THE INBETWEENERS MOVIE - vfx and titles
Read about our dirty VFX, graphics and trailer for the upcoming movie.
Our work on The Inbetweeners Movie
Andrew Daffy
11 / 11 / 11
We’re delighted to be the official vendor for the dirty VFX, graphics and trailer for the upcoming movie. Here’s an online review by Empire…
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=137335
“Happily, the movie also has cinematic chops. Early doors, the camera starts high in the sky and then swoops down through suburban streets and up to a window where Jay is having a hand-shandy using the internet, diving goggles and slices of honey roast ham - it’s American Pie directed by David Fincher. “
OPENING SHOT
The opening shot is a continuous move which starts in the clouds a mile above suburbia, swoops down to the Inbetweeners neighbourhood and in through Jays window where we catch him about to err… pleasure himself.
The sequence is made up of seven elements. Three helicopter shots, a hovercam shot, a steadicam shot and two CGI joins which bridge it all together.
The sequence was heavily previsualised.
Firstly, to translate the ideas of Ben Palmer (director) from spoken words into something tangible.
Secondly, to see which parts of the now infamous neighbourhood would look impressive.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it gave film crews, producers and helicopter pilots an idea of the logistics involved in turning an idea into an actual shoot.
This third part was crucial. In the form of a telephone call meeting, the various crews were split into two camps. The unusually confident, saying that the things we were trying to achieve were easy. Then on the flipside other people were overly cautious, setting restrictions and quoting health and safety stats which made it impossible to conceive getting helicopters close enough to the action. The split reactions made us feel a good previz would really help. Our version showed the intended shot AND a version which showed a life sized helicopter running through the move. Very quickly this clearly illustrated the problems and workarounds, and very quickly we got unanimous and useful information with everybody on the same page.
The main challenge that we faced was that Ben wanted to be going through lovely ‘Simpsons’ clouds and impressive skylines at the beginning, and within the same shot have the camera go through a physical window to allow for the moment we see Jay in his compromising position. With the health and safety restrictions we were given, there was seemingly no way a full size helicopter could get even remotely near to a house to achieve the desired effect.
We then considered using a hovercam. A lightweight remote controlled helicopter which under the right conditions could move through housing estates and could give very natural and dynamic moves skimming cars and moving up to our intended window. The problem here was that it couldn’t physically get high enough to give us our initial cloud shots.
Ultimately our studio bit the bullet and instructed the production to book BOTH helicopter AND hovercams to enable the entire shot, but leave us the unenviable task of making the seamless CGI joins between these often unpredictable cameras, which we also new would be shot on entirely different days.
Time was on our side for this production. Planning started in November 2010 and the shot was due for August 2011. However on long production schedules, things often change just by a shot festering on the shelf. So we planned the shot to try to counter this.
We worked our shots backwards, shooting the steadicam section first. This covered the section from the window right up to Jay at his laptop. This part of the shot being inside, luckily meant that the weather didn’t matter, so we shot it in the spring during principle photography. The very specific way we instructed the cameraman to move in sideways from the window really helped commit everyone to stick to this camera move. Then in the previz, We replaced this bit of the shot with the final take.
Everyone could see how we could then drop in new part of the shot, like filling in a jigsaw puzzle.
At the beginning of summer we shot a test using the hovercam. We strapped an HD camcorder to the gyroscopic head and shot a test of the helicopter matching our previz as best as possible. It helped seeing this so that we could make some adjustments in terms of how the final move should look.
Back at base we used Final Cut Pro SmoothCam to see how well it would remove the natural jitters caused by the shaky hovercam. It did a great job but it still looked slightly warpy. Plus we lost a lot of screen space due to the film area bouncing around. Essentially we could only really use a heavily cropped portion of the stabilised footage.
For the actual shoot day, we attached a RED ONE to the Hovercam, with a 16mm lens, shooting at 1/2000th shutter speed.
This allowed us to have 3k plates of footage we knew would be jittery, which when stabilised could be cropped to filmres 2k, and having the high shutterspeed removed the motion blur, meaning that any side to side blurring caused by jitters wouldn’t give a reverberating effect on the final stabilised film. We ended up using ReelSmart Motion Blur to analyse the film and add realistic motion blur back onto the final plate.
