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the dark knight -
واضح آرشیو وب فارسی:سایت ریسک: the dark knight Farrokh 24 ارديبهشت 1388, 10:06VFX Supervisor Paul Franklin Talks Batman Begins Comic pro Danny Fingeroth talks with Double Negative’s visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin about bringing Batman Begins to the big screen. Visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin, enters Gotham City. All images courtesy of Double Negative. © 2005 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved. For its most ambitious project to date, London-based Double Negative created more than 300 vfx shots for Batman Begins (), led by in-house visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin. This necessitated revamping its design facility, creating a new working pipeline and installing new infrastructure to handle the workload. Franklin tells comic expert Danny Fingeroth how Double Negative helped to seamlessly create Gotham City and its role in digitally assisting with many of the other Bat happenings. Danny Fingeroth: How did the visual effects you worked on help to make Batman, a superhero who’s not actually superhuman, seem bigger than life? Paul Franklin: The key thing for this movie, throughout production and post-production, and in every aspect, is that [director] Chris Nolan really wanted this to be very much grounded in some sort of believable reality, rather than existing purely inside some sort of graphic world that could only be achieved through the use of computer animation or whatever. And he always wanted to make it feel like that you might actually go to Gotham, that Gotham might be a real place and that somebody could really do the things that Batman was doing. So, particularly with our work for creating the character of Batman, the majority of what you’re looking at on film is real stuntwork. It’s either Christian Bale dressed as Batman, or his stunt double, Buster, who did some incredible stuff. And there was some amazing work put together by the stunt crew for the show. But there were a few moments where we used digital effects to basically extend what the stunt crew had already achieved, and just basically carry the action off in ways that perhaps are a little bit too hard to rig at the moment. For instance, Batman is equipped with various types of high technology that he uses in his battle against crime. He has the ability to fly — or, to be more precise — to glide, with the aid of the Bat-cape. And the special effects guys put together a really impressive flying rig for Batman. But one thing that it wasn’t really capable of doing was deploying in flight. So, for instance, when Batman jumps off the top of a building and goes down the side of a building, and then his loose-flying cape suddenly deploys into the hang glider shape, bat-wing shape — that’s something we achieved digitally, through digital stunt double work. But, at every point, Chris Nolan was really, really keen that it shouldn’t look like this guy has suddenly sprouted wings and is able to fly like a bird-man. He basically is now turned into, say, a hang glider or a parasail, or something like that. And so that effect was based on: what might it be like if this guy was equipped with some kind of high-tech parafoil? How might he fly? DF: Well, you certainly achieved that. PF: Batman’s not capable of incredible muscular feats that would require him to be superhuman and have unbelievable, godlike strength. But he’s equipped with this incredible Kevlar body suit that has an endoskeleton, and all this sort of stuff. So that’s the type of thing we were doing. And in order to make that all work, we had to, first off, make very, very detailed models of Christian Bale dressed as Batman in the Batman costume. We had to study the Batman costume so we could reproduce it with fidelity in the digital world, so that you wouldn’t notice the difference between the digital Batman and the live-action Batman. Because we actually cut seamlessly within a couple of shots from a stunt double to the fully digital Batman. We wanted to make sure that was seamless, because we didn’t want it to certainly look like it was turned into an animated character at that point. And then, when we we’re doing the stuff that we’re doing as digital effects, we’re always basing it on some sort of actual reference. So, for example, for the shot in the movie, where you see Batman dive down the side of a building and then deploy his wings and “fly,” it’s an entirely digital shot. We actually had access to Buster, and he and the stunt crew staged the special reference stuff for us. Buster went up on top of one of the large buildings inside the giant set in Cardington, which is about eight stories high, and did a wire jump off the side of the building — which he repeated 10 times. We mounted 10 video cameras manned by members of the Double Negative visual effects team, and recorded Buster from every possible angle doing this repeated action. He did it with and without the bat wings, so we could get a feel for how he might fall, and how the wings might behave in the slipstream. So all our stuff was always based on some sort of actual reference that we always have. DF: Is there anything you want to add about the effects being seamless and fitting in with the overall naturalistic look of the film? PF: Chris is a very interesting filmmaker in that he’s a young guy and he has a very hands-on approach to filmmaking. Now, Batman Begins is a very big-budget film, probably one of the biggest-budget films made this year. Quite often, in that kind of filmmaking, the director will spend a lot of time working with the principal cast and crew, but he’ll let stunt sequences and visual