In this installment of Comics2Film's continuing coverage of the visit to Vancouver and the set of 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer', we move from the studio and our brush with the Fantasticar, to the inner offices of the production. We are walked to a small meeting room where we see various Silver Surfer concept art lining the walls. The stuff looks amazing, shots of Silver Surfer all around the globe, sketches of Doom, what looks to be a wedding; and on the tables are all sorts of scaled down models depicting Doom's lab, his chair and a pod from the London Eye. And if you look at the 1:300 scale model of the Black Forest, you'll see a little bear, which Michael Chiklis describes as a great big bear that he actually got to wrestle.
It is hard not to be a bit taken with the production art, as it looks really great. Much care seems to have been taken to depict the Silver Surfer and his journey of destruction around the planet. We all take a breath, at least I do, certainly needing to catch it, and take a seat. In moments, Ralph Winter and Kirk Petrucelli will be joining us.
The door opens and in walks Ralph Winter and Kirk Petrucelli who don't miss a beat, and begin to immediately explain to us all of these interesting sketches and models.
Ralph Winter (RW): Let me talk you through these models. You've all reported probably on ... the process is pretty much the same in terms of, we start with the script ... we'll have the writer come in here in a few minutes and Tim, our director ... and, from the script in the earliest stages, even before the script's ready, it's about concept; what is that world gonna look like? The general, like, Kirk, who has done the last Tomb Raider and lots of other movies, drives his team for what that world might look like.
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What those concepts would be, and some of that you see as art on the wall and then it fleshes out to storyboards, and then the art department starts to put in these practical models so that we can, the filmmakers, can see what we're doing, because not everybody can read blueprints like an art director.
So, that's pretty, and then we go into making sort of little cartoons, we call animatics, that help us do the blocking and staging for the action beats and how big and how wide and how many cameras and how many angles and how difficult and how possible it's going to be to do. And then we get down to various specifics of planning and go through that. So, why don't we walk 'em through some of the models and what's some of the stuff that goes into it, the thinking, and then we'll walk 'em around some of the images.
Kirk Petruccelli (KP): Well, each one of the cases wherever we discuss ...
RW: Stand here and talk louder.
(Ralph Winter directs Kirk Petrucelli to stand at the front of the room, while he takes a seat toward the far end of the table.)
KP: ... with Tim and Ralph and everybody, with all the departments, we had to relay a lot of information on this, so really, we think about stage sets and a couple of these, you know, what kind of environment would Victor von Doom ... and we found a location that was very interesting, what we'd do, we'd kind of build a little model of it, do a little concept piece and explain it to everybody, just really get the ball rolling. So in the case of von Doom, we found the Orpheum Theater downtown and it was a good location, and it was a magnificent, really a rococo kind of design and we went there, and discussed what style we would have and what would be necessary and we made our plans based upon some of these concepts, models, what's real, what needs some help later on, what needs to occur. This model happens to be of von Doom's lab and his chair, so we suss out problems, with the chair, with his world, by doing models like this and discussing with Tim, Ralph, the visual effects team ...
RW: Tim wanted to move, some of this moves ...
(Ralph Winter motions toward the model of Victor Von Doom's chair.)
KP: And these are really cool ways of just explaining the scenes, and actually some of the models are so detailed and we scan them, and then we can use them in the pre-visualization process and some of them we work out ... the London Eye pod in the middle is a major element, and we had to work it out. We're building one of those units and we work out what's needed. How does the scene take place? What are the camera positions? What are the possibilities for visual effect enhancement? Do we need glass? All those kind of things that go into one little unit of many, many sets that are devised. There are close to 100 sets for this film, so in each case we had a lot of interactivity between visual effects team, our team, the stunt teams, the rigging, all the people, even down to the costume designers, the different technicians across the board had to know all the information before we get into the movie ...
(The door to the room opens and in walks Tim Story. He politely and quietly acknowledges everyone in the room and takes a seat next to Kirk Petrucelli.)
RW: Ladies and gentlemen, Tim Story, our director.
KP: So as an example, with this London pod, you can see there's pieces of clear plastic with little dots on them and that glass, that plex that's in there is very complicated and expensive to make, and you can see how large it is by the size of the humans in there, so literally we took this model and the cartoon, the animatic that we made, and go through it and try to figure out what's the least number of pieces of glass or plex we need to make, so that's what they determined by those blue dots on there. Those are the ones we are going to make. We can flip the other ones over to the other side of the bubble if we have to, and so it became a very ... these things become a very useful tool in trying to manage the production as well as make it efficient.
KP: And again, it's helpful just in creating the visual that Tim needs to accomplish and I threw these ideas out, we worked together to find out where we would like to take the drive of the story. We have a forest there. Again, we found locations in Vancouver - beautiful -- with a lot of forested areas but we needed one that was very specific to us, to what we had to do in shooting. So what we ended up doing is using that little model there, which is a topographical model of the landscape, and then everything in yellow there, we added trees. So we ended up adding about 200 trees in a forest to create a specified forest that we needed for the film, and it's more cost effective to do that, and be able to shoot and control the area, rather than just keep searching for a mountain somewhere else three hours away from here that might suffice.
