines. This was really helpful.”
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
The crash of the XF11 surveillance plane was the first shot DNA received for The Aviator. In this scene, Howard Hughes is piloting the test flight of the XF11 when propeller failure causes him to make an emergency landing on a golf course near Beverly Hills. He never makes it to the golf course. Instead, the plane crashes into a Beverly Hills suburban neighborhood, plowing into several houses before hitting the ground.
The landing gear impact is seen from within an apartment where a woman hunches over and covers her head to protect herself from falling debris as the wheel narrowly misses her head. The room for the scene was a rigged set, and the tires and gear mechanism are both practical. This back plate was shot overcranked at 96fps. Previously shot on the same (yet undamaged) set is the actress playing the housewife, and After Effects 6.5 was used to rotoscope the woman out of the scene. As with all shots, this is a complex process of creating separate masks for an object or character, each rotoscoped individually. When the rotoscoping is completed, the isolated woman element is placed into back-plate footage of the crash. To improve the integration of the woman and back plate, Red Giant Software’s Composite Wizard, Trapcode’s Shine, and AE paint were used to marry foreground and background more convincingly and to add light to the edges of the woman.
Elements of the background, such as falling debris, had to be rotoscoped out of the back plate and placed back into the comp. This was necessary to bring these elements in front of the woman. The last step of the process was the addition of camera shake to the entire composition. This introduced digitally calculated motion blur, which has no grain, and so After Effects grain-matching tools were used to match the finished shot to live action footage.