effects sequences be handled by a second unit. Well, with this film, there was no second unit. Chris and Wally Pfister, the director of photography, shot everything. Every frame you’re looking at there has pretty much been authored by Chris and Wally. They’re involved. Chris is involved in everything that went into the film. And what’s also very interesting about this film is that they’re very into the whole technology of filmmaking in the traditional sense, in that this film does not have a digital intermediate. It wasn’t taken to a digital lab. It’s all graded in the traditional way, in a film laboratory. Chris Nolan’s control of the look of the film even extended to grading the film in a film lab instead of using a digital intermediate. DF: How so? PF: It was very important to Chris and Wally that all our digital work fit in seamlessly with that, so we had to prove at a very early stage that we were going to be able to faithfully mimic the actual photochemical filming process with our digital tools. And this set the standard for the way that we then have to work on the movie, because to prove something to Chris Nolan, who’s not somebody who’s done a huge number of digital effects in his previous films — what he would like to do is go out, film something for real and then go away and make a digital version of the same thing and put them side by side. And when he agreed that they both looked the same, that’s when we passed the test, that’s when he’s happy that the work’s going to go into the film. It was this level of scrutiny that was applied to every aspect, whether it was creating the digital reproduction of the way that a camera actually captures the light, to the way that we had to prove that we could do convincing, photorealistic digital architecture to be able to create the digital cityscapes of Gotham City. We actually went out and we chose a suitably art deco building here in London and photographed it on a variety of different films and still formats, on an extremely cold day here in January about a year ago. We filmed the sun rising, so we were there before the dawn. That was also an interesting foresight of what was to come, because we were perched on the tops of buildings, looking at this other building, in fairly precarious positions. And eventually we ended up in Chicago, standing on top of the very top ledge of the Sears Tower photographing the dawn rising over Lake Michigan. DF: Tell us more about the lighting and modeling used to achieve the effects that you wanted. PF: Well, Chris isn’t somebody who will come up with a whole bunch of storyboards and approve a whole bunch of previsualization animation, and say, “OK, this is what we’re going to do for the film.” He was very keen that this film should not be overwhelmed by CGI and end up becoming a cartoon. This extended all the way back to the pre-production process, where he didn’t want to produce animatics. He didn’t want to have, say, a story reel of the film, which he would then just go out and shoot. He likes to make a lot of his creative decisions when he’s actually on the set, because it might be that the actors respond differently to actually being in Chicago or something like that, and get some interesting things that you couldn’t predict were going to happen. If you’ve got this sort of predefined, rigid structure, which you’re going to shoot, then you can’t respond to that, you can’t make use of it. So he would often see things and say, “OK, this is a cool thing, this is what I want to get in the film.” However, we had to be able to plan for what we were going to do to be able to create the digital environments later on. And so we went out in May for a two-week visual effects shoot, which is in advance of the main unit turning up in August in Chicago. We knew there were a variety of locations that were going to be in the film, and a variety of different types of environments that we needed to get, but we didn’t know exactly what they would be, and where the camera was going to be pointing and how the scene was going to be lit. So we developed a process that allowed us to photograph very high-resolution panoramas of the Chicago cityscape across a very wide range of exposure. This means that we could take environments that we’d shot under ambient Chicago city light conditions — in other words, just the lighting you would see if you went to Chicago this evening and pointed a camera at the buildings — and then, because we had this very, very high dynamic exposure range, we could then relight these images through the use of computer graphics so we could match the theatrical lighting, which Wally then put on the locations when the main unit showed up later in the year. They used some pretty impressive lighting rigs on the days when they were shooting stuff, particularly for the car chase sequence, when the Batmobile is on the rooftop of the parking garage just before it leaps off and goes into the crazy chase across the rooftops, which is all our work. We had to match all the environments around the miniature car chase sequence to match everything that came before that. The other thing is that we had to build, for modeling, a very comprehensive library of Chicago structures, and also other structures that were hero buildings, like Wayne Tower, for example, which was an imaginary building which doesn’t really exist, obviously. Whenever you see Wayne Tower in the film, it’s an entirely digital creation. So that was something very key, to get it looking totally convincing and integrate it into the Chicago cityscape, to then create the landscape of Gotham. One of the major architectural additions was the Wayne Tower. DF: How big an adjustment was it for Nolan to work digitally? PF: Chris, I think, was kind of worried that we would obscure everything behind technicality. He was slightly suspicious that the digital visual effects guys might try and pull the wool over his eyes, and steer the film into a direction they wanted to take it in. So we had to make sure that all of our tools worked in a way that was understandable to people who are involved in the business of going out and shooting pictures and who talk in terms of traditional cinematography. Now, basically, our 3D lighting toolset was designed to mimic the way you would work on a real set, instead of working in arbitrary values of intensity of light and things like that. You can do things in a 3D universe, which are completely non-naturalistic. They don’t obey any laws of physics. And this was the sort of thing that Chris objected to. He would say, “Well, as soon as you start breaking the rules, then the scene inherently loses its believable look. It starts looking like a cartoon. It starts looking like a contrivance.” So we were very keen to make sure that our office would always talk in terms of photographic stops. And so they would say, “OK, so you want to raise the exposure on this scene?” Rather than just, “Make it brighter, increase the intensity by this amount,” you actually talk in terms of photographic stops. And so if Chris would say to us, “OK, that needs to be two stops brighter,” I could say to my 3D artists, “Make it two stops brighter,” and it all meant the same thing to everybody. We all used the same language. That was quite conscious. So it was more about making the digital environment user-friendly. DF: It’s the way a computer interface becomes simplified. You don’t need to know all sorts of code to use it. PF: Exactly. One of the key things is also that it means that our artists are also thinking in a more creative, more artistic fashion. They’re not looking at everything through the interface of all the technical layers that get laid on top, and they start thinking more about, “What is it I’m actually doing here? What am I actually doing with these images? How am I making these images so that they evoke an emotional response, that they fit with the feeling of the live-action photography, and that they tell a story?” DF: What was gained by using a virtual city, albeit one based on real places, instead of simply going on location in an actual city? PF: One of the key places where Batman Begins really goes into the realms of the fantastic is that the sheer scale of Gotham City is way beyond anything that you could ever see in a real city. Now, Chicago is incredibly impressive. If you go up to the top of the Sears Tower and look out, you think, “This is quite an incredible landscape.” Especially compared to anything we have over here in Europe. I mean, London’s an enormous city, but it just doesn’t have that sheer gargantuan size at the center of it that big American East Coast cities have. At the same time, Chris really wanted it to feel like Gotham’s a city out of control, sprawling in all directions, a true mega-city. There’s a moment quite early on in the film, where Bruce is returning from his sojourn in the Himalayas, and he’s flying back into Gotham with Alfred on board the Wayne Enterprises private jet. Bruce looks out of the window and he sees the sun rising over Gotham City as they fly in from the sea, and the sun is glittering off the sea — that’s an entirely computer-generated shot. There’s no live action in that shot. Everything that you’re looking at there is computer-generated. But it’s always based on a reality. All of the buildings in the city are based on Chicago originals, and the look and feel of it is inspired by the way that New York is broken up into islands. The lighting design is based on the photography that I did from the top of the Sears Tower, watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan. But the scale of it is enormous. DF: So Wayne Tower is the only made-up building in the thing? PF: Yes, although, obviously we have things like the monorail system, which is a non-real thing. That was inspired by the Chicago El train, but it’s been taken into the realm of the fantastic by suspending it 150 feet up in the air with these incredible sort of mid-twentieth century ironwork structures. It has this almost sort of Victorian, industrial revolution feel to it. DF: Was that based on actual designs, actual buildings from the Victorian era? PF: What they were all based on was the actual structure of the Cardington, the building that was used here in the U.K. as a studio, which is a vast hangar, which was built just after the First World War to house an airship called the R-101, which was the size of the Hindenburg — 800 feet long. The building is quite incredible. It’s a single structure, one giant room, which is about 200 hundred feet high and about 200 feet wide, and a quarter of a mile long. But it’s supported by this unbelievable grid structure inside of it, the girder structure that supports the roof, and that was the inspiration, I believe, for the monorail towers. One of the digital touches added to Chicago to transform it into Gotham City was the monorail system. DF: Are there any scenes you worked on that are obviously vfx? PF: With visual effects work, you have stuff that ranges from big, key moments — like, say, the end shot of the movie, or that big cityscape or any of these big establishing city shots of Gotham where we’ve extended the scenes, and that’s obviously stuff where people will probably notice that something was done. But then you go all the way down to the other end of the scale, where you’ve got straightforward things like wire removals, where you’re just taking out wiring and things like that and