Sherlock Holmes

HOLMES SWEET HOLMES

Sherlock Holmes brings the fiction's most famous detective back to the world's movie screens once more, in an exhilarating new feature directed by Guy Ritchie, for Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures. The film stars Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, and it opens in the US on December 25th 2009, and in the UK on December 26th. Framestore have contributed nearly 450 VFX shots to the film.

The action-adventure mystery is set in 1891 and revolves around Holmes and Watson stopping a conspiracy to destroy Britain. The film opens with Holmes apprehending the murderous cult leader Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), who promises he will return from the dead and exact his revenge as he is being led to the gallows…

Sherlock Holmes is a decidedly modern reworking of the legend. As envisioned by Ritchie and his producers, Holmes is a man of action as much as of intellect, and his idiosyncrasies extend to knowledge of martial arts and a taste for brawling. London itself is not the postcard-Victoriana home of gently trotting hansom cabs, velvet fogs and genteel terraces, but a panorama of grime, poverty and half-finished industrial monstrosities. All of which gave ample employment to Framestore's artists, whose work ranged from meticulous digital painting and modeling of period locations, to spectacular set-pieces such as a perilous shipyard fight, and an amazing sequence featuring a gauntlet of high explosives.

The experience was unusually pleasurable, say the Framestore team, who enjoyed an excellent relationship both with Ritchie and his VFX Supervisor, Chas Jarret. Says Framestore VFX Supervisor for the film, Jonathan Fawkner, "Chas presented us with a beautifully prepared bid package – scrupulously detailed and thought through; the shoot was excellently prepared; and Guy Ritchie was a pleasure to work with – a jovial figure on and off set, imbuing the proceedings with a feeling of relaxed good nature." Fawkner led a team of up to 90 artists and technicians throughout the 11 month post period, working with Framestore Producers Tim Keene and Alexandra Daunt Watney.

THE INVISIBLE ART
Victorian London is a period at once remote and recent. So much of everyday life has changed, and yet the city locations – even, sometimes, the architecture – remain. In fact, the film's location material was shot in London, Manchester and Liverpool, all of which retain areas that have stayed relatively unchanged in 150 years. Nonetheless, there was much work to be done at Framestore to ensure an authentic backdrop. Heading a six-strong team of digital matte artists was Lead Digital Matte Painter Jason Horley. "Whilst some of the shots Guy Ritchie wanted were panoramic cityscapes," he says, "None of them were meant to draw attention to themselves – the panoramas were incidental, as it were. The ethos throughout was one of gritty, low-key authenticity – nothing self-consciously ‘'magnificent'. So we tried as much as we could to sublimate our work into the images, to the point where you usually won’t even be aware of it."

Matte painting and other digital cosmetic work formed the bulk of Framestore’s shot-count for Sherlock Holmes. An essential complement to this was the work of the project’s compositing team, led by Anthony Smith, whose work brought everything to life, seamlessly inserting green-screen elements, and placing the matte paintings onto the plate with countless touches that helped lend verisimilitude. Everything from Baker Street (the set-based residence of Holmes), to the Houses of Parliament, Piccadilly Circus to day for night boat rides on the Thames, were lovingly, yet invisibly enhanced. "One thing we found whilst researching through photo archives was the extent to which advertising covered so many surfaces back then," says Horley, "You think of omnipresent adverts as a distinctly modern phenomenon, but the Victorians put ads up everywhere they could. And the streets of London were also covered with shop awnings that often extended right across the pavement. These are small details, true, but they affect the ambience of the exteriors a lot."

In addition to straight matte shots, Horley's and Smith's team's work was also complemented through projection onto 3D models for some shots where the camera was moving, or when it made economic sense to extend the 2D rather than go fully CG. Most of the team's work was done in Photoshop, with 2.5D work projected within Maya, using proprietary plug-ins, as well as Nuke.

MAKING A BIG SPLASH
No London crime film would seem to be complete without a scene featuring meat on hooks, and Sherlock Holmes does not buck the trend. A fight in an abattoir features some dangling pig carcasses which, as they were something of an afterthought, were actually CG. It was not a tough brief and creating them came as something like light relief, says CG Supervisor Laurent Hugueniot, after the demands made on his team by one of the most spectacular sequences in the film, known in-house as the Shipyard Sequence.

