Before filmmaker David Fincher began shooting Panic Room on a single, four-story set, he first sat down with previsualization specialists to direct his movie on computer.
By J. Sperling Reich, FilmStew.com
Shooting expensive, often dangerous, special effects sequences for films and television shows has always been a logistical and time consuming process filled with uncertainty for the producers and directors working behind the scenes. Add actors and stunt men to the mix and the outcome of any given day on set can be wildly unpredictable, even with the most careful, strategic planning.
For filmmaker David Fincher, however, there is never any room for extraneous variables on one of his visually dynamic movies. A director who cut his teeth helming award-winning music videos and commercials, Fincher made a name for himself in feature films beginning with Alien 3 in 1992. With movies such as Seven and The Game, he has honed a unique visual style that has made him one of the most sought after directors in Hollywood. As someone who likes to "manicure" everything that goes into each frame of footage, including cinematography, performance and production design, when Fincher made Fight Club in 1999 he actually pre-planned some of the film's most complicated effects sequences using computer generated, animated storyboards.
This process, which has come to be known as previsualization, is a new approach to visual effects production. Sequences are designed, technically planned and approved before elements are shot or production budgets are finalized. The process has been proven to give directors more control and allows producers submit more accurate bids. Each shot of a particular scene is conceived, planned out and followed all the way through to post-production before a single frame of film is ever exposed. Of course, the resulting efficiency resulting from the technique helps streamline the shooting schedule and save money.
Fincher's experiment with previsualization was so successful that when he set out make Panic Room, starring Jodie Foster, he utilized it on a broader level. The film tells the suspenseful tale of a newly divorced Meg Altman, who, with her young daughter Sarah, moves into a Manhattan brownstone. In their very first night in the new home, intruders barge into their lives, trapping them in a panic room; a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of a break in. Unfortunately, a hidden safe within the small, secure room is the reason the crooks have broken into the brownstone in the first place. What ensues is a violent stand off between Altman, her daughter and the three intruders - Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yaokam) and Junior (Jared Leto).
In June of 2000, six months before shooting began on Panic Room in January of 2001, Fincher returned to the offices of Pixel Liberation Front, the visual effects company with which he worked on Fight Club, based in Venice, California. The filmmaker spent months working with previz supervisor Ron Frankel planning out intricate sequences down to the very the last technical detail.
"What David identified with his uncanny ability to recognize advances for technology and their application for new areas was the potential for this tool, not simply as a visual effects design planning production tool, but simply as a pre-production design and planning tool that would bring efficiency to the entire process," says Frankel who headed the team of between four and ten people who were assigned to the film from pre-production through the end of post.
"The production challenge on Panic Room was partly how to keep the movie interesting," Frankel adds. "Over the course of one night in one set, how do you keep the cameras moving in a dynamic way that tells the story and keeps everything fresh and exciting? How do you film inside of a four-walled set where every single shot is going to require some element to be pulled out?"
Working in tandem with production designer Arthur Max, Frankel and his staff built a computer simulation of the four story set which was being constructed on a soundstage in Manhattan Beach, just a few miles away. Frankel says his computer model was "literally a representation of the production environment down to the inch."
Previsualization is a two-part process that starts off with 3-D storyboards. According to Frankel, filmmakers would miss out on the usefulness of the tool if they were just to stop at storyboards without animating them. The storyboards are created using Softimage's XSI, a high end 3-D modeling and animation software package used by post-production companies creating visual effects for movies such as Jurassic Park and the upcoming Terminator 3. Since everything in the model and storyboards is created to scale, a lot of information is collected. "What we get out of it is a lot of hard data, useful information for the production that helps them with the execution with each shot," states Frankel.
"This represents the actual stage environment, down to the inch of what was shot," he continues. "All of the design work that we were doing with David as we were positioning actors and positioning cameras and understanding how this movie was cut together was always done with an eye towards how. How do you get a camera up there? Can a camera fit up there? What kind of equipment are you going to need, and where are you going to place it, and how are you going to get it there, and is that wall wild, and all those sorts of questions are happening simultaneously throughout the process."
Once a computer model was built, the next step in the process was blocking in the action of all the characters that enter the four-story house. Computer versions of each actor were created to scale, including their height and build, and then animated.