preparing the background, removing a bit of camera apparatus, which you didn’t want to see, that sort of thing. That’s obviously stuff that people might not notice that there’s any visual effects work. DF: But, say, the scene on the glacier — were there any visual effects done on that? PF: The big moment in the scenes in Iceland is when we establish the monastery for the first time, where you see the monastery on the side of a mountain through a snowstorm. And the monastery is a miniature, of course, because there isn’t a real monastery that looks like that, and there certainly isn’t one in Iceland. But everything that you’re looking at in terms of the environment in those scenes, with the snow falling, all that sort of stuff, that’s all been created digitally, as well. I’d say that’s an example of scene effects where people wouldn’t notice that something was going on. Perhaps the best moment for that is, at the end of that whole sequence where Bruce Wayne is walking towards the private jet parked out on the runway. That was actually shot at a rather rainy airfield north of London, so surrounding the plane was just flat, green, rolling fields, and some housing in the far distance. We replaced the background with a digital matte painting, which I think is pretty seamlessly integrated there. It makes it look like you’re still in the Iceland environment. DF: Were there any visual effects you tried for in the movie that didn’t work and couldn’t be used? PF: I’d say no. There wasn’t really anything that we tried that didn’t work out, because we were in a very lucky position on with this film. We got involved on the movie right at the beginning, during preproduction. We were involved in all of the pre-planning phase, so we were able to actually sit down with the guys and work out the best way of going about shooting things, and what kind of material we needed to get, and what kind of tools that we needed to develop. We then were able to have a good, solid six months of research and development here at Double Negative, where our programmers worked like the blazes and developed this fantastic new suite of tools, which allowed us to do the show. This pretty much allowed us to accommodate all of the different things that then happened as we went along through the film. So we moved from a position where, at the outset of the film, Chris was pretty adamant that he wasn’t going to have digital cityscapes, certainly not entirely digital cityscapes, in the film, to a position, at the end of post-production, where Chris is approaching his final cut of the film and is coming up with new ideas for shots, and we’re able to generate them entirely digitally, because obviously there is no opportunity to go out and shoot new material at this point. DF: So his original vision was to do things completely naturalistically? PF: Or to restrict visual effects to things like matte painting extensions of cityscapes and for backgrounds, and whenever we were looking at foreground architecture, to always have that as real stuff in-camera. But as the film progressed, I think Chris became more and more comfortable with what we were doing and what we were able to give him. And he would ask for something and we would give it to him, not come back and say, “Well, we can’t do this, and we can’t do that.” Because we’d had this long period to plan and decide how we were going to approach things. He became pretty confident we could achieve the things he was after. So we ended up with sequences in the final reel of the movie, in the train sequence, where we’re cutting back to back between completely CGI shots for about five shots in a row, at one point. One thing the newer crop of superhero and sci-fi films are doing right is using effects to enhance the story, not overshadow it. DF: There have been, over the past 10 years or more, a whole raft of visual effects-filled superhero and science-fiction films. In the evolution of the technology and the ability of things you can do, how have things progressed since the Spider-Man films (), the X-Men films (), The Matrix () and Star Wars ()? PF: The most satisfying thing in the way that visual effects have developed over just the last few years, over the films that you mentioned, is that filmmakers, directors, screenplay writers, and art directors, have all really begun to embrace the possibilities digital filmmaking allows them. In the case of Batman Begins, it’s a sort of hybrid approach of very traditional techniques and state-of-the-art digital effects techniques all combined together to make a film which is an enhanced version of what you would be able to achieve if you were just doing it traditionally. It was really interesting that in Batman Begins you saw Chris Nolan basically progress through all the various stages that visual effects have been through in the last five or six years. He went from being very reluctant to use extensive digital effects work, to the point where he was pretty happy for us to go away and generate something entirely digitally, because we were getting what he wanted. It’s almost like there’s been a real maturing of the visual language of visual effects, so that it’s now become incorporated into the broader language of cinematography in general. A lot of the stuff that we refer to as traditional, 60, 70 years ago were state-of-the-art. When somebody came up with the idea of doing matte paintings f or Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Baghdad, that was pretty radical stuff. Before that it was a case of, well, surely you just go out and film stuff that’s real and cut it together and that’s how you made your film. The effects technicians of the day were taking it further. Then, because you give it this sort