Starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster, World War Z revolves around an ex-United Nations investigator Gerry Lane (Pitt), who traverses the world in a race against time to stop a pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself. Under the guidance of Overall VFX Supervisor Scott Farrar, MPC VFX Supervisor Jessica Norman and the MPC the team completed more than 450 shots for World War Z. MPC’s main areas of work were creating the hordes in Jerusalem, the plane crash sequence, the Wales sequence and the epilogue.
“We did a sequence that is played in Israel, all actually shot in Malta,” explains Norman. “Some of the key shots would be what we call the Pyramid of Zombies. There are several shots with those kinds of pyramids. We built the big wall surrounding Jerusalem, protecting it from zombies. All the zombies tried coming in from outside trying their best to get there and therefore forming these pyramids.” Some of the zombies are climbing on the tower forming a little bit of a tentacle and grabbing the helicopter. “They do all the other crazy stuff like running down these little alleyways and they were almost like sloshing against the wall, they are behaving a little bit like water, just because of the sheer density of the crowd,” adds Norman.
The largest portion of MPC’s work was for the Israel sequence, a combination of live action plates with added CG environments, CG humans, CG helicopters and FX passes for dust and helicopter wash. In creating all of the pyramids or towers of zombies, MPC started off doing a lot of motion capture. They started putting in layers since they are such a heavy crowd job. They didn’t want all the agents in there before knowing exactly what the shape needed to be. “So we would do rough blockings. We would put in geometry where the pyramids needed to be and try and define it first,” explains Norman. “Then we would populate the geometry or that area with our clips using our power crowd tool called ALICE, first used on ‘Troy’ for the battles on the beach, years ago. We showed a couple of guys like crawling on nets, crawling along and getting up, falling and all of that. So we would sort of populate the geometry and get all the zombies in the shape. There were specific little animated numbers to get like a little bit of interaction. There is one shot that begins really quite close up and the camera pulls back and reveals the whole pyramid. That falling was generated using our dynamic software, and sometimes there would be a crowd agent turning into a ragdoll falling, and then he would crash sometimes going into animation and sometimes back and up and running. So there is a lot of close work between our crowd and animation department.”
Fashion sense
The build was obviously quite massive. They needed to have so many zombies and then not have repeats, they created the build of 24 different body types, and then made a huge wardrobe of garments to throw on them, all in CG. The crowd characters were built from reference photography and scans gathered on set. Modeling Lead Ashley Tilley and Texture Lead Jung Yoon Choi oversaw the asset team, creating 24 different body types with different textures, which resulted in 3,000 crowd variations. Max Wood, MPC’s CG Supervisor, set up a little system so they could create many thousands of outfits. “I think we had 3,000 outfits that would be sort of ready-made to make sure that older women would not wear the flowery jeggings and all that,” explains Jessica Norman. “We could always go in and change it over if we liked. Using the ALICE crowd simulation software meant the MPC crew could call in those outfits as they saw fit. “We came up another little tool that was linked to ALICE again where we could make a QuickTime from a shot and it would tell you exactly who was in that shot by producing front and back views of those agents and also telling you exactly how many numbers,” she explained. “And then we wrote a little tool that would say these are all the guys that are wearing bright clothing, these are all the guys wearing blue and then we could reduce the numbers based on that. And that ended being really very useful, I don’t think we thought about it before. So all the clothing items and the bodies were built based on the guys that were on site in Malta. So we had a photo booth set up, where we scanned and photographed the guys including clothing. So that is where the clothing idea comes from including their coloring. So then obviously on top of that we would do texture variations for each clothing item.” MPC’s Crowd team worked closely with the Animation department, lead by Animation Supervisor Gabrielle Zucchelli, to ensure that the figures moved realistically in a crowd and while interacting with the live action. For the larger crowds, they used MPC’s in-house cloth solver that is integrated with ALICE. One of the largest tasks for the lighting team, lead by Jonathan Attenborough and Wes Franklin, was to render crowds of up to 250,000 in a single shot.
One of the greatest benefits in using the inhouse crowd sim for MPC is that it is so much part of their pipeline that they can very easily work closely in between departments. “We can create the crowd, go to animation and then take it back into the crowd sim. Adding in higher passes, and textures, clothes and such,” adds Norman. “It is just very useful in that way but it is sort of part of the whole MPC setup. Marco Carboni was our crowd lead and he did a fantastic job because there are always those improvements in all the areas that you need just to make the ALICE crowd software work just so.”
MPC did a lot of environment work. There were helicopters skimming over the towers and the helicopter crash. There were a bunch of plates set in this sequence where there was a crashing plane and then also a lot of work on the plane, you must have seen the trailer obviously, there is a whole blow and all that. There was some plastic prosthetic work but there is always need for some extra touch-up and extra crispiness. There were also a few shots towards the end of the movie where they get really close up to these characters so it just really calls for some very tight animation work. “Our animation team also did a fantastic job. It was just really good teamwork there,” adds Norman.
All images © Paramount, MPC
via CGsociety
World War Z Special Effects
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