Amazing Before & After VFX Breakdown - "I Am Legend"
1,177In our videos, we generally talk about how effects were achieved and the amount of work that went into them during production and post-production. One thing we don't talk about an awful lot, however, is Pre-production and its importance...
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Pre-production is basically when they break the movie down into scenes with storyboards. Locations, props, cast members, costumes, special effects, and visual effects are identified and planned.
The lack of VFX pre-production in this film led to failed VFX and a final product that didn't quite hit the mark.
Post-apocalypse New York
Sony Imageworks' challenge was to create a "New York" that had been deserted for 3 years and make it as real as possible, which meant a bunch of research.
They researched which plants would grow, where they would grow and how much the would grow, as well as what kind of animals would reinhabit the area.
Firstly they removed any sign of life from the live-action plates then they added weathering and ageing to the cityscape. They developed a specific pipeline that would procedurally grow 20 different types of plants with 20 different additional leaves and flower species and each one of these having many variations.
Two full CG models were created for Times square and the city port and Brooklyn Bridge, and an additional simpler model of Brooklyn Bridge built in Houdini was created so it could be destroyed by a missile.
The Dark Seekers
According to the director Francis Lawrence, "the Dark Seekers" probably should have stayed in the dark!
Originally the idea was to use actors wearing prosthetics and make-up for the dark seekers, a team of around 50 parkour specialists were hired and trained by movement coaches to obtain their "behavioural characteristics".
When shooting started, Lawrence realized that they looked like "a bunch of mime artists running across Washington Square Park and that the dark seekers would have to be CG.
Having done no pre-production the VFX team now had a mammoth task and little time.
The team created two main "Alpha" characters, a male and a female and from these, they created another two body types were created, and by altering height, thinness, depth, and width they were able to build a total of 43 different models.
A lot of care was put into texture, their skin had to be slightly translucent and since they lacked body fat, muscles and tendons had to be visible.
Although in some scenes these monsters look incredible as they interact with Will Smith, in others, they don,t quite make it, This destroys the whole effect and breaks the illusion for the audience.
The Importance of pre-production has never shown more than it did in "I am Legend",
a film that in its first 60 minutes has the makings of a classic only to fall into the mundane in the last 45.
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