of credibility of history, suddenly it’s an established visual technique. Really, all we’re doing with digital special effects is taking that kind of thing one stage further. We’re offering greater flexibility. We’re offering a broader palette that the filmmakers can paint from. That, for me, has been the real key to the way things have developed. DF: What’s coming up that you’ll be able to do with visual effects — in two years, in five years — that you can’t do now? PF: In terms of where it’s going, I think you can imagine that process going even further. Instead of digital effects being something that’s done at the end of the day, after the film has been shot, we’re now beginning to see more and more films being made in the way that we did Batman Begins. The visual effects teams are brought on very early in the filmmaking process, so we can actually contribute to the whole creative process in which the decision-making’s getting made up front. Some of the stuff that I was really pleased with in the work that we did was the way that, for instance, whenever we flew the helicopter down the streets of Chicago, the city authorities cleared all the traffic from the street, so there’s nobody on the street, so it just looks like it’s deserted. But, obviously, we had to bring the life back, so we had to return all the traffic and all the pedestrians to the street, and they’re all created digitally and added in there. Those are just the sorts of incidental things that give filmmakers a greater scope to realize their work. I think you’ll start seeing stuff where the actual stock from the pre-visualization process of filmmaking, where at the moment we use very low-resolution animation, very sort of sketchy, basically like moving storyboard, in a couple years time, you’ll be able to do stuff that actually looks like the finished thing at that stage, to really give the filmmaker an idea of, well, what are you going to do? Where are you going to take it? So they won’t have to guess, they won’t have to cross their fingers and say, “I hope these guys can make this look totally real.” You’re going to see increasingly realistic humans created digitally, and you’ll also see, I think, landscapes and environments. You look at something like the recent Star Wars movies, and there are some incredible landscapes and environments in there. But they work because they are fantasy environments. But re-creating scenes and environments of historical things which are long past, yet making them feel like you could actually be there and really see them, that’s the sort of thing I thing I think you’re going to see more and more of. I also think you’ll start seeing filmmakers using visual effects in a non-realistic way, by which I mean the kind of work that we saw in films like The Matrix and Twister, where you’ve got a subjective approach to the way that the film is made. Events will be portrayed from the observer’s point of view rather than some sort of slavish adherence to objective photorealism, whatever that means. In other words, a more expressive way of using visual effects, rather than it just being eye candy. Danny Fingeroth was the longtime editorial director of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man line and consulted on the 1990s Fox Kids Spider-Man animated series. He has written hundreds of comics stories, and written and developed characters and scripts for animation, most recently episodes of 4Kids Ent.’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fingeroth is also the author of Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society (Continuum), and puts out Write Now! Magazine, the premier publication about writing for comics and animation, through TwoMorrows Publishing. He teaches Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels and moderates seminars with Graphic Novel creators at New York University and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Fingeroth is a frequent guest on radio and television (including E! Ent. Television, the Today Show and NPR’s All Things Considered), commenting on comics and on popular culture in general. His op-eds and comments on superheroes and pop culture have appeared in many newspapers and websites, including the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, USA Today and cnn.com. © 1996 - 2009 AWN, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without the written consent of AWN, Inc. Farrokh 24 ارديبهشت 1388, 10:07 Batman Begins: Redefining the Dark Knight Comic pro Danny Fingeroth explores how director Christopher Nolan and the vfx teams have embraced a back to basics approach on Batman Begins. “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.” — Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins A new Batman descends onto movies screens. Courtesy of Double Negative. All images © 2005 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved. With those words, Bruce Wayne defines just what makes Batman different from Spider-Man, Superman — and from you and me. Most of us would like to think that what we do is less important than who we believe we are. Life often makes us compromise our ideals and do things we would rather not have. We tell ourselves we’re good people, but do things in our personal or professional lives that hurt others, even when we’re trying not to. That very contradiction is what makes a character like Spider-Man so relatable. He tries hard, but messes up. Peter Parker’s whole Spider-Man career is based on him believing he messed up. He didn’t stop the burglar who went on to murder his beloved uncle when he could have. But Batman, as incarnated by Christian Bale in director and co-writer Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman Begins (opening June 15 from Warner Bros.), does not believe that who he is “underneath” is important. For this driven character, Bruce Wayne is the disguise, Batman — the man of action — is the real person. His campaign against crime is the thing he lives for — and that motivates his actions. And actions are, to him, all that counts. This is what he says, at any rate. Of course, under the toughened exterior is a little boy even more damaged, and at an earlier age, than Peter Parker. The child Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins is not unlike that other young Bruce — Banner — in Ang Lee’s exploration of superhuman childhood trauma, Hulk (). “What I wanted to do,” explains Nolan in the production notes, “was tell the Batman story I’d never seen, the one that the fans have been wanting to see — the story of how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman.” According to Nolan: “There is no one definitive account of Batman’s origins, but throughout the interpretations of his character over the years, there are key events that make Batman who he is and make his story the great legend that it has come to be. There were also a lot of very interesting gaps in the mythology that we were able to interpret ourselves and bring in our own ideas of how Bruce Wayne and Batman would have evolved specifically.” Superheroes are at their core metaphors for human emotions and conflicts. The Hulk is about anger. Spider-Man is about coming to terms with responsibility. Superman is about coming from somewhere else and fitting in. And Batman has always been about anger and regret channeled as a force for justice. The current “back to basics” approach of so many superhero movies — from the X-Men films (), to the Spider-Man movies (), to, now, Batman Begins (DC Comics/Warner Bros.’ modern foray into the pool) — resonates with those primal metaphors, telling tales of pathos and passion, angst and agony, glory and victory, in a straightforward, undiluted manner. Superheroes enable us to journey into a world where powerful protectors use force in our name to, paradoxically, defend and advance a free society, while cathartically dealing with our deepest fears and highest hopes. That’s a lot to ask of a guy in a bat-suit. Underneath the suit, Batman is just a man trying to overcome his fears. Courtesy of The Moving Picture Co. And, in theory, that’s all Batman is: a regular guy who has trained himself to the peak of human perfection in body and mind. Batman comes and fights his own demons and ours (both inner and outer), and does it in the bigger-than-life manner we have come to expect of our costumed adventurer/superhero characters. And while he may not have super strength or a spider-sense, he has the most advanced technology that Wayne Industries can produce, and the most up-to-date vfx that the industry has to offer. How this technology was used, though, is not the way you would expect it would be in a typical summer superhero blockbuster. Nolan says he wanted to present “a more realistic take on his [Batman’s] story than we’ve seen in previous incarnations of the character. I wanted to treat it with a degree of gravity and with a sense of epic scope, but set in a world that is firmly grounded in reality.” With that as his priority, Nolan had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern vfx world, and eventually saw the light. The visual effects boutiques he would use to achieve his cinematic goals included Double Negative, Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) and The Moving Picture Co. (MPC). Paul Franklin, Double Negative’s visual effects supervisor, explained about his company’s most ambitious project to date: “Chris Nolan really wanted this film to be very much grounded in some sort of believable reality rather than existing purely inside some sort of graphic world that could only be achieved through the use of computer animation or whatever. And he always wanted to make it feel like that you might actually go to Gotham, that Gotham might be a real place, and that somebody could really do the things that Batman was doing. “It was really interesting that in Batman Begins you saw Chris basically progress through all the various stages that visual effects have been through in the last five or six years, and going from the position where he was very reluctant to use extensive digital effects work, to the point where was pretty happy for us to go away and generate something entirely digitally, because we were getting what he wanted. The digital artist working on the cityscapes subtly transformed Chicago into Gotham City. Courtesy of Double Negative. “So we moved from a position where at the outset of the film, Chris was pretty adamant that he wasn’t going to have digital cityscapes, certainly not entirely digital cityscapes, in the film, to a position where at the end of post-production, where Chris is approaching his final cut of the film, where he’s coming up with new ideas for shots, and we’re able to generate them entirely digitally, because obviously there is no opportunity to go out and shoot new material at this point.” Nolan’s bottom line is the story of the man inside the suit. And at its core, that story is about fear. The director, whose previous films have been Memento and Insomnia — both about men pushed to the absolute edge of sanity by forces beyond their control — is focused on what that emotion can do to a person and to a society. “It’s fascinating to me,” Nolan remarks, “the idea of a person who would confront his innermost fear and then attempt to become it.” If Marvel’s Daredevil () character — another superhero revitalized, as Batman was in the 1980s, by writer and artist Frank Miller — is “the man