Hasta La Motion!

Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri on The Lovely Bones

In The Lovely Bones, now on DVD, director Peter Jackson’s taste for the fantastical is seen in the in-between heaven world inhabited by young girl Susie Salmon after she has been murdered. Responsible for realising Jackson’s vision for the heavenly sequences was Weta Digital. Visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri spoke with a number of outlets, including vfxblog, about Weta’s approach to the film.

The effects are very stylised and fantastical. How difficult was it to get the right tone and style for this movie?

Letteri: It was really difficult because there was a stylisation to it. The idea of heaven was constantly evolving. It wasn’t like where you’re doing something that you knew is totally photoreal, like a tree. There were aspects of that of course, because we wanted elements of it to look real, but they were able to evolve and be evocative of what Susie was experiencing. We would try things, we’d see how they’d work in the context of the cut and how the scene was playing emotionally. This is one of those movies were most of the work that went into it was on the creative side instead of the technical side. With a lot of visual effects films, there’s usually a lot of new things you’ve got to create technically. This one was trying to understand the world. This is what Susie is experiencing, but in a lot of ways it’s out of her experiences – it’s not like she can conjure it up – so we were always trying to find this balance of what’s happening around of her and what’s happening inside of her.

How much of the heaven sequences is based on real landscapes and how much is CGI? For instance, can you explain how you created the scene with the giant ships in bottles crashing on the rocks on the coast?

Letteri: The giant ships in bottles had a lot of real imagery in it. What we did is took a helicopter and flew it over some coastline here in New Zealand. That became the water and the sand and rocks and ground that you see. The ships in bottles were added as CG elements and the water interaction was a CG element. They sky was replaced from the one that was there, just to have something more dramatic. That one probably had the most mix of real elements compared to elements that were totally CG than anything else in that sequence. If you go to the sequence where they’re on the sled coming over the mountains, that’s entirely CG. It really was a mix and depended on what the shot needed.

Were there any particular problems in rendering the breaking glass of the bottles?

Letteri: It again gets back to the question of stylisation. It needed to reflect the idea that these were ships in bottles that Susie and her father had worked with. We didn’t want them to look like full-size ships because that’s not what they were – they were ships in bottles. But if you took just ships in bottles and scaled them up to be that big, it would look just like a miniature. We had to work with the design of the detailing of it to come up with something where you knew it was supposed to be small ships in bottles but just big, if that makes sense.

What was it like working with Peter Jackson on the film? Was he inspiring or was it more difficult because his expectations can be so high?

Letteri: It’s great working with Peter. We’ve worked with him a lot. He’s very open with us about what he wants and what he wants to try. Especially in this film, he just threw  a lot of it to us. You can talk about some of these things, but until you actually sit down and try them and see how they come together and actually work with it –  it’s almost like working with clay – you don’t know if the idea is actually successful or not. So, a lot of it was done through discussions and the artists had a lot of hands-on input to try to bring their own ideas and inventions to it.

You were born in 1957 and must be a digital immigrant. Could you explain a little bit how you experienced the development of visual effects from your beginnings in your work?

Letteri: I was pretty lucky because I got into it at the right time. I think the first film I did was Star Trek VI and the second one was Jurassic Park. So I was really involved in designing the look of the dinosaurs and figuring out the lighting and figuring out the realism of it. I did that through a number of shows and came here to Weta working on Gollum, trying to take the same approach of realism and bringing characters to like. We did the same thing with King Kong. Most of what I do has been focussed on characters and things of that nature. This film was a bit of a departure – it was more about the artistry and ideas. Being evocative of what the feelings are of the characters as opposed to trying to make a realistic character.

What was the most difficult aspect of the visual effects of the film?

Letteri: I think the most difficult aspect was that you never really knew you’d done it right until you were there. If you’re making something – a character or a creature or vehicle that you’re putting into a normal visual effects shot, you can always say: ‘Well, does this look like that car that you’re matching?’. With this one it was always just getting the right combination of things to look right. You could have the same elements but just kind of mixed in with the wrong balance and it wouldn’t look right, and you don’t know whether elements are wrong or the balance is wrong. There was a lot of experimentation to try to figure out how to get everything working properly.

How did you find the right visual effects for the right scene?

Letteri: It really just comes down to intuition at that point, looking at it, watching the scene. Talking about what we like, what we don’t like. What they mean in the context of the story and how they flow from shot to shot. It also comes down to Peter deciding what he wants for the film.

Why did you decide to make the in-between place where Susie lives to be a very visually appealing place, because it’s also a place she decides early on that it’s not a place she really wants to stay?

