, by Trevor Hogg | Production
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“Hercules was something different for Brett Ratner and for me because it has massive armies with swords and sandals,” states John Bruno who was previously hired by Ratner to handle the visual effects for X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and Rush Hour 3 (2007). “Brett didn’t want to do fantasy adventure; he wanted the visuals to be solidly based in reality. This story of Hercules [Dwayne Johnson] is slightly different; the whole thing is that he is perpetuating the myth of him being a son of Zeus.” A realistic approach was adopted when cinematically depicting mythological creatures such as the Lernan Hydra, Nemean Lion, Erymanthian Boar, Cerberus and Centaurs. “You see the Hydra as you imagine the Hydra to be – a seven headed snake-like creature; I happened to put the Hydra in a swamp because it was cool. It’s revealed in the story that the Hydra was seven assassins wearing snake-like helmets that Hercules killed.”
Reverse engineering was required to match the reality with the myth. “If you did see a Centaur in 350 B.C. what tricked the mind to make you look at a guy on a horse and think it was one unit? I played with the idea of whether I could photograph something like that and how would I do it. I would use camouflage and tricks of the sun. I did a photographic test where we lined up a rider and his horse with matching colours. We backlit it with the sun and the horse would be looking to the right. As soon as the horse came to a place where its head was covered by its body and the chest of the man was in silhouette, it looked like a Centaur.”
“In the beginning we didn’t know if we were going to go to New Zealand or shooting in Croatia,” remarks John Bruno who created a number of storyboards for the project. “Brett had hired Weta Workshop to design armour, swords, spears, costumes and had been working that way for a couple of months. I had done Avatar [2009] with them and I got my friends there to design specifically images of the Boar, the Hydra, and the Cerberus; they went through several iterations because I wanted them to be fantastical. Brett said, ‘No. It has to look real.’ Our conversations were always scaling everything down because I had a tendency to make them more like monsters.”
The first illustration of the Lernan Hydra was a success whereas the development of the Erymanthian Boar was a longer process. “The Boar had to be big enough to tear up farm field which is the size of a rhinoceros. The artwork that came back was impressive. Then it was the problem of, ‘How does he kill it?’ I came up with that Hercules has to run up a tree to get on top of it and attack it from above. This was all storyboarded way before production in December. We had some previs done to solidify the action. I had Rob Bliss [Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince], a really good British designer, do carousels of all of these creatures in 3D.”
“In my original storyboard Hercules is in the desert and comes across these giant tracks on the ground,” reveals John Bruno when discussing the appearance of the Nemean Lion. “He puts his hand inside the paw print and a shadow comes over him. Hercules turns around backlit by the sun outside as the lion leaps onto him. It’s outside so you see the lion in full daylight. I was nervous about this because we only had three months. I put it inside a cave that is all silhouetted and dark. There is one spot of light through an open area at the top of the cave. The lion would leap from the shadows into the light and that’s when we would only see it. Then the fight would be rolling in and out of light.”
Three vicious wolves haunt Hercules. “I wanted them to be bigger than normal wolves, to be scarred up with sword slices, their ribs exposed, and missing an eye. One has a sword slash across its snout because the last person they killed got one in before dying. They’re like caged pit bulls. We had to create them digitally and that was scary for me. They were backlit in a dark dungeon; you never get a really good look at them except for this fight which is all in quick cuts. I’m happy with how these wolves turned out.”
When it came to creating the battle sequences John Bruno was impressed by what was accomplished in Troy (2004), Robin Hood (2010) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and sought out the advise of the visual effects talent responsible for them. “They said, ‘You need a minimum of 250 soldiers in the front and try to put everything behind them. You do a lot of motion-capture. You have to think about smoke, fire and dust in all of your staging.’ We would shoot the master shot and then the battle was done with the second unit helping us with the idea of extending. It was a combination of shooting enough material and fighting against green screen; that was done for a long period of time.
The opening fight at the Bessi Village is successful and cool. Neil Corbould’s [Black Hawk Down] guys put together chariots. A chariot goes smoking around the corner with Hercules knocking guys down who end up being all digital because of safety. One of the guys jump onto the chariot, Hercules knocks him down and he goes under the wheels; it looks quite good but it’s digital. We had a lot of time to finesse that and the second unit would shoot inserts for us. We would continually enhance and expand that sequence.”
