In theory, keeping shapes in shadow to show less has always made the jobs of visual effects artists somewhat easier, except that with CG, images can go muddy or invisible unless a delicate touch is employed. "There's a very fine line, so we ended up doing a lot more film-outs, because your monitor is less useful in making aesthetic judgments when you get into the really dark footage around the toe of the [exposure] curve," says Beck, who brought his experience creating Titanic's almost invisible CG iceberg to bear on The X-Files movie's spaceship. "We literally worked through balancing the darkness of the interior in CG. We had versions where we couldn't see enough detail, and you need enough detail to see the complexity that makes something look big. If we'd made it too dark, the audience wouldn't have been able to see what the hell is in the background it would just turn to mud. Making something too bright, on the other hand, can give you a look that's a little CG-ish. For that reason, we kept things dark and put lots of light behind objects in our CG set, which creates a sense of great depth and allows a lot of the action to play out in silhouette. Part of the rule of The X-Files is the cliché that we hide stuff in light and shadow. In fact, in one episode of the TV show, there's a moment where you're looking at a spaceship and you can't quite see it because it's really dark; then all of a sudden, the light comes on and you can't quite see it because it's really bright! That's the kind of trick we like to use."
This type of radical contrast range is employed when Mulder first encounters the mammoth spacecraft interior. As the FBI agent walks down to the end of the upper rim corridor and into the interior area, he passes into darkness before emerging into blinding light. "It's a bit like entering the Forum through one of those entrances where it's all dark," Beck explains. "I remember doing that as a kid at Boston Garden, walking from this dark tunnel out into this room with glaring lights. We'd called that moment in the film the 'entering the arena' shot."
Shooting within the colossal colorful set was a fairly complex job; almost everywhere the camera was pointed, colored screens were set up to facilitate the CG set extensions that would be composited in post. To achieve the proper contrast, the colors of the set and the effects screens had to be different. Beck recalls, "David Duchovny was wearing a navy blue suit, and in the original test, the spaceship was lit mostly with blue light, so we had a really big greenscreen. But as the spaceship's design evolved, the artists decided to put some green lights in, so as Mulder walked from one area to another, he crossed against a bunch of glowing green pods, then walked in front of a bit of the set before finally crossing in front of a greenscreen. We also had Day-Glo red tracking balls, cubes and marks within the set; there were actually shots where David was in front of bluescreen and greenscreen and crossing in front of those red tracking objects, so we had to make mattes for those, too."
If the shots inside the spacecraft had been fairly static, Beck and company would not have had such a rough time, but Bowman gave them no quarter in terms of camera movement. The director crows, "I shot handheld and did crane moves and all kinds of wild stuff; out of 200-plus visual effects shots, very few of them were motion control."
Indeed, Beck characterizes Bowman as "an extremely active-camera director," which created "adventures in tracking" for the artists working on all 30 of the spaceship interior shots. Consider, for example, what Beck humorously terms "the whoop-de-do grand-tour shot": Mulder walks through a huge vault toward the camera, which then swoops up as he passes, panning with him and looking upward at the ceiling. Finally, as he crosses the camera, it rises, looking over his shoulder and down at the gigantic vault. "I don't know what the percentages are, but there isn't much set in that shot," Beck says with a grin. "He's walking from the end of this corridor out onto this little balcony, so basically the little balcony and what we arc under is the set; everything else was totally CG."
In the next shot, the camera hovers above Mulder as he sees Scully down below; it then tilts almost straight down, following Mulder as he crawls through a hole in the balcony (revealing a downward view akin to looking off Yosemite's El Capitan) and begins his descent. "The hole in the balcony and the slide he's trying to climb down were real," Beck says, "but everything else the entire environment that we're looking down at was synthetic. There were these glowing pods down there floating above an even deeper abyss, with pipes going down into this faintly backlit greenish mist. Mulder begins sliding down, so the camera bounces down this track and does a whip-pan with him; it flies down the track to simulate his POV as he hurtles towards something he's going to smack into, and then bounces off into oblivion. It's like sliding down the Lhotse Face opposite Everest. Because we had such an active camera, that shot involved a lot of tracking. The whole environment was bouncing, so it was heavily motion-blurred, which was somewhat more forgiving. But that also made tracking more difficult, because all of our tracking marks also became motion-blurred. Fortunately, we had some tricks we could use to deal with that."
Some of Beck's suggestions included transforming the occasional complex tracking job into an in-camera shot. "There was a shot where Rob was dollying on a track past all these cryopods, and he went to a longer lens," Beck recalls. "Suddenly, it became a really complicated shot because of the bluescreen at the end of this little dolly. If we just cheated the camera back a couple of pods, the bluescreen would be really small in the frame and not changing as much in three dimensions, making it a much easier shot to do. Rob backed up the camera, and when he was done framing the shot, the bluescreen was in a little corner of the frame and there were green and blue setpieces off in the background. I said, 'Why don't we just shut off the lights on that bluescreen and let it be a dark blue so it will blend right into the set?' In the end, we saved a bluescreen shot. You don't have to make every shot an effects shot, and you also don't have to make every effects shots follow all the rules. Like a lot of things in life, you can get hurt breaking the rules, but you can also have a breakthrough."
[ continued on page 4 ]