In pursuit of Dredger, a gigantic, scar-faced thug, Holmes and Watson find themselves in a vast Thames-side shipyard, where a copper-hulled steamship is in mid-construction. Facing off against the brute, the large wooden poles that hold the ship in place are destroyed and the vessel begins to slide down the slipway, slowly at first but soon accelerating. An enormous chain connects the ship to a capstan, and as the ship enters the water the multi-ton capstan is dragged off its mooring and bounds down the slipway like a ball on a string, wreaking destruction as it goes and heading straight for Holmes…

Almost the entire interior environment is a CG construct for some of the shots, as are the ship, chain and capstan. Although there was a plate, so many of the modern day elements had to be removed that a model of the interior of the shed was created and imported into Nuke, onto which a matte painter painted all the corrections. This asset was utilized and maintained by Anthony Smith’s compositing team, who could drop it into every shot. The actors were filmed in a real shipyard in Chatham, Kent, where a truncated version of the ship's hull was also built. "Because so little of the ship had actually been constructed on the set," recalls Hugueniot, "We were given quite a bit of leeway in terms of designing the rest of it – what sort of ship it was, how far construction had proceeded, and what sort of 'dressing' there would be – gantries, scaffolding, etc. – Guy gave us a pretty free hand in these matters."

The set had been LIDAR scanned, providing the CG with a precise map of where the dozens of props were, so that it could all be digitally replicated. The team worked out precisely the pace at which the ship moved and accelerated, deriving their CG organized chaos from this carefully calculated trajectory. Their work was further complicated by the varying lighting conditions caused by the large amounts of light coming from the roof of the structure's dozens of skylights.

There is a misleading lull after the ship has entered the water, which is broken by the capstan bounding after it like an enormous iron bobbin. This was animated over six months or so by a six-strong team at Framestore's Reykjavik office, headed by Dadi Einarsson. Says Einarsson, "The capstan shots are highly dramatic, and the way it behaves needed to be quite carefully controlled to bring this drama out, so we found that it worked best to treat the capstan and chain as characters to be animated, rather than as simple objects. We were able to use our animators' eye and judgment to keep it looking real." Einarsson's team also had the less taxing task of choreographing some flies into synchronous counterclockwise formation, as they fly around in a jar responding to the sound of Holmes's violin.

"There is an interesting tension between the two routes you use to make a sequence like this work," reflects Hugueniot. "You use animation and dynamics (where real-world physics are calculated and decide the behaviour of the objects). Animation gives you complete control, in terms of choreographing a shot and using the space precisely as you want to, but at the possible expense of realism, since the human eye is so adept at detecting even the tiniest of 'bogus' movements. With dynamics, you get the reverse – utterly convincing motion, but without being able to precisely call the shots. So, of course, you do your best to blend them together. Sometimes animation drives the dynamics, sometimes its 'real life' tweaked by animation." The CG team worked in Maya, using Framestore's proprietary fBounce tool, nCloth for the dynamics, as well as blastCode.

Anthony Smith’s team contributed enormously to the scene for the shots involving the ship’s arrival in the water. Remarkably, this was accomplished purely in the compositing, without additional 3D elements. Although water and craft elements had been captured during a specially shot lifeboat launch, all of these had to be scaled up, split up, multi-planed and otherwise modified using every trick in the compositor’s book, making this an astonishing technical achievement.

FIRE RUN WITH ME
Another opportunity for the Framestore team to show off their paces came with the Wharf Explosion, a sequence of characteristically Ritchie flamboyance which was actually a relatively late addition to the VFX shopping list.

Holmes and Watson, in the company of femme fatale Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), are investigating an area in the London docks when Watson hits a tripwire in an alley between a warehouse and the dockside. This sets off a sequence of timed explosions which engulf him completely and throws Holmes backwards. Watson seems likely to have perished, so Holmes goes to save Irene. Snatching up a large wooden tray as a makeshift shield, he runs – in slow-motion – a gauntlet of explosions to reach her.

Fawkner and his team are hugely proud of what they achieved for this sequence. "It's only an eight shot sequence, but they were a tough eight. One shot is heading for 2000 frames long, and the raw material is basically Holmes running through thin air," says Fawkner, "We had to create everything which fills the frame – explosions, fire, smoke, debris – all of which interact with him in a detailed and realistic way, and all in super slow motion. There's no question of him coming through this unscathed – he's buffeted and burned by virtual materials every step of the way. Robert Downey Jr.'s performance was excellent (of course), giving us a firm platform on which to build our firestorm. Special mention should also go to Chas Jarret's beautiful green screen capture of the fireball elements we used. We had to throw everything we knew into this sequence – there was manipulation of the plate, manipulation of the lighting, and Laurent Hugueniot's team brought CG elements including fire, smoke a collapsing brick wall, and a huge amount of flying debris and decimated barrels. But 3D elements notwithstanding, it really is a state of the art showcase for what can be achieved in 2D and compositing. Plus it’s very cool and beautiful looking.” The sequence has also been nominated for a Best Compositing Award in the 2010 VES Awards.