RW: I think the sand set is kind of interesting because one of the few locations we can't find in Vancouver is beaches and desert, and yet suddenly we found ourselves in a situation where we had to have a desert scene, so Kirk and his team put together a model to show what we could shoot if we put together a green screen around this set. This is the amount of sand they would bring in, so we found sand, brought it in. We found the only ... stand up the camel there ... April. That's April. April is the only camel in the zoo here, so we brought her in and she did fine and then we went down to California where there's nothing but sand in the desert, went to Bakersfield and we clocked in our shots, so this was very helpful in showing the director what we could and couldn't do, and then we would go to our standby in Bakersfield, so... you go on.
KP: So with those things in mind, then we go to one of the primary, one of the better models and more refined models that we have, and that's the Fantasticar, and these parquettes were designed with computer aided design. We did some concept ... Tim did a lot of concept work with Tim Flattery, who is a terrific friend and a great designer, automotive designer, and illustrator, and what I ended up doing now is fleshing it out. What's it going to look like? So we built it with Tim and a company called TransFX, TFX ...
RW: And Dodge.
KP: ... and Dodge, of course, and conceived of the notion of a flying car and how the Fantastic Four would work within it, and how it would break apart. What would happen if there was an aerial, ya know, aerial work, that each pod breaks apart, so all the technologies ... again we built all these things, full-sized renditions of all these things ...
RW: You can see all the pictures over here, all the illustrations that Kurt and his team were doing, visualizing what it would be, all those things get done first before we actually build the model or get going, so there's a lot of work in the traditional car designing, right?
KP: And with that, all the information we did on the computer translated exactly to a full-sized model of these things and we had it machined, manufactured and we're using the car quite extensively.
(Ralph Winters speaks up, making sure we had seen the Fantasticar, which we had just had the pleasure of visiting moments before.)
RW: You already saw the car on set while you were on stage and you saw the pieces on J2 or J3?
KP: Right, and then last but not least, the biggest model we have and it's one of the larger sets that we have on the show is the Shanghai streets.
RW: And you're all coming tonight, right? You'll have jackets? It's very, very cold.
KP: And again, this is another instance where a lot of information is generated from the model. We know first and foremost the scale of ... What it could look like, how many signs we need, how much does each sign cost, how long does it take to put into the street? Every bit of information for all the departments can be kind of sussed out and organized and then with Lee [Cleary], and the assistant director team, you can see how many extras ... where would people go, what is the shooting, where do we choreograph the movements, what is the sequence, how do you do it. Tim gets an idea of really what we can take advantage of.
RW: So this is the scale, the cars, people, everything else and that little viewer, pick the viewer up at the end, you can look at one mirror and down the other you can sort of see what a shot might look like as you look down the model. And then this is a real cul de sac in the city here. It's downtown. These are parking structures here. This is a historic building we can't rig to and then this is an actual working environment, so we can clean this out by 6:00 a.m. so that the trucks do their deliveries and do their commerce during the day, and not destroy our set and run over our cables, and then when they're done we put back the cables, put back the shops and all that kind of stuff. Tell them a couple of things that people ... where there's actually a large Asian population here in Vancouver, it's become a bit of curiosity.
RW: There's a great group of people that we were fortunate enough to work with, and we worked with a lot of Chinese calligraphers and people who know the language, so we really wanted to make sure that every word, every character, every portion of this thing is not only correct but in good taste, and specific to the shops that we have. It's a story telling thing. It's a lovely way of going around and knowing there's a noodle place, there's a dumpling shop, there's a bicycle shop, there's all these different real world, real iconographic kind of places that everybody can now learn or base their ideas from, the wardrobe, costume design can now tell that there's this type of shot. The people who worked on it, and everybody from Vancouver who is able to read the signs, really, it's all good messages and all things that are really quite optimistic. We were hoping that it would become a very optimistic place. We have, we built a pagoda in the center of it and it's so realistic, we've had several people come in and light incense and give a prayer to the shrine that's within it. It's that special, that unique and actually it's important for us, for me, to make sure if we're going to put up a religious artifact or an old or antiquated artifact or anything in there, that it is not only in good taste but it's authentic, and it's really, truly great. It's a beautiful set that a lot of people worked very hard on and I'm really proud of it.
RW: When the fruits and vegetables are out, people are trying to buy them.
KP: It's fun. It was finding out what roots would be available in the herbalist market, and we went down to Chinatown and met a lot of the vendors in Vancouver and Chinatown and they came over and dressed the set with us. It was really great fun. The community is great with us, and again, the logistics and tactics in there are pretty outlandish.
