American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 50

◗

Macro Heroics

Top:
Yellowjacket
takes aim at a
shrunken-down
Ant-Man.
Bottom: Lang
dispatches a
coterie of
henchmen.

or so he's CG and then the rest of the
shot is mostly live action. Nearly every
shot with little Ant-Man is CG.
"Early on in the process,"
Morrison continues, "we discovered that
no matter how small the lens was, or how
close we got to a surface, the resulting
photography looked like a crane shot
when we placed Ant-Man in there. As
Ant-Man is only 0.5 inches, a lens with
the entrance pupil 6 inches above the
deck reads like a Supertechno 30. We
actually ended up referring to our
motion-control passes as 'macro aerial
plates'! The magic of Rebecca's photography was that even if a macro set was recreated within the computer, we were
able to give the visual-effects vendors the
motion-picture footage as an absolute
guide so there would be no question of
50

August 2015

the photo-reality of the results."
Double Negative was charged
with creating the main 3D model assets
for Ant-Man and Yellowjacket, as well
as capturing macro environments for
later animation by all vendors. "We were
embedded into the macro cinematography unit with three Canon 5D Mark III
DSLR cameras and Canon 100mm
USM macro lenses [f2.8] mounted on
[Clauss Rodeon Pixpert] robotic panand-tilt-heads," reveals Alex Wuttke,
visual-effects supervisor for Double
Negative. "We shot a huge amount of
raw stills at a variety of different exposure and focus brackets. We also did
Lidar scans and Mephisto-structured
light scans for set and prop geometry,
and HDRI probe passes to capture the
on-set lighting.
American Cinematographer

"We shot many sequences crosspolarized to extract specularity from the
underlying diffuse nature of the surfaces,"
Wuttke continues. "We put polarizing gels
onto the lights and cross-polarizing filters
on the lenses, then used the repeatable
Rodeon head to shoot with and without
the polarization. From those vast amounts
of data, we used Jigsaw, our proprietary
image-stitching tool, to generate huge
panoramas of up to 20K resolution for sets
that measured as little as 60 centimeters
across. We'd use the focus bracketing to
render them infinitely sharp and then send
the completed panoramas to the other
effects vendors for use in all of the macro
sequences."
Luma Pictures handled a number of
different macro sequences, including one
toward the film's climax set in a computernetwork server room. "Ant-Man is flying
around and scraping very close to many
different surfaces, which was an incredible
amount of detail to partition out,"
describes Vince Cirelli, visual-effects
supervisor for Luma. "Take a computer
keyboard and desk, for example. From a
typical perspective, it's a handful of objects
and their textures. But at the macro level
you have all the dust and grime and additional pieces of geometry all over each
item. Those texture data and assets get
multiplied over hundreds of surfaces and
thousands of objects in the server room.
"The [completed] movie has probably some of the highest volume of objectasset work seen in films today," he adds.
Cirelli's teams modeled in Maya, with
Arnold for rendering and Nuke for
compositing. Luma delivered completed
shots as 2K DPX files onto the production's secure Signiant file-sharing service
via fiber channel.
In stark contrast to the grandiose
vistas that background most superherofilm finales, Ant-Man's climactic battle
sequence takes place in Scott's daughter's
bedroom, where the hero and Yellowjacket
shrink in size to tussle atop a speeding toy
train set. Levine lit the compact bedroom
set with Chimera Pancake Lanterns,
Lowel Rifa eXchanges and a hybrid
balloon overhead.
"The train fight is really original,

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2015