Rebuilding the past for J. Edgar

Method Studios' VFX supervisors Geoffrey Hancock and Ollie Rankin talks about J. Edgar.

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| December 19, 2011

Geoffrey Hancock, VFX Supervisor, Method Studios Vancouver

Geoffrey Hancock is one of Method Studio Vancouver's lead digital and visual effects supervisors whose recent credits in addition to "J. Edgar" include "Invictus," "Changeling," "Vantage Point" and the original "Twilight." Hancock initially joined the company, then named Rainmaker, as a digital artist on "I, Robot," an Academy Award nominee for best visual effects. Prior to joining the studio, he worked at several Vancouver studios in addition to a brief stint away to work on "Slither" before returning as CG supervisor on "Night at the Museum." Hancock's broad background in digital artistry includes character animation, film compositing, CG cinematics and CG supervision. Additional feature credits include "Elektra", "Santa Claus 2" and the upcoming "Red Dawn." Hancock's television credits include "Samurai Girl," "Stargate SG-1" and "The Outer Limits."

Ollie Rankin, VFX Supervisor, Method Studios Vancouver

Visual effects supervisor Ollie Rankin was born in New Zealand and is currently based in Vancouver where he has spent three years at Method Studios working on films such as "Invictus" and "J. Edgar." Rankin’s early film credits include the Lord of the Rings and Matrix trilogies for which he helped pioneer the discipline of crowd simulation. He brought this expertise with him to MPC in London where it was applied to such epic films as "Troy," "Kingdom of Heaven," "10,000 BC" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian." During the course of these and other productions, Rankin expanded his responsibilities, including supervising and directing motion capture and overseeing the digital creature pipeline. Rankin has worked in studios in his native New Zealand, Tokyo, San Francisco, London and now Vancouver. He is currently Method Studio Vancouver's visual effects supervisor on "G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation." Rankin has worked with such visionary directors as Clint Eastwood, Peter Jackson, Ridley Scott and the Wachowskis, as well as recently helping a local independent director bring his first feature to fruition.

How did Method Studios get involved in J. Edgar?

Geoffrey Hancock: When Method Studios Vancouver was initially contacted by visual effects supervisor Michael Owens regarding "J. Edgar," we were very excited about the opportunity to team up with Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions on another film. Owens asked us to begin thinking about how we could leverage our set extension experience from films like "Changeling" and "Angels & Demons" while utilizing the advances to our crowd system which were put in place for "Invictus". From the beginning Owens expected that we would need to create a handful of virtual, fully CG shots in post production.

Ollie Rankin: On the surface this project seemed to have a lot in common with the two previous Clint Eastwood films we had worked on with Michael Owens as supervisor, so it was really gratifying that they again asked us to be involved. That said, the vfx work on both "Changeling" and "Invictus" tended to be quite repetitive in nature, with much reuse of assets and methodologies throughout. By contrast, "J. Edgar" had a lot more one-off locations and shot content and the vfx requirements were much more varied, so assets and techniques often needed to be very specific and custom to a single shot or sequence.

How many shots did you do for the movie?

GH: By the end of production we had completed 146 shots throughout the film in 41 scenes. At the peak of production we occupied over 17TB of disk space (2,634,464 files and frames). The production timeline was tightly packed into 7 months between January and August 2011. We increased our render farm during production to a total of 2780 cores on 340 Linux and Mac machines.

OR: We had around 45 artists working on this project, a technical support team of 6 as well as a production team of about the same size and, unusually for a project of this scale, 2 visual effects supervisors. (During production Geoff was hospitalized with a ruptured appendix part way into the project, and being the dfx supervisor on the project I was asked to step up and fill in for Geoff. When it became clear Geoff wouldn’t fully recover in time to resume responsibility I continued in the role working closely with Michael Owens.)

For this shot Method Studios added bullet and glass effects on the car. © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved. Images courtesy Method Studios Vancouver.

In which sequences did you work?

GH: We worked on many sequences doing anachronistic period cleanup, effects enhancement, set extensions including digital crowds, matte paintings, CG traffic and virtual full CG shots. The first shot of the film in front of the Department of Justice needed to have the street wiped clean of modern people, traffic and street signs, which where all added back in a 1960's style. Another rewarding scene was a conversion between Hoover and Tolson on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington DC, which was shot at a location with a much less smaller building. At first we thought we would add the iconic Capitol Building dome to the existing building. Eventually we rotoscoped the actors and replaced the entire building to help show the grandeur and scale of Washington DC, as well as creating a digital matte painting of the park across the street filled with CG pedestrians and vehicle traffic. One of our favorite scenes was the New York premiere of a film on Broadway at night in the 1930's. For this we worked closely with Michael Owens to design a virtual shot that would set the scene in a bustling entertainment district. Following the premiere Hoover and his guests exist the theatre and drive away; here we inserted the practical theatre front and car into our Broadway environment complete with animated neon signs, klieg lights, period traffic and throngs of digital movie goers.

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Tags:

• clint eastwood
• geoffrey hancock
• j. edgar
• method studios
• michael owens
• ollie rankin