Visual effects producer Keith Vanderlaan and visual effects supervisor Ted Rae talked to VFXPro about creating the makeup and digital effects for Mel Gibson's controversial religious epic, "The Passion of the Christ."

	Sky Matte Painting

How did you both get involved in the project?
KV: I was working with Mel on another film called "The Singing Detective," and he started talking about this idea that he had. Originally we talked about it strictly from a makeup effects standpoint since that is how the whole thing started out.

I have wanted to combine a makeup effects studio with a digital effects studio for a long time. After having several discussions with Mel and with Stephen McEveety, the producer, they agreed to let my company do the makeup effects and the visual effects.

It was at that time that I contacted Ted, because we had worked together on a previous project. He has such a tremendous sensibility about things -- he knows when to use practical and when to use digital, etc.


Did you work on the film under the banner of Captive Audience?
KV: Yes.


Did you have to add a digital effects department?
KV: I had owned Captive Audience for seven or eight years, and did not have a visual effects department. We set up the visual effects part of the studio specifically for this project.


What did you put together in terms of a VFX studio?
TR: We had a compositing department and a VERY small 3D department. I own my own cameras, and some grip and electrical equipment, so I brought that in. We setup a shooting stage and a small model shop.

Keith managed to find a building in Burbank that was right across the street from the makeup division. Luckily, nobody got whacked by a car walking back and forth across the street.


Can you tell me a little about the hardware and software that you put into the VFX studio?
TR: It was all desktop machines, with about an equal mix of PCs and Macs.


Why did you mix those?
TR: To accomodate the personal preferences of the artists.

	Satan with CG Maggot

Interfacing them was not a problem?
TR: Not really. It was pretty invisible. In Combustion, we traded projects back and forth between the PCs and the Macs. They all talked to the same server. It really wasn't an obstacle.


What other software did you use?
TR: Most of the work was done in After Effects and Combustion. There were also five shots that we did in a Flame.

All of the CPUs in the building had After Effects Licenses. Our systems engineer, Michael Donahue, set the render farm up so that if people went to lunch, they could release their CPU and it would turn out frames for us while they were having a hamburger.


How many shots were there in the film that you digitally altered?
TR: About 130 or 135. It 's hard to keep track of what stayed in and what didn't. The cut, to a small degree, stayed somewhat flexible until the last minute.


Were most of those effects shots or were they fixes?
TR: A majority of those were shots that were planned.

There was a time when we were shooting that the workload was potentially enormous. We didn't know exactly how many shots we were going to do, and that was a large part of the challenge while I was on location. While on set, I was trying to plan ways that if we wound up with 70 or 80 scourging shots, that it would be something we were going to be able to do expeditiously.

We did inherit quite a few fixes, though. A lot of my friends call them 1st unit screw-ups -- these were not screw-ups. 1st unit shot a lot of footage, and the shooting style became almost a documentary approach.

	Roman Soldiers Flogging Christ

What in the way that they shot made it more like a documentary?
TR: Mel and Caleb Deschanel, the director of photography, would often set up an entire scene and shoot it with three cameras. Occasionally, without cutting, they would say, everybody back to one, and then run it again. My observation was -- I do not know if this was the intent -- that because there was not a clean stop and start each run through, the actors might not go back to the exact same marks, and the camera operators didn't know exactly where everybody was going to be. There started to be some really wonderful, spontaneous things happening.

The way that John Wright, the editor, and Mel cut it together, it winds up having a lot of energy. You have big sweeping camera moves, dolly moves everywhere -- it is very obviously epic filmmaking, but there is this feeling that someone just happened to be there with a camera shooting it.


Was budget a big issue for the VFX department?
KV: Budget is always an issue -- we were dealing with a set figure provided by Mel. Quality was the larger issue. We all knew that if the audience was consciously aware of the makeup or visual effects, they could step out of the film emotionally. We were all very careful to make sure the budgetary constraints were not detrimental to the filmmaking process.

It was a wonderful experience in that way. It was not the type of project where people said, 'That is good enough.' It was always, 'we can make it better,' 'we need to make it seamless.'

TR: That was before we would even show the shot to Mel. We found that all of the artists -- sculptors, makeup artists, compositors and model makers -- everyone had an unprecedented amount of belief in this project.

The hours that people put in and the amount of sweat and care and love -- I have never experienced people working this hard.

Keith and I took very seriously the fact that it was Mel's money. I became very protective of our director, very protective of his budget.

KV: Yes, protective is probably the best word.

