Director Roland Emmerich is widely known for blockbuster disaster-style pics such as “Independence Day” and “2012.” Although the setting has changed, the visual effects are no less impressive in his latest film, “Anonymous,” which focuses on the real identity of Shakespeare.
Faced with the daunting — and expensive — prospect of having to re-create an entire 16th century London or find a suitable place to film it, Emmerich used his visual effects experience on his previous films as his guide to realizing “Anonymous” on a reasonable budget.
“There was this test shot we did on ‘2012’ of a car driving through Los Angeles,” explained Volker Engel of production company Uncharted Territory, who was a a visual effects supervisor on “Anonymous” and one of the film’s executive producers.
“That was the point where Roland decided that for ‘2012’ we could do these vistas completely digitally, and that eventually led to him to saying, for ‘Anonymous,’ ‘You know what, I don’t actually have to go [to London]. We can build this.’”
The film was ultimately shot at Germany’s Studio Babelsberg using only key set pieces, interiors and large green-screen sets.
In addition, the epic wide shots of London were all completely digital, fleshed out by means of an interchangeable digital building block system devised by Uncharted and dubbed OGEL — literally “LEGO” backward.
OGEL allowed artists to create, inside Autodesk’s 3ds Max, just a few versions of timber or stone houses that could be recombined in multiple ways with different doors, roofs and other details.
Although the geometry of the buildings was digital, their locations were based on old maps and their textures created from purpose-shot photographs. “I went to England to shoot several thousand stills with a Canon 5D and 1D camera,” recalled Marc Weigert, also a visual effects supervisor and executive producer on the film. “We had real textures — nothing was painted.”
The flowing River Thames was created as a 3-D element entirely inside Eyeon’s Fusion compositing package. Additional details in the London shots included digital boats, horses, birds and even cats — and, of course, crowds of people.
These crowds were “agents” made inside Massive software; up to 20,000 virtual characters appear in the funeral procession along the frozen Thames, each with his or her own individual cloth simulation.
“Anonymous” was filmed on several digital prototype ARRI ALEXA cameras — in fact, the production used four or five of the only seven such cameras then in existence. With such a heavy green-screen component, there were also several challenges in creating good composites through smoke and fog, and even through the semi-transparent collars worn by Queen Elizabeth I.
Still, Emmerich’s shooting approach was hugely successful — whole scenes such as a courtyard gun battle were filmed on a 360-degree green-screen set.
But Weigert said that, next time, he would actually prefer to shoot on blue screen. “After shooting so long on green screen, all you can see is green for days and days. Blue screen is more mellow — there’s something about it that’s very nice.”