RW: A normal question would be why don't you just go to Chinatown and just shoot there? Well, the difficulty in negotiating with every merchant, stopping their business, protecting their goods and services, bringing in our stuff, is a nightmare, and so it's actually easier for us to create this here, because we have things that are falling. We have action that takes place. We've got rigs and things like that. It would be literally impossible to do in a real Chinatown, so ... we have 25 generators just to produce the amount of light here, and they've been cabling this for weeks, and the city has been very patient with us as we're kind of following all the rules. Then we have this one over here right?
KP: And that's the London Eye, and it's a really interesting ... it's a very important and multi-layered objective on the London Eye. It's a very important sequence. It's a very difficult thing to conceive of because the structure itself is so big ...
RW: Can you see the size of the people here? The little white dots?
KP: The real Eye is 400 feet tall and there are 32 pods for 32 boroughs within London and we worked with the people from the London Eye and in London, we took photography there and they've been really wonderful working with us to call up a really cool sequence, and the only way to now do this here in Vancouver and in Los Angeles, to try to explain ourselves and work out pre-visualization and all the things with the model, the individual pre-visualization, camera angles and everything to see, it's 400 foot tall and what would it look like if somebody was at the top of it or bottom of it? How big are people? How much do you see around it? It's really important to get all those things answered before we go off and send a team to London. And for Tim ... what can we do then? What are the possibilities? What makes that scene so special that we can pull off different activities, different shots?
RW: And we had to get hold of the police and all the folks in London. We had helicopters for aerial photography and that sort of upset Parliament and some of those folks, so it's been quite an effort to get the photography we need for this icon there. On the wall here you'll see a lot of concept art that Kirk and his team put together. In that first column there you'll see some images of the inside of the Baxter Building and the preparations being made for a wedding. The second column is an illustration of a club environment, and then of course this movie involves the Silver Surfer.
There's lots of outer space concept images that were put together. Then there's some images of the, sort of the impact the Silver Surfer has here on earth, some weird things that happen at sea, snow, the pyramids. Down at the bottom you see Reed's lab, which was redesigned on this movie from the first movie; they got a little more cash and it's moved up a floor or two, so Kirk, again, doing a great job of re-conceiving that.
The next column there you'll see a device that Reed Richards figures out to track Silver Surfer and then the Surfer has his way with it when he actually sees it. There's a wind tunnel where the car was inside of that lab. We would take you to that set but that's been taken down. Then there's a bunch of other images here of Silver Surfer and we have a book of about 500 images from comic books that we've put together and then it's a matter of culling that down with the director ... how does Surfer interact? How does he move? What does he look like in each scene? And using that to break it down so that we can actually achieve some of those shots. So those are some concepts.
The one of the Chrysler Building, I think, is almost precisely out of a comic book. Other mysterious sets. There's Parliament there. There's someone hanging from a pod of the London Eye. We'll try to avoid that for our London Eye folks. They weren't thrilled with that in particular. But we are making a little behind-the-scenes video for them that they can use as people queue up in line, so they can see how the wheel is used in the movie. There are some other images of some strange craters that seem to be wherever Surfer is.
There's an encounter, as Kirk referred to, in the forest and we saw some of the images here of how they might interact with Surfer in that forest environment. There's a military encampment where we required snow and Vancouver delivered that for us on Saturday night, and then there's an air battle chase here in the last couple of columns. There's some signature places. One of the reasons we chose Shanghai is to have a little more of a global event here, and not just limit ourselves to New York or Los Angeles. So the model ... I think it's Gulin, in China, and then some images over Shanghai, what Shanghai might look like with our air battle taking place there, and then some other devices and things like that. You should probably look at those things. And then again over the other side are some classic comic book images of Surfer.
Here's an image that Tim was working on. I think it was last November you were doing this image about a wedding on a rooftop and our wedding looks very similar. I don't think we got Jessica to look like this though, with a ragged wedding dress and that angry look on her face, but we have something close. And so again we find that those images are stuff that help inspire what we're going to do, and inspire the artists, from the illustrations that we are doing to the sets that we're building, so ...
One of the challenges we have in making this comic book movie is that you can draw anything. We went on the first movie just to see what does that white bit of hair on Reed look like and you go to comics and it's all over the place. It could be a big band, or just a couple of hairs and in making a movie one of the things that a director has to do is make very, very specific choices. I mean, literally we were counting hairs on the first movie, about how much white hair should be there and what it would look like and what's the impression. Does Thing have a watch? What kind of fabric is the uniform made out of? What's the style sense of clothes they really do wear? All those concrete decisions have to be made and that's what makes it a lot tougher to visualize. We have to make those decisions, otherwise people will criticize us, so there's a lot that goes into all this and that falls to Kirk and his team who are costumes and props and set dressing, set design, so he's a big part of this. Do you have some questions for these guys?
Yes, in fact, we have many questions for Tim Story upon being given the opportunity. We will reconnect with Kirk on the Shanghai set. Unfortunately for you, my fair readers, you must wait for the next installment to read just what Mr. Story has to say.
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