The Aviator Lands in Venice Beach
Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, The Aviator, a biopic about the first half of the life of Howard Hughes, is a rare commodity in today’s Cineplex: a family entertainment picture that is smart, well-crafted, and mildly subversive. Hughes’ life is tailor-made for the big screen. He dreamed big and his achievements—record-breaking aeronautical feats, epic movies, the biggest plane ever built, love affairs with movie stars—require the full width of the screen. As a period piece covering the ’20s to the ’50s, hundreds of visual effects shots were needed to convincingly recreate the past.
Hughes was a pioneer and contrarian who spent his long career challenging traditional wisdom and the status quo. Most of the time this paid off, and so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Hughes, the director of epic motion pictures in the ’20s and ’30s, would have eagerly embraced revolutionary digital technology. He surely would have appreciated the notion that digital artists are beholden to no one (even if they are not heirs to a fortune).
Which brings us to a more modern story of technology and freedom at DNA, a visual effects boutique that handled 68 shots for The Aviator. Darius Fisher, founder of the Venice, Calif.-based studio, began his career in London in the late ’80s. Yet another teenager who got hold of a VHS deck and camera, his hobby led to work as an assistant director in London’s music video scene. By the early ’90s, after a few directing stints, Fisher became interested in digital post production. As it turns out, Darius ended up at New York’s largest animation studio, Curious Pictures, where he and partner Melanie Franciosi worked on digital effects for a series of Miller Lite commercials. This began his successful stateside career as a compositor and visual effects artist. Like Hughes, it wasn’t long before Fisher headed to Hollywood to make his mark in the movies. Hughes made epic pictures, Fisher started a small studio, Digital Neural Axis.
DNA is a home studio in Venice Beach serving up online NLE, motion graphics, and visual effects services with a comfortable patio, dartboard, and hazy coastal sunlight thrown in at no extra charge. The company now has four full-time employees, and while they handled commercial effects and a few shots from the Tom Cruise pic The Last Samurai, The Aviator was a big step up in complexity and magnitude. Home studios don’t always scale well, but Fisher built his pipeline to have fast throughput and lots of storage.
“We currently have fourteen G5 Macintosh computers and two PCs. We have about 3TB of RAID5 storage [Xserve RAID] served by a G5 Xserve. Gigabit Ethernet connects all the workstations. We have a main HD/SD edit suite with 1.2TB of HD-capable Fibre Channel attached storage, Blackmagic HD Pro Dual Link card, with HDLink to a 23 inch Apple Cinema Display, and component out to a Sony HD client monitor. We share a Digi Beta and HDCAM playback deck [J3] with a closely associated neighborhood company and have Beta SP, DVCAM, and 3 / 4 decks, etc. in house. We run Final Cut Pro HD™, but also have an Avid 9000XL suite.” Fisher has been using Adobe After Effects™ since version 1.0, and this, along with other Adobe products, is the main compositing software.
Being a capable, even innovative, boutique is not enough to land a contract for a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese. This would be true anywhere, but it’s especially true in the southern end of Santa Monica, which has the highest concentration of effects shops on the planet. Fortunately, an old friendship came into play. Fisher’s friend, Ron Ames, was the 1st AD of the visual effects unit for The Aviator. Rob Legato, the well-known effects cinematographer, was the supervisor. “Ron eventually went on to play the role of visual effects producer,” Fisher says. “He was very familiar with DNA’s broad range of skills and had suggested to Rob Legato that I might be helpful in the area of previz and vfx editing. Ron brought Rob over to meet us in May, saw our vfx reel, and decided to ask us to bid on some shots in the movie.”
The first shot that DNA was asked to work on was the interior of the sleek looking XF11 spy plane. In 1946, Hughes piloted a test flight for the XF11 that ended in disaster when the gear box for the counter rotating propellers failed and the plane lost power. Hughes ditched the plane in Beverly Hills slicing through the roof of a home and crashing in a backyard where the plane caught fire. Hughes survived (miraculously, since the plane was completely destroyed), but was left scarred by fire and with permanent damage to one leg. The scene is incredible to watch, partly because it’s true, but also because the plane had such a small cockpit that offered Hughes no protection.
