The Making of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo title sequence

Kerrie Hughes | Movies | Showcase | 16/01/2012 15:12pm

Blur studio reveals some of the technical challenges faced when creating the opening sequence for the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s award-winning crime novel

California-based VFX facility Blur Studio is the company responsible for the dark yet beautiful title sequence for the 2011 movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Familiar with Blur’s work, the film’s director David Fincher contacted the studio with the brief. “We’ve worked with Fincher on several projects over the last few years and we have a few feature films in development with him,” explains creative director Tim Miller. “So he knows us well and for what he wanted these titles to become we were a good fit. He knew from the start that he wanted the opening titles to be entirely CGI and that’s our strength. He came straight to Blur with the project.”

The studio was responsible for nearly every aspect of the title sequence, including conceptual exploration, design, CG modeling, editing, layout, animation, FX to final lighting and compositing. The team did, however, enlist the help of other artists in order to keep to the deadline. “We had help from a few key outside vendors for things like 3D scanning and fluid dynamics,” explains Miller. “Particularly for the fluids – there was so much to do in so little time that we asked Spatial Harmonics and Fusion CIS to lend a hand getting it done.”

Plenty of fluids

The two-and-a-half minute opening sequence features a huge amount of fluid effects, the majority of which were created using RealFlow but a few sequences were also done using Lagoa in XSI. “The fluids were meshed with Frost (in 3ds Max) and then cached using XMesh (a cache tool from Thinkbox that handles changing topology) to hand off for rendering,” says FX supervisor Kirby Miller. “For the fire we used FumeFX. Particles and fragmentation were done with a mix of thinkingParticles and RayFire.

“Doing roughly 175 or so fluid shots was a big task. Of course RealFlow was used for most of the fluid sims, but it was also great to use Frost, which meshes fluids better and faster than anything else we have used and gives us tremendous control over the final look of the fluids. And using XMesh we were able to cache the fluids using our entire render farm which really helped to get things through our pipeline quickly.”

Complex effects

The project also involved many other complicated tasks, in particular lighting and character animation, the latter of which was handled primarily in Softimage. Animation supervisor Derren Ross explains, “For the animation department, XSI has allowed us to evolve our animation rig capabilities to be able to handle much more complex, elaborate styles of character and creature driven work over the years.”

3ds Max was also used to create a large part of the final animation, as well as for modelling and lighting. “On this project we modelled in 3ds Max primarily with some assets starting off in ZBrush and Mudbox,” explains lighting and modelling supervisor Jerome Denjean. “All the lighting was done in 3ds Max and rendering in V-Ray. For compositing we use Eyeon’s Digital Fusion and the type animation was produced in After Effects.”

The film titles clearly reflect its dark content. And this proved to be one of the team’s biggest technical hurdles. “The sheer number of shots and the different aspects inherent in each was the toughest challenge for the lighting folks,” says Denjean. “Black on black is VERY tricky to light—the minimalist aspect of the design was both a challenge and an asset. The flexibility of 3ds Max enabled us to do many different kinds of set-ups in a very short time to produce the studio’s record for the most number of shots per minute.”

The 3D package’s extensive toolset enabled the team to fully achieve the look the director required. “Creating a considerable amount of 3D shots in a short amount of time, and yet keeping it close to final “black lacquer” effect was our main challenge,” explains editor and layout supervisor Franck Balson. “We used 3ds Max direct X shaders to create some real time reflections, allowing us to frame and compose our images more naturally than if we had had gray-scaled colors, as we usually have in the layout process.”

As in any movie production, the Blur team had strict time limitations on the project but are more than happy with the final product. “It’s all so rich in visual detail, movement and pace,” says Ross. “The whole team really pulled together and pushed hard to create something you haven’t quite seen before. What’s most impressive for me is how much each department kept plussing the work with every layer they added to it in a short period of time, utilizing so many different software packages and techniques. Oh and now you know how black oil has sex and gives birth to all sorts of nightmarish imagery.”

Check out the Blur website for more work

Take a look at the work Fusion CIS did on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Check out the best 3D movies of 2012 on our sister site Creative Bloq.

Posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 3:12 pm under Movies, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.