The picture basically opens with Lara going through a training session
with this droid.
We went through a great deal,
of pre-vis animation, trying to give it character.
And because of the thing's multi-arms, it's got basically six appendages,
it went through a spider version,
a gymnast version.
We inserted some of that into the action.
In fact, he does a really cool back flip in the movie
where she's run past him.
He then leaps up onto a pillar
and does a back flip ending up on top of her.
He basically exists in two versions.
One is a fully synthetic
CG character.
But he also exists in a real world as a posable prop.
That was used primarily for shots where it was immobile.
And it gave her something to react to.
We built a full-sized droid.
The way the progression went
was they pretty much designed it on the computer.
You know., the pre-visualization guys got together
with the director, with the production designer Kirk.
Came up with what they wanted it to look like
and then gave us sort of conceptual drawings of it.
And then we made a full-sized one of it.
Any time it moves and jumps around, it's the CG version.
Stop!
The shot on this was about 80 frames long.
About three days.
But it all depends really how much the robot is moving in the shot.
Okay, first of all we get the clean plate. The director shoots.
And as his beauty pass
we were able to key that straight on
and then we're able to grade it and depth it with various mattes
that 3-D gave us along with lots of other layers that they supply.
Separation passes for each limb and various other bits and bobs.
We're able to grade and treat each individual limb.
Then various stages of putting it together
to grade it to fit the background.
There's a matte for his volumetrics
and a matte for his separation shadows.
Various highlight passes,
which we were able to key directly over the top again,
so that all the light on the robot soaks into the shot.
Finally. a live action element which we can put over the top
so that when it cuts with the live action robot in the next shot
it all sits in so the final shot looks like that.
We went to a great deal of effort
to make sure that the two tied up together.
I mean, it was also particularly tricky
in that the environment was very smoky and what have you.
And we had to make sure that he sat in appropriately.
You know. he didn't look like he was added onto the shot.
I think we sort of broke new ground with that robot.
I mean, there's been a lot of really impressive robots recently.
CG robots in recent movies.
But I think this one just was that little bit better.
And I think we achieved a level of reality and scariness
with this character that I hadn't seen in other films before.
They built the clock physically.
There was a three-dimensional clock
that was used in the shooting of the film.
But what they hadn't created was the insides,
the inner workings of the clock, and how would that be.
So, we worked on the idea of making these sort of magical cogs and springs.
And how it would actually look sort of suspended in time.
For this particular shot
the clock had to explode and all the internal components
had to animate in suspended animation.
The recognisable parts had to be there
and then we had to fill out with lots of small detail parts.
First we went up to the set
and took pictures of the large-scale clock.
Then we brought these pictures into the computer
and used that to draw around and get the correct proportions.
This is the CG objects which are rendered
and in the background, Lara Croft.
And we have the crystal, which is an important part
of the story here.
And she puts her hand up and picks it off.
And we also create some interaction with the objects
as she puts her hand into the space.
And it's been quite exciting.
So, it looks pretty cool.
Lara uses the mysterious power,
that this triangular artefact has,
in order to go back in time
and stop the killing of her boyfriend, Alex.
So, we see her emerge from a fourth dimension
into this slowed down past
where we see the knife slowly on its way towards Alex
having been thrown by Powell, the villain.
She then approaches the knife.
She's the only one who's existing faster than real time.
She then
physically goes up to the knife and turns the thing
back on a trajectory towards Powell,
the villain of the piece who'd thrown the knife.
The time slowing device then
snaps back into real time and the knife hits Powell
disabling him so they can leave the tomb.
We did it by physically having a knife on set
attached to a green screen,
green painted rod.
That was then digitally removed,
that allowed Angelina to have something physically to wrestle with.
A CG knife was then used
to actually plunge into Powell.
No.
As an offshoot of the mechanism,
the time-effect mechanism of the orrery,
we have these little fractures in time,
these time glitches.