DNA’s shot of the XF11 was well received, which led to bids on interior shots of Hughes’ most famous plane, the Hercules (aka, Spruce Goose), by far the largest plane ever built. Work on the plane commenced during the war and because of the scarcity of strategic materials such as aluminum, it was decided to build the immense plane out of wood. This and Hughes’ perfectionism meant that the plane would not be finished before war’s end, which led to an investigation into military procurement practices by the government. In 1947, during a break in the hearings, Hughes took the Hercules out for an engine test, but instead made an unscheduled flight over water for a distance of just over a mile. The short flight silenced critics of the plane and the hearings were cut short soon after. It was a double triumph for Hughes, politically and as an engineer, and it’s one of the movie’s most exciting scenes.
The majority of DNA’s work on The Aviator are shots of the Hercules interior and its single, history-making flight. But while other effects houses in L.A. were executing shots for The Aviator with dozens of artists, 200-node render farms, and Flame and Inferno systems, DNA was having to accomplish the same level work with far less infrastructure. Fisher’s pipeline for The Aviator was all HD, a decision made possible because of the DeckLink HD card. “On The Aviator, the first phase of work was to do temp composites of all of our shots using all HD source material for a preview screening,” Fisher says. “We were given all the greenscreen material as 8-bit HD QuickTime™'s with an FCP project containing the edited sequence. We did all the composites, cut them back into the timeline, tweaked them to work in the sequence, and delivered them back for approval as HD QuickTime™'s when we were happy with them. The Blackmagic card helped us to see all our shots in the edit playing at full motion (24fps) and full 1920x1080 resolution using the HDlink and a 23 inch Apple display, and also on our HD CRT with the analog HD component outs.”
One of the significant changes in visual effects in terms of leveling the playing field is the ability of smaller shops to work affordably in HD. Small shops like DNA can now work in the same bit depth and resolution as the largest visual effects studios. In addition, there are now a considerable number of indie projects originating in HD, which means that a costly telecine session is no longer necessary. Instead, a few hours of download time from VTRs such as HDCAM and HD D-5 are the one, reasonable out-of-house expense. “We used to stay away from HD, except to work on pre-digitized files given to us that we then returned as composites, because the price for capturing hardware, suitable hard drives, and monitoring was so prohibitive,” Fisher says. “The Blackmagic DeckLink and HDLink products were our first foray into hardware solutions at DNA. We had become dependent on their SD products and impressed with their price, performance, and support, and so I think we were one of the first end-users to get an HD Pro Dual Link card in the U.S., and we put it to work immediately with an HDLink on The Aviator.”
From almost any perspective, affordable storage, fast CPUs, and solutions like those offered by the DeckLink series of HD cards open up entire new markets for boutique studios. An early adopter of desktop video solutions, Fisher has seen the rewards from his decade-long belief in technology payoff. “I don’t really have any hands-on experience of non-desktop solutions, except for hands on my checkbook paying up to $400 an hour for Flame or linear online suites. I think you have similar challenges in modern high-end facilities as far as engineering, interconnectivity, workflow, troubleshooting, and maintenance. I think also the challenges are perhaps more accessible in terms of being able to self-engineer and scale up a desktop-based studio. Nevertheless, you have to build up a body of knowledge and experience, as well as trusting your intuition in order to keep the systems performing as they get more complex. Knowing who to ask when you’re in over your head also helps. In terms of a single editorial and graphics station that can handle SD, HD, and film work, it’s never been easier on a desktop platform than it is now.”
Desktop production was the right technology for The Aviator, a movie about a visionary’s love of technology. The digital revolution has reached the point where a home-based studio is the equal (on a shot-by-shot basis) to 90 percent of the top effects studios anywhere in the world. The equivalent of breaking the speed barrier in flight might compare to the taming of HD. We are now in the Jet Age of visual information, and no artist can make the excuse that he does not have the money for the best tools. Now talent is the differentiator. For Hughes and Fisher, the sky is not the limit.