without fear,” Batman could be said to be “the man with fear — but who rises above it.” Nolan elaborates: “In the story, young Bruce’s accidental discovery of the bat-filled caverns beneath Wayne Manor results in a harrowing encounter with the terrifying creatures, leaving him permanently haunted by the memory. Nolan and [co-writer David] Goyer fused this seminal experience with Bruce’s subsequent guilt over his parents’ deaths, making his decision to remold himself in the image of a creature that wracks him with such fear and anxiety all the more remarkable and resonant.” And how were those amazing, fear-inducing bat-effects achieved? According to MPC’s visual effects supervisor Rudi Holzapfel, “From the outset, Chris made sure, that the digital bats would look and act like real ones in his scenes. “First, when scenes were shot that would later contain bats, we had various kinds of reference bats on set; these were stuffed bats of various sizes and tones. Each time bats were to be required in those scenes, Chris would take it on himself to walk through the set with these bats on a stick and film the references with the same stock as the scene. This gave us perfect references of how real bats would look in these environments. Vfx artists used footage of real Egyptian fruit bats to create the winged creatures of the night for Batman Begins. Courtesy of The Moving Picture Co. “Second, Chris and production vfx supervisors Janek Sirrs and Dan Glass shot a plethora of reference footage of real Egyptian fruit bats. For this they went on a bluescreen stage and also a dark, side-lit set, not unlike the well and cave the digital bats would later on end up in. This would provide us with a basic library of wing movement and flight patterns, as well as specific actions during take-off and landing that was later used as reference for the basis of the bat animation.” So in script and design, the movie is about how we face and use our fears. Or don’t. And the metaphor is propelled forward by the use of countless visual effects. But Nolan’s prime directive was always that the effects not call attention to themselves, and that you should always sense that, like Batman with his abilities, the filmmakers simply pushed reality-recording film technology to the limit. Rising Sun Pictures was the effects house responsible for maintaining the illusion of reality in the scenes involving the interior of Batman’s ride, the Batmobile. When you look out the vehicle’s windows, it is RSP’s use of “Fast Fourier Transformations” that makes you believe the car is racing through Gotham, as opposed to standing in front of a greenscreen, which it was. As one of RSP’s visual effects supervisors, Tim Crosbie (who worked closely with another vfx supervisor, Tim Baier, and with vfx producer Sara Henschke), offers: “As Batman BEGINS, it makes sense not be as full of vfx as previous films. However, by achieving subtle and seamless ‘real world’ images via vfx techniques, you get the vfx without it feeling like a huge vfx film. I think we’ve all seen a lot of films where the effects seem to come before the story.” Whether real or simulated, Batman Begins is certainly impressive to look at. From the Monastery in the Himalayas, to the vertiginous canyons of Gotham City, to Arkham Asylum and its home in Gotham’s Narrows, the look and feel of the film hammers home the theme of fear. Not that Batman Begins is a horror movie, but there’s an edge of menace you feel lurking around every corner, even in the quieter scenes. It’s a world where, if you lived in it, you’d hope and pray that someone like Batman would come along to save you. For Batman Begins, the Batmobile design is far more utilitarian than in other film or television adaptations. Courtesy of Double Negative. And then there’s that Batmobile. The thing is essentially a tank. I’ll go out on a limb and predict there will be quite a few toys in its image sold this holiday season. Production designer Nathan Crowley worked closely with Nolan and Goyer in Nolan’s garage. As Nolan and Goyer worked on the script in the director’s house, they would share ideas with Crowley about how they were envisioning the vehicle. Their ideas informed Crowley’s designs, and Crowley’s designs contributed to important aspects of the script. Beyond the story and visual effects, there are, of course, the characters it contains. First and foremost is Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman. If you thought Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne was too open and emotionally vulnerable in the manner of Peter Parker, then Bale will be more your cup of tea. What Keanu Reaves is to the Matrix’s () Neo, Bale is to Bruce. I thought there was a certain distance to his demeanor that might have been appropriate to the character, but made it hard for me to feel his emotional plight. Bale was most engaging in the scenes where he is haggard and battered, searching the world for a way to channel his anger and pain, less so when he returns to Gotham and begins to implement strategies for battling evil. But the character, as created decades ago in the comics by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson and others (and continued over the decades by Dennis O’Neil, Neal Adams, and Frank Miller, to name just a few), is so strong that Bale is able to draw much out if it. The eponymous hero of Batman Begins has a diverse array of friends and foes that help tell his story. The shining gem of them all is Michael Caine (supporting Oscar nomination — you read it here) as the Wayne family butler, Alfred Pennyworth. His relationship with Bale’s Bruce Wayne is the one where the young heir comes most alive. Caine is both straight-man and comedian, giving