"I also worked a lot with Simon Crane to perfect using the air cannons to fly the amputees up in the air [to simulate the effects of explosions]. They would sit almost right on top of one of them, and Simon attached a wire to their back that was connected to a 50-ton crane. As we let the explosion off, we had a nitrogen jerk ram activated by the same button that lifted the guy up in the air. He then released himself from the wire at the right moment and landed on the beach, with his limb blown off. I think that was very effective."
The incredible reality of the beachhead carnage resulted in a harrowing experience for the filmmakers. "The practical effects gave all of us -- the crew, the actors, and myself -- a feeling of actually being under combat conditions, and the actors couldn't help but react to it," Spielberg says. "Often we would walk away from a setup with our hands shaking, and it informed everyone's performance. It certainly reinformed me, from shot to shot, how I needed to tell the story. From Close Encounters through the Jurassic Park films, I've done a lot of movies in which whatever was going to be onscreen wasn't in front of the camera, and I've had to rely a lot on my actors' imaginations so their reactions would be appropriate for what was going to be added in postproduction. But for Private Ryan, it was critically essential that everybody understand what it felt like to be fired upon, and the only way to do that was through the use of physical effects as opposed to visual effects. I could not have gotten that sense of reality digitally."
However, there were certain shots that were too dangerous, too complex or too ambitious to create in-camera. For these 40 shots, Spielberg turned to Industrial Light & Magic. On Saving Private Ryan, ILM added everything from bullets whizzing through water to an armada of Allied vessels off the Normandy coast. Visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett offers, "I think Steven had the right idea, which was basically to film everything in-camera if possible. But you can't shoot something that is potentially dangerous near your principal actors. That's where we can do things that add an extra level of drama or, to a certain extent, shock value."
Among the contributions that Guyett, fellow visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, and ILM's artists provided were a variety of digital wounds, which were prevalent in the graphic D-Day landing sequence. "In one instance, we matched a bloodier stump to the end of [an amputee stuntman's] leg after he landed a little closer to the camera than expected," Guyett recalls.
Later in the scene, a hapless G.I.'s helmet deflects an incoming round. Marveling at his luck, he removes the helmet to examine the resulting dent, only to have another bullet immediately rip through his forehead. "That was one of our big shots," Guyett says. "Gonzalo Escudero did a great job making it believable. That was difficult because we were trying to create this bloody spray, which has to have organic, very physical properties, with digital techniques. In another shot, a soldier running down a trench got shot in the back, but there was no blood. Caitlin Content added blood spraying from the wound by augmenting particle systems with five or six hand-painted frames done via [ILM's] Saber [computer platform]. We used a similar technique for another shot in which a soldier gets shot in the head, arm and leg as he's hiding behind a steel beach obstacle."
Although Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, ASC chose to desaturate Ryan's images by using Technicolor's ENR process, the director wanted the blood to retain a vivid quality, which created challenges for both ILM's digital crew and Corbould's practical effects team. Corbould's company ultimately mixed their own stage blood to create a hue that would render appropriately onscreen after undergoing ENR, augmenting some pre-made plasma from Screen Face for shots in which Omaha Beach ran red.
At ILM, the ENR process was both a blessing and a curse. Because of the deliberately gritty look of the original footage, ILM's digital artists weren't too concerned about matching the sharpness of the images, but they did have to repeatedly film out each shot to see if their effects stood out by being more colorful than the plates. The ENR process often turned ILM's wound effects brown, so Kenneth Smith created color&45;test wedges to find the right "red saturation point" for the digital blood. "The ENR process is a bit unpredictable, so we tried our best to balance our effects to the plates," Guyett says. "Some of our effects were fairly subtle, and putting them through the ENR process made a tremendous difference to the contrast relationships and the saturation."
Beyond that, the 45- and 90-degree shutter effects that Kaminski employed to deliberately cause the images to strobe forced CG supervisor Gregor Lakner to heavily research the correct timings for ILM's digital explosions.
ILM also added to the chaos of Omaha Beach by creating digital bullet hits sparking off the steel beach obstacles, as well as the endless tracer fire from the German machine guns. "A lot of our work was adding hits around the guys as they came out of the landing craft, when Steven didn't want the squibs getting too close to the actors," Guyett says. "We also added lots of dirt being kicked up by bullet hits near the actors."
As troops pile out of the Higgins landing craft, many are dragged beneath the waves by their equipment, but the heavy machine gun fire continues to pursue them underwater, with deadly rounds still finding their targets and dispelling the notion that it's safe below the surface. "It's not," Spielberg explains. "Water will slow a projectile down and eventually stop it, but there is still a lethal range of about seven feet.
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