SmoothCam had done a great job, but didn’t allow for much tweaking, and we weren’t keen on the importing and exporting of VFX footage in and out of Apples Final Cut Pro. Fortuitously After Effects CS5.5 had landed that week. And Adobe were showing off WARP STABILISER. It was terrifically powerful kit that did a fine job stabilising the shot as well as us being able to maintain our After Effects / Nuke pipeline.
There were however two large kinks which neither software managed to remove. This was due to the camera tripping out here and there, doing its best to film smoothly, but with so many axis to consider it was too easy to expect a perfect run. Mikkel Hanson - our compositor for the project created extra stabilisation nodes in Nuke to remove the anomalies.
With a stabilised hovercam shot, roughly lined up with the steadicam shot, we could see the sequence take shape. We were now ready to reverse engineer once again, and shoot the much simpler section at the beginning of the final shot. We took to the helicopter. Doing things this way around meant that we could choose our perfect hovercam take. The takes were all very different due to the wind and remote controlled hovercam giving unwieldy and unpredictable results. After choosing the preferred take, we analysed the final crucial takeover point between the helicopter and hovercam. By plotting the best point for CGI to join the cameras, we were able to plan the perfect camera descent trajectory, in the much more stable conditions of a large sturdy helicopter.
Once we’d locked the takeover point whilst mid-air, we shot about 20 approaches through clouds and down to the take over point. There was still a large discrepancy between the heli height and the hovercam height. The chopper not getting lower than 250 metres from the ground. the hovercam not going higher than 40 metres, meant that we had a lot of augmentation work to do in CGI to bridge this crucial section together.
Back at The House of Curves, we edited the three key pieces together. The cloud section was constructed from a few shots. based on the shape of the clouds, and the narrative given by travelling through them. A couple of days after final shooting, we finally had an exciting edit showing all of the footage together but with some scary gaping holes in desperate need of attention.
The process of joining the shots was initiated by tracking the start and the end of the final hovercam move in Boujou. The point clouds allowed us to model the architecture of the roads, buildings, bricks and glass panes.
Then on various frames during the camera track, we’d ‘camera project’ the final footage onto CG geometry. This gave us plenty of high res texture already stuck to the crude objects we’d built. Then came the long task of ‘upressing’ certain models and retexturing sections that had lost their integrity during the projection process.
3D artist Dan Prince found himself painting a lot of trees, roads, bricks and modelling a super high resolution window frame for the camera to fly through
A lot of the textures came from still photographs I’d shot on the day of principle photography.
Mikkel spent a great deal of time augmenting, and tracking, and stabilising real footage, 2D cheated houses, and CGI together to form seamless blends taking us from the clouds to a bedroom in one smooth swoop.
The final camera move is one minute fifteen seconds long, and with the orchestration of the extra’s walking through the streets, some extra CG cars and and entire sky replacement as we travel through the street, it makes for a very convincing shot that we’re very proud of.
The film is due for release in the US and Australia at the end of November 2011, so I hope we can show the final shot on here, very shortly afterwards.
MOVIE GRAPHICS
As well as our main shot, we did the graphics work for the teaser trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAlGUO4el_0
We worked with Cathy Murray at STUDIO ZOO who stepped in to help out with the typography, illustrating the sillhouette and generally finessing things to level of slickness that the clients wish to use it for the entire print campaign. We’re therefore indepted to her and her studio.
EXTRA VFX WORK
We also delivered 20+ VFX shots for the rest of the film including digital crotch replacement for the bashful teen actors. The entire production was bizaare, as a studio we’re becoming quite used to working on X rated material, but I’m sure that the things we were painting out could have had us locked away in some countries.
Personally, my most awkward moment was supervising the shoot where we needed to shoot a ‘cock double’ for Jay. Asking a totally naked man stood by a busy pool to do small pelvic thrusts every few seconds so that we could composite some ‘willy jiggle’ when the shorts got pulled down, really made me feel liked I’d reached the big time.”
The Inbetweeners Movie was the #1 film on the UK box office charts for four consecutive weeks to become the third highest-grossing film of 2011 to date, behind The King’s Speech and Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part II.
Attending the premiere was a really great experience. It was own private Harry Potter moment.
Movie credits
VFX Supervisor - Andrew Daffy
Compositor - Mikkel Hansen
3D Artist - Dan Prince
Teaser trailer credits
Logo and Typography conceptualised and produced by - Andrew Daffy, The House of Curves
Logo and Typography layout design and finishing - Cathy Murray, Studio Zoo
Compositing - Mikkel Hansen