It felt like a big responsibility -- it always does, on any film. But somehow on this one, the financial responsibility and the creative responsibility were intertwined.

	Jerusalem, CG People

How big was the crew?
KV: My entire crew roster goes over 100 for makeup and visual effects.


What was the breakdown of the crew between digital and makeup?
KV: I think I had sixty makeup effects people in total and probably forty of those were long term and the rest were visual effects.

TR: The core group of system engineer, coordinator, compositors, digital paint artists, etc., that was actually quite small. I think we only had a total of eight compositors. But that number expanded and contracted. At one point I think we had fifteen people just doing dustbusting.

The visual effects part of the crew expanded and contracted greatly depending on whether we were shooting elements or not, because we did almost no CG. There are only three CG elements in the film. Everything else was a photographic element.

We shot a lot of photographic elements. If we had not been doing a complete digital intermediate for the film, it would have made the show even harder and much more expensive to do. We had the support of Efilm and they were incredibly helpful when we needed to scan elements. For instance, say we were working on a shot and we needed one more dust element. I would run out in the parking lot and throw some Fuller's Earth around, make a big mess, and then Efilm would scan the element for us for a fraction of what we would have paid if there had not been a full digital intermediate.


What is the first visual effects shot in the film?
TR: The opening shot -- the closeup of the moon -- is totally fabricated. That drops back to a wide shot where you see the sky with clouds, and then the camera tilts down until you see Jerusalem in the background. Then the camera starts to boom down, through a layer of ground mist, and into a big steadicam shot. That whole shot is almost 2500 frames long.

That whole background was a 2D matte painting by Mark Sullivan. It was broken up into layers so that we could simulate perspective shifts in it.

Outside of the opening matte shot, the first composited shot is the maggot in Satan's nose. That maggot is the first of the three CG elements in the show.


Where did the design for Satan come from?
TR: Mel's head. He has a very strong visual sense. Virtually everything that he described to us -- the feeling of things, specific kinds of shots, specific points of view -- is all there in the final edit of the film.

He is JUST so smart that he makes it look easy. Because he is also so darn fun to work with. He enjoys people and loves making them laugh.


Keith, can you tell me about the makeup that you did?
KV: The most important thing to me was realism. But Mel and I also agreed from day one that there was not to be gratuitous gore. We wanted a realism that the audience could accept.

	Crucifixion, Greenscreens and Composite

The bloodletting was toned down from what it could have been, and from the direction that we were going in at times. I know that some people think we went too far. But the intent was not to beat a guy to a bloody pulp to show what it would look like to do that. We wanted to present a realistic concept of what was endured. What would really happen throughout this crucifixion.

We did a number of off-camera makeup tests for two reasons. One was to figure out the look, the design of the makeup. There are several stages of the makeup. There are points throughout the film when he is beaten, points when he is dragged, points when he is caned. We had to see what each of those stages was going to look like.

The other thing that we had to find out was, of the materials that we developed for this project, which ones would work best.

We are well known for having developed a silicon appliance. We recently developed another product that is made from a bonding agent. It is incredibly durable and has tremendous movement. The application process, although of course lengthy when you are covering somebody from head to toe, is much faster than that of conventional materials.

We had taken it for a test drive on 'Master & Commander' and then on 'Pirates of the Caribbean.' But, we really developed the final stage of this product on "The Passion."


How long were the most complex application sessions?
KV: I think the first makeup test took us eight hours, and I do not think we covered the entire body in that time.

TR: Toward the end of the shoot with the most complex makeup, they had gotten the whole thing down to just a little under four hours. That included the beard and the wig.

KV: That is an extraordinarily small amount of time, considering how makeup usually goes.

	Crucifixion, Hilltop

TR: When we were shooting up on the hill, where the crucifixion takes place, we had a lot of severe weather conditions. Sometimes, Jim would get into makeup -- with all of the appliances on, but with the top left layer undone. He would go out to set and wait to see whether or not it was possible to shoot. Some days when they couldn't, he would sleep overnight in the appliances. There was one instance where I think he wore them for three days. And they lasted.

KV: That kind of durability is unheard of. Foam Latex and Silicon stay on quite well, but once you start sweating or you get out in the rain, there is no way they will stay on.


How do you create the effect that the scourges are hitting Jim when they really are not?
TR: Probably one shot that you can remember is the very first time that you see Jesus hit and a wound appears on his body. Part of the difficulty of that whole sequence was that there was no way to know exactly how many shots there were going to be or how it was going to be cut. Whether or not you agree with the balance that was struck in the edit, we were trying very hard to strike the right emotional balance and they needed freedom in the edit to do that.