And they're basically three-dimensional,
three-foot floating clouds of plasma
that serenely float around the tomb.
However, when something physical interacts with them
they reveal a much more malevolent character.
One of the sequences, the husky dog sequence,
calls for a dog to enter the time glitch, enter a time storm,
and be whittled back down to bone, blood. and gore.
And then it travels through the time storm
and out the other side and is untouched.
I ended up shooting the husky dog against blue screen
50 we could take it off that blue screen environment and place it anywhere.
And we digitally, three-dimensionally rotoed the dog
and built up muscle tissue and dog skeleton
and tracked it to the live action.
So, time storms, they started with conceptual discussions
with Simon West, the director.
And from that we put together this image which is a basic design,
which represents the concept of when the time storm
is alive, or something has touched it.
In particular, we're gonna talk about the dog sequence.
This is the sequence when
the dog jumps through one of these things.
The dog sees one of them, jumps into it, it ignites
and inside the time storm the fur is stripped away from the dog.
But his inertia carries him through, and he comes out unscathed.
We start with an off-line
which is basically just timing out the dog sequence
with the other principal photography plates.
From that we develop an animatic
including the computer generated animals.
Close-up of the dog.
You start with your back plate, which is shot on the orrery set.
We have a dog which is shot on blue screen.
We suppress the blue from the dog, put the dog over the black.
And extract a matte.
From this, the CG dog was assembled.
That's the dog with the muscle texture and the skeleton dog.
These elements are combined to produce the final result.
And the sequence looks pretty gnarly.
Goon, get it!
Holy shit!
The major set piece, action wise,
effects wise, visual-effects wise in the film is the…
This battle in the Angkor Tomb
with all the stone statues and characters that come to life.
Powell, the bad guy. activates this centuries-old mechanism
which unleashes this mercurial life form
in the tomb, which wends its way towards the statues,
and systematically brings them all to life.
The first ones that we encounter
are these 6'4" humanoid stone monkey characters.
And I went to a great deal of effort
to make sure that they looked very plausible,
very convincing and they looked like they were actually in the environment.
The shape was given by production because
that was part of the set and that was designed by production.
From that we had a, you know, perfect copy of the statues in digital world.
But then the way they moved was up to us.
The next step consists of actually putting
skeleton bones in the creature.
Once you've got a creature which is able to move,
just like in animatronic, really you can pose I,
animate it, light it, and render it,
and it gets composition on the background.
When the stone characters came to life
I felt very strongly that they should break and fissure
and crack at the joints.
They didn't actually have a rubberized feel about them.
Rather than going 100% CG route with all that,
I made a great deal of effort to shoot real elements,
dust and cobwebs,
that would be later superimposed on top of these characters.
I think to make any shot successful
you've always got to sit the CG into the plate
and then try and join the plate with it.
And we shot lots of practical elements
with Steve Begg, the effects supervisor.
All of those elements have been used
to blend the two images together.
I had considered at one point that we have
stand-ins of stuntmen, standing and we at ring green costumes
that would give Lara and the other characters
something to actually physically refer to.
But that actually would have limited
the animation approach that I had in mind.
There's two situations, really. There's some situations
where the actors are interacting closely with the monkeys
so we had to kind of stand,
with some lights on it,
so the actor could look in the eyes of the monkey
without having the monkey
and that was quite useful because straight away it makes it work.
Went to a great deal of effort to make sure
that this looked totally believable.
Originally the concept was
once Lara beats Powell up she throws him into a time storm.
And then he's basically carried into another tomb
via the time storm where he becomes entombed into the rock.
The time storms are sort of time portals,
areas where time is bizarre, where it's turned inside out.
And anything that interacts with these time storms,
you know, comes to a sticky end.
Powell becomes petrified.
That was a miniature that we shot with little 3-D characters
and what have you in it.
We've actually relieved Powell's face,
and do a powers of 10 pullback from him,
as he turns into rock.