“In December of 2012, the first thing I storyboarded on the movie was the collapse of Hera’s temple,” explains John Bruno. “Hercules defends his mates from a thousand man onslaught coming up the steps of the temple. They first turnover these fire pots and cause this big fire to hold them back. When the fire goes down there’s nothing left, they’re just standing there so he pushes down this 65 foot tall statue. Logically how do we do that? I worked with the Production Designer Jean-Vincent Puzos [Lord of War]. We were looking at different statues and the bases of different statues. We saw these pillars on an old Greek structure. The statue is supported on a flat base of 20 of these caryatid statues. The temple is over an active volcanic fault. Steam had to come out from under the statue. The sulphur had eaten away at the stone over the years. At least Hercules as a guy can push this over. It might even be possible. We were always trying to be logical.”
MPC did a collapse test for the sequence was handed over to Method Studios to complete. “When the army gets close Hercules pushes the statue over, the base collapses acting like a few dozen canons shooting the crushing stones out in all directions and killing the first two rows of the soldiers who are on the top of the steps. The statue hits the side of the vertical pillars around it. The statue falls forward on the remaining guys and starts tumbling down, steamrolling over the soldiers. In a clockwise fashion the temple collapses around Hercules. It turned out well.”
“The arrows turned out to be huge,” reveals John Bruno. “There’s a scene where Atalanta [Ingrid Bolsø Berdal] does kicks, rolls and tumbles; the first time she did this she broke all of the arrows in her quiver. All of the prop guys were going crazy. ‘Wait a minute! Maybe we could put them down farther.’ But they didn’t look real. ‘Take them all out, have her do her stunts and we’ll track them in.’ We started to do that but then we got into this rule you can’t shoot an actual arrow with other people around. You can’t shoot on or into a set. It got crazy. They were all digital. Ingrid Bolsø Berdal [Chernobyl Diaries] was a great student and took to it quite well. I could talk to her and say, ‘When you pull this out it has to fall over here. Just remember you have something physical in your hand. You have to visualize it going onto the top of your hand. When you pull the bow back remember its in-between your two fingers. You have to keep a little gap.’ All that stuff from the first shot worked perfectly. Her natural sense of timing, dimensionality [how big the arrows were going to be] to previsualize the arc of the arrow. Sometimes Atalanta would have to shoot two arrows and at one point she does three.”
A frequent cinematographer for Brett Ranter is Dante Spinotti (L.A. Confidential). “What was different with this movie was it was all digital for him,” notes John Bruno. We used the Alexa camera with anamorphic lenses which meant that we had no error top and bottom. We had been mostly working at Super 35 where you had a little room to tilt up or down to readjust the shot. No one knew where the top of Hera’s statue was so we had to talk it through and visualize. I spent more time with Dante in the DOP tent composing shots; we would be talking to Brett. I’d say, ‘The army is going to extend to the right here so we have to imagine that there is more stuff on the right. Give me some headroom or room for things that were not there.’ We had a great working relationship. Many of these scenes were shot exterior outside day so lighting was everything.
Dante was really good at getting three quarter backlight which is best photography for the actors and digital doubles or anything else that we might be doing for them to seamlessly blend.” Another key member and regular Ranter collaborator is Mark Helfrich (Predator) who handled the editing along with Julia Wong (Red Riding Hood). “We would have cineSync sessions and Mark would send edited things. We would talk about how shots were going to go together. Mark came out at the end of principle photography for a week and a half of third unit where we would setup things. ‘Here are all of the things we need to fill in these gaps. We didn’t get a shot like this. We didn’t get a close-up here.’ We make sure that things were prepped for him visually.”
“There was a sequence where Hercules wakes up after having a dream about the Cerberus and walks outside into the citadel,” remarks John Bruno. “The film was restructured and we were going to cut that scene out. The solution was rotoing out Hercules and Amphiaraus [Ian McShane], and putting in a CG forest because they’re in the woods. In our second last reshoot, Dante, myself and Visual Effects Producer Dean Wright [RoboCop] were at Pinewood Studios. We went to the Black Forest which is a mile away and shot at the end of the day the sun dropping behind the trees. We stitched a bunch of plates together to see if it would work and hired a small company in London [Halo Post] to roto out the characters and drop in this background; it worked perfectly. It took two weeks of hard roto in Flame and my only adjustment to the entire scene was to lower the horizon.”
A favourite sequence for the veteran visual effects supervisor involves double axes. “There’s an image in the graphic novel that this story is based on of Tydeus of Thebes [Aksel Hennie] where he has the axes crossed and arrows are bouncing off of them. I said, ‘That would be cool. Why don’t we figure out a place where arrows are being shot and he blocks them out of the way?’ I storyboarded this thing where the axes were blocking arrows being shot at the boy. Tydeus runs at 20 archers who are shooting at him and that gets slow-motion; he’s bouncing arrows off of his blades and in 3D it looks spectacular.” A Director’s Cut will be released. “With the DVD they have another budget so we restored some shots that we never finished.”
Related links
Hercules Movie Site