For that particular sequence, we had come up with a road map of the order that the wounds appeared in. The makeup and VFX crew we had taken to Italy went out and shot digital storyboards on the set. We put together a book of the shots that Mel had given us ideas for, so that we could figure out what the wound progression order was going to be.

We did not adhere to that strictly while shooting, but at least it was a starting point. When he is hit that first time, the shot is actually out of order. Since it was not intended to be the first shot, there are wounds on his body that should not have been there.

Once the movie was cut, our digital paint artist, Michael Shelton did little matte paintings to cover up the wounds. He painted flesh patches in a 10-bit color space and then we tracked and warped those on top of his body, until we wiped them away to reveal the wounds.

We also warped the wounds a little more closed. As the paint patch is wiped off, the wound opens up. Often we would add additional skin distortion to it so it looked like it pulled the skin a little farther, and then it would snap back.

KV: It is all the little subtleties and creative tricks that you put into a movie that make it exciting to do. At one point Ted and I were looking at a shot in progress. Simultaneously we realized that what we needed were muscles around the wound -- in Jim's arms or in his stomach area -- tensing and flexing. Jim's performance was tremendous and we just wanted to add to it what we could.

	God's Tear, CG Effect

The scourge element was shot on greenscreen?
TR: Yes, it was always a photographic element.


Did that mean there was extensive rotoscoping?
TR: It was not that bad. I don't know how we got away with that.

How about the hands during the crucifiction -- are those prosthetics? TR: When Jesus is nailed, that is a real hand. It is a digital composite that was shot under very controlled circumstances.

We tested several different ways of doing it. But when it came down to a choice of whether we were going to use a live-action gag on set -- some sort of mechanical hand or some forced perspective extended hand -- I decided just to shoot a plate of Jim.

We had Jim lay on the cross with his hand turned down into the crossbar, so the camera is just looking at a stump of his wrist. The of the crossbar was brought back here to our stage and lined up to the perspective of the original plate. I recreated the lighting of the setup in front of a greenscreen with the opposite of the on set orientation of Jesus' hand. A real hand came up through the cross, and a tube came down from the top of frame that could stand in for where the nail would be. That tube could spurt a little blood out onto the hand.

One of our makeup effects guys made a rig where we could pound a nail into with enough resistance that it looked like it was being driven into wood. That spurted blood as well. We used the same setup after having pulled the real hand out.

I composited the greenscreen hand element back on top of the live-action plate and that hand included the end of the cross. The cutting line became the rope that is around his wrist. The tube was rotoscoped out.

Then I comped in the element of the nail that had been shot on the same greenscreen set-up. Essentially, the greenscreen hand is composited over the top of the live-action plate, and the greenscreen nail, executioner's hand, hammer, and blood are composited over the top of the greenscreen hand.

The reason not to shoot on set is that when we rotoscoped the elements out, we would have had to replace the people that were walking around behind it. It may seem like the long way around just to get back to putting a hand in, but it allowed a lot of control over the reaction of the hand, how flat the palm was against the cross, and how much blood there was. It is too iconic an image to not get it right.

	The Temple Splits

Can you talk about the scene in the temple toward the end of the film?
TR: There is the wide shot where you see the Sanheddrin standing off to the side and the stone temple floor splits right down the middle. In real scale what happens is that the floor separates by six feet,right to left. It also offsets by four feet, the left side up and the right side down.

Instead of moving the walls, we simulated that by shooting the shot with two cameras on a specially constructed camera rig. It was designed, built, and tested here in the makeup effects shop and the shipped over to Italy where it was reassembled and re-tested in position in the temple set.

I then took the spherical images from those two cameras and stitched them together and then down rezzed them to make one anamorphic plate. Even though the perspective is moving, even though the two cameras originally were moving, the composite looks like the camera stays still and the walls move apart.

I took that approach knowing that we wanted to have people in the shot, and I did not want to do a miniature set and then matte greenscreen people in. The full miniature would have cost a lot more than it did to do this composite shot anyway.


Did you use any miniatures at all?
TR: We built a 1:5 scale floor element that actuated under the same principle, scaled down, that the camera rig simulated. The miniature floor movement was controlled by hand. We did 27 takes, and on take 25, one of our stage electricians managed to match the movement of the walls exactly. We didn't have to fudge it in the composite at all.