And we basically…
He becomes one of the souls that are lost in this tomb.
Basically I'm a big fan of miniatures.
And I think, used in conjunction with digital effects,
you can get levels of reality,
that you just would have to work at with pure CG.
The Brahman character is basically the climactic part of the sequence.
Our villains basically leave the tomb.
And they know something else is going to happen.
Lara, of course, is slightly oblivious to this.
She's standing in front of this character, and he slowly comes to life behind her.
Obviously it has to be pretty imposing, pretty scary,
and definitely convincing that this thing is towering over Angelina.
Because it exists on the set already,
the look. in that sense, is already described.
What we needed to do was recreate the Brahman
from the set in CG, totally.
So, in order to do that
you need to go out onto set, take photographs,
take textures, take measurements
and bring that all back for the guys to replicate it.
It was quite complicated and sort of quite interesting
from a 3-D standpoint
because it's a character which starts off as a real object.
And has to sort of…
Because it's made out of stone, it breaks itself into a real character.
So, it was quite a challenge for us.
Somehow we've got to get a transition where it actually breaks itself apart.
And we see the stone crumbling
and so it frees itself up enough to be able to move.
We basically, by hand, have to go through
and sketch out on the Brahman,
guidelines where we need to break it.
So, the animators sort of play with the character for a while,
try and work out which bits need to be removed.
And which bits of stone need to be cracked
so they can actually achieve the movement that we need to get.
And then we have to go through
and painstakingly chop it up into hundreds and hundreds of bits.
And his face animates as well.
So they may have to go into even more detail and break his face up into…
Give him enough pieces so they can actually move
to make shapes and give expressions.
This is the first time he sort of fully stands.
So at this point, we've broken away enough of him to allow him to move.
And he actually steps down from the podium
and she realises that he is going to come after her.
From within all those cracks
we're getting dust and bits of stone crumbling out all the time.
We did have the option of, you know,
putting dust gags, dust effects actually physically on the set
that we would imply were basically being caused
by the footfalls and the motion,
but I opted to go for a post-effect with that,
a very complicated effects element shoot,
that we would use to layer on top of this character
to make him look like he was really…
He was really 25 tons of statue coming to life.
We had loads of dust and rocks and bits and pieces falling off him.
All shot real world, but added on top of the CG character.
As with the stone monkeys, we got a level of, I think, reality that we…
You know, you could do with CG,
but funnily enough, we did have the option…
And also I thought, if you can do something for real, do it for real.
I was trying to imply that there was a 5,000-year-old intelligence within him.
And he…
Basically, we tried to get that across in his moves
and that there was a definite function in what he was doing.
He was slowly stalking her.
He was manoeuvring himself in this position
to actually, you know, get to her.
And then when he uses his magical force to summon these swords,
we thought that we're basically building up towards a climax,
where he ultimately throws the swords toward her.
These griffin characters are statues that are coming to life.
These are gorilla shaped characters with wings.
And they are much more dynamic in their movements than the monkeys.
And they're very sort of athletic in their moves.
In order to make the stuntmen react in a real physical way,
the black box was dragged through the set.
It was built to be the same shape roughly as the griffin
so that the stuntmen reacted to a synthesised object.
And then we removed the black box.
Here we can see the same frame but with the griffin in place,
with the soldiers reacting now to the griffin rather than the box.
We made a great deal of effort to give them
a different character from the stone monkeys.
The griffin characters were very dynamic and very…
They had a definite function
and that was basically to get and stop Lara.
This is one of the final Angkor shots
where Lara shoots one of the griffins.
Here's some of the elements that we used to put it together.
This is a background plate without anything there.
The 3-D CG element.
These are some of the bullet hits, elements you can put on top.
We finally sync mattes,
we replaced the hands in the gun for the final shot.
We have a lot of fun
blowing the living daylights out of these characters.
I think our animators did a good job
in getting across the dynamism of this character.
I was very pleased with the way that they came out.