‘Adaptation’ effects: seamless, unsung

No one is talking about the effects in “Adaptation,” which suits director Spike Jonze and visual effects supervisor Gray Marshall just fine.

“It’s not like a ‘Star Wars’ movie where everybody comes out talking about the effects,” says Jonze. “He did such a good job that he made himself invisible. It’s like a magic trick; you don’t know there is a trick happening here because your attention is focused somewhere else.”

In the case of “Adaptation,” which opened last Friday to mostly rave reviews, audiences know that it is just one actor -- Nicolas Cage -- playing the twin screenwriters Charlie and Donald Kaufman. But Jonze says “what we focused our energy on was the brothers and their relationship and who they are as individuals and how they react toward each other. That was always our goal, that what you pay attention to is the brothers’ relationship, not that the same actor is playing each part.”

To help him achieve his naturalistic vision for the film, Jonze called on Marshall and the Venice-based company he co-owns, Gray Matter FX. Marshall and Gray Matter also did the effects for Jonze’s 1999 hit, “Being John Malkovich.”

In order to make the twin sequences seamless and unaffected, Marshall and his company shied away from using the popular green-screen method in which a subject is first filmed on a green background.

The green screen is then removed either optically or digitally, allowing the subject to be isolated for compositing with another element.

Gray Matter relied more on split screen, motion-control cameras and rotoscoping. The latter, says Marshall, “is a big fancy word for trace by hand. You have to accurately trace wherever there is an overlap [of each person] so it looks seamless and smooth.”

Besides creating the twin sequences, Gray Matter also worked on digitally tightening scenes and creating a computer-generated bee for a 40-second sequence.

The reason Marshall and his team used green screen for only 20% of the 130 “twinning” shots of Charlie and Donald was “a green screen should be set up under fairly controlled conditions. If it isn’t, we can have a lot of downside which is splashing green all over the set. That’s what we call contamination or green spill.”

Sometimes “the locations we used were practical” for using green screen, but frequently they did not have enough room to put a green screen in.

Before production began Jonze spent three weeks working with Cage to create each brother. “Gray was involved from the very beginning,” Jonze says. “After we would block out a scene we would shoot photo storyboards and talk to him about how we were going to do each shot. The amount of time you have on the set is so precious in terms of the amount of time you have to shoot a scene. I think he knew going into it that the performance had to be alive and couldn’t be burdened with more technical stuff.”

Which twin was shot first was based on many factors.

“Sometimes it has to do