Every time I see the beginning of the new WOTW I’m intrigued by an early shot that I’ve been meaning to ask the dope film techies about.
It’s when we fly in to Tom Cruise sitting in his crane. The shot starts high and away like we’re in a helicopter, then comes in closer, then closer, and closer until it comes to rest about ten feet outside Tom Cruise’s cab - all in one smooth motion.
How did they do that?
Nothing about it reeked of CGI although I imagine that had something to do with it. Was it a few live shots very carefully shot and stitched together to give the impression of one fluid shot?
I don’t know the technicalities, but this technique is used a number of times in the film. My favorite is the scene where they’re fleeing in the van down the highway: it looks as if it’s nothing but a single tracking shot but it’s a number of composites and CGI work, expertly merged into a near-seamless whole.
There’s another shot later in the movie where the camera is pointed inside the minivan, like it’s on a conventional rig mounted on the side of the car-- until it swoops up and around the minivan, revealing no such rig, and finally settling on the opposite side! Clearly some form of CGI magic going on, but it’s uncannily fluid.
There are also some shots that appear as reflections in mirrors or glass, as well as the well-publicized camera viewer shot of the first tripod raising holy hell.
I noticed the mirror thing being copied almost immediately after the films release.
Check out “The Birdcage” for a cool opening shot. The camera flies in across the ocean and directly into the nightclub. I watched it several times before I found the seam. As I recall, there’s a car and/or a person on skates that’s position changes to give away the dissolve. Very well done.
That, of course, is the point of CGI work – it can take even shaky movement and, by going through frame-by-frame, make it look really fluid.
I think the very first CGI work I ever saw that wasn’t an attempt at computer animation, or special effects for a science fiction movie, was a commercial I saw in Salt Lake City for – of all things – automatic garage doors, CIRCA 1986. The owner of the company stood next to a garage door and gestured to it. The camera pulled back and to the side a bit, keeping view of hi all the time, standing still in that gesture, then someone came along and picked him up, only now he was a cardboard cutout. Clearly they shot him in the ad, at some point during the tracking shot he walked out, and was replaced by the cardboard cutout. At the time, it was a startling ad. But when more CGI started to get used, I realized that they had used the CGI in this ad very subtly to make that smooth transition between the man and the cutout.
I actually noticed the camerawork when I first saw the movie: the fluidity of the movement and the clarity of the reflections really stood out in a way that they don’t in almost any other film. If you recall, the audiences first view of a fully-extended tripod was in a reflection off a coffee-shop window. When I saw that, I realized that the film was going to be, in some ways, a “test” of a number of new techniques for Spielberg and his crew in the same manner of Jurassic Park.
On the other hand, in Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety (IIRC), the camera zooms in on a house while a dinner party is going on inside. The camera gets closer and closer, eventually hitting the window loudly. Everyone stops talking and stares at it. The camera then backs away, as if in embarrassment…
As a general rule of thumb, when it’s only nonliving things in the scene (cars, skyscrapers, etc.), it’s perfectly possible to do flawless, undetectable CG from scratch. For living things, it’s possible to do it good enough that a person not intimately familiar with that type of creature won’t be able to tell. Unfortunately, humans are one type of creature with which everyone is intimately familiar, so computer-generated humans still look subtly off.
Of course, nothing requires that it all be done from scratch, either. They might, for instance, have taken actual footage of Cruise sitting on a soundstage, and combined that with a computer-generated van. Or maybe Cruise and the van were both real, but the road and buildings were digital. Or maybe none of it was real, and they just took advantage of the fact that the real Tom Cruise is even more off than the computerized one, so that nobody would notice the difference.