Letteri: That was always walking the line between heaven being some place where she has some comfort and some place that was pushing her to be somewhere else. It was sort of this interrupted journey. We didn’t want it to be scary all the time. In the book, the way heaven is portrayed is not scary at all. So there’s sense of her trying to need to feel both ways – needing to feel comfortable sometimes and also that there was something more that she was supposed to be doing.

What were some of the effects that you had to do for the real world?

Letteri: The sinkhole shots at the beginning and at the end. That was just a blue tarp laying on the ground, and the sinkhole was built as a whole digital effect. The shots of Stanley falling at the end were all visual effects shots. A lot of the rest of them are more invisible effects. When you’re inside the houses looking out the windows, a lot of that was done with bluescreen and the exteriors added in later. We also painted out things that wouldn’t have been there in 1976. There are also shots in the cornfield that cross the line between the two, especially the scene where Jack goes into the cornfield with the baseball bat, because Susie finds herself in the middle of it and it transitions between heaven and earth.

What were the artistic inspirations for the visual look of the film, such as paintings or other movies?

Letteri: It was all done internally. We had an art director, Michael  Pangrazio. Michael did the concept art that we really pushed to. We had a few things that we talked about as inspiration from existing art. We talked about surrealism as an idea. But we didn’t find anything we could really use as inspiration. A lot of that was based on irony, but there really isn’t a lot of irony in heaven. So we wanted this idea of the fantastic, but it had to come from the mind of this young girl who didn’t have a whole lot of worldly experience outside of this small town and neighbourhood she grew up in, so we tried to keep it very personal in that regard.

Did you have someone on set supervising, and what kind of decisions did that person take part in?

Letteri: We did have someone on set supervising. Most of that comes down to if you’re going to set up a particular shot, how are you going to do. That just involves working with the director of photography, Andrew Lesnie and Peter just to look what’s the best thing to get in-camera and what’s best to get after the fact, and then just working on the technical aspects to make sure things are set up correctly like bluescreens.

Did you have to do any previs work or did you rely on the concept work on set?

Letteri: There was previs work done just to flesh things out. We do a lot of things in previs that in the past would have been done with storyboards, just because you can be a little bit more fluid about it. You can see how things might flow across the cut. For the ships in bottles, we did a little bit of previs to get some idea of what kind of angle might work best. They’re almost like moving concept sketches in a way.

What kind of effect did you have to do to depict the gazebo when it is swallowed by the ground?

Letteri: It’s all done as a digital effect. The idea was to make it feel like a strange, external otherworldly pressure was making it happen, and it was being swallowed up by the ground. There was a metaphor there for moving on from the gazebo being this comfortable place and some kind of connection with the sinkhole. So mixing in these ideas in the film made sense once you get to the end.

There was a wonderful scene where Susie pushes the mountains away and arranges them in a way that she likes. You’re giving the director ultimate power to do anything they like. How will this change in the future?

Letteri: I think you’re right – that’s one of the things we try to do. If you can imagine it, we can put it on screen. That shot that you mentioned is kind of interesting. That idea was specifically Peter’s. He wanted to see that. In a way, it was trying to represent what was happening to Susie. She needs something around her as world but there’s nothing there. She’s not exactly willing it into existence, but it’s somehow coming out of her imagination and forming itself into a world. Some of the way the world is made is to provide this comfort around her.

In the scene with the tree where the leaves come off and turn into almost birds with a semi-chaotic behaviour, how was this simulated?

Letteri: We have simulation software to do flocking and we can do that with birds and people. The idea behind that was that you wouldn’t be able to tell if the leaves were birds or the birds were leaves and when one turned into the other. It was playing with the idea of the wind coming up and blowing the leaves off the tree, but what if the leaves actually had their own life. It seemed like the birds were a good way to do that.

What were the most complex shots between the live action and the digital work?

Letteri: Probably the shots of heaven appearing and the girls coming out of, just in terms of trying to get that blend and the mix between the two worlds. It took a lot of work to get the feeling of it quite right.

How special was it working on this film?

Letteri: It was pretty unique. It was very much artist-driven. It was very much, ‘what can we try here that will work?’, and show Peter ideas. It was much less kind of proscribed as most visual effects is when you come into it knowing exactly what the visual effects work is meant to be. It was much more creative. It had its challenges as well, because with a lot of artists bringing forward their ideas not all of them are going to work, so there’s a lot of rejection. It was definitely an emotional movie, especially because of the content.

Check out some making of clips at Weta Digital’s website.