as well as he gets. He’s the good father that Bruce comes to depend on. Bruce’s real father died before they could establish an ***** relationship, and Liam Neeson’s Ducard is stern and demanding, didactic and challenging, but not a father figure with any sympathy. If Bruce Wayne is anyone’s son, it is Alfred’s. While others collect comics, Bruce Wayne collects father figures, which include Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth, Liam Neeson’s Henri Ducard and Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox. Another contender for father-figure, however, is Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox. Playing Q to Bale’s James Bond, Fox just happens to have the right set of gizmos for Batman’s campaign against crime. Or maybe Bruce Wayne is simply clever enough to adapt, for crime-fighting purposes, whatever Lucius has developed. Freeman’s Lucius is cool and imperturbable, another steady anchor in Bruce’s life. Outstanding in the role of nervous sibling is Gary Oldman’s Lieutenant Jim Gordon. With a moustache directly out of Miller and Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One comics mini-series, Oldman becomes the “one good cop” that Batman needs on his side in order to be most effective in cleaning up Gotham. Echoing the movie’s theme of fear is the Scarecrow, Dr. Jonathan Crane, played by Cillian Murphy. With his use of toxins to induce fear and terror in his victims, he’s the little kid pulling the wings off a fly writ large. Katie Holmes plays assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes, the grown-up version of Bruce’s childhood best friend (a character created specifically for the movie). Unfortunately, Holmes is given the thankless task of having to state the themes. While Ducard’s spouting of portentous truisms works in the context of cruel-for-your-own-good movie mentors from time immemorial, when Rachel is burdened with such lines, they sound fatuous. Happily, by the film’s end, her dialogue is written with more subtlety, lending more dimension to the character. A notable missing element in the film is the sense that Bruce might actually be missing and mourning a maternal figure. The film — like the Star Wars movies — is primarily, of course, about fathers and sons. But a boy needs his mom, too. Is there fear that a kid who might mourn and want to avenge his murdered mother would be a turn-off to audiences? Would Bruce Wayne be considered a sissy if he did that? So how does Batman Begins stack up? Well, it’s a wild, fun ride and the truest live-action incarnation of the character ever done. In the ranking of superhero movies, I’d say it’s somewhere behind the Spider-Man movies — which will most likely remain the gold standard of these types of films for a good long while — and on a par with the excellent X-Men movies. Everything else places well behind this group, so that’s pretty good company to be in. The movie may be called Batman Begins — but it’s a movie franchise that won’t be ending for a long, long time. Danny Fingeroth was the longtime editorial director of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man line and consulted on the 1990s Fox Kids Spider-Man animated series. He has written hundreds of comics stories, and written and developed characters and scripts for animation, most recently episodes of 4Kids Ent.’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fingeroth is also the author of Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society (Continuum), and puts out Write Now! Magazine, the premier publication about writing for comics and animation, through TwoMorrows Publishing. He teaches Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels and moderates seminars with Graphic Novel creators at New York University and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Fingeroth is a frequent guest on radio and television (including E! Ent. Television, the Today Show and NPR’s All Things Considered), commenting on comics and on popular culture in general. His op-eds and comments on superheroes and pop culture have appeared in many newspapers and websites, including the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, USA Today and cnn.com. © 1996 - 2009 AWN, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without the written consent of AWN, Inc. animations 24 ارديبهشت 1388, 15:57ممنون f_tabande جان. کاش می دادی یکی ترجمه می کرد. متن خوب و ثقیلی به نظر می یاد... :D gigamax 26 ارديبهشت 1388, 20:48خیلی جالب بید ... مرسی فرخ !! من عاشق این فیلمم .... جوکر شخصیت مورد علاقه !!! یادتونه قبلا گفتم دارم یه سری کارای بزرگ می کنم ؟! حالا که بحثش شد لو میدم :D من دارم یه سری تجربیاتی میزنم که صورتی مثل tow face درست کنم .... این یکی از همون کارای بزرگیه که قرار در آینده ازم ببینین .... وای !!! در یک کلام منفجر میشین !!!! واقعا پروسه پیچیدیه ... خیلی !!! جالبه من تا حالا هیج making of ازش ندیدم ... تنها چیزی که تونستم یه فریم از صحنه قبل و بعد از post production ه ... جلوه های ویژه این قسمت از فیلم توسط کمپانی frame stone ایجاد شده ... این کمپانی یدی طولانی در جلوه های ویژه داره ... فریم استون برای پردازش اطلاعات فقط همین قسمت از جلوه های ویژه فیلم (که یکی از سنگین ترین پروژه های جلوه های ویژه کامپیوتری در تاریخ سینماست) از 120 کامپیوتر برای رندر و نهایی سازی این شاتها استفاده کرده .... کریستوفر نولام کلا زیاد با جلوه های ویژه کامپیوتری صفا نمی کنه .... تا جایی که جا داره دوست داره از جلوه های وِِیژه در لوکیشن استفاده کنه ... اما برای پیاده سازی two face چاره ای جز این کار نبود .... التبه خاطر نشان کنم چنین صحنه هایی فوق العاده گرون هستن !! فوق العاده !!! برا همین خیلی با دقت باید ازشون استفاده کرد که بهترین نحو هم استفاده کرد به هر حال تاپیک خوبی شد در موردش صحبت کنیم موفق باشین Farrokh 26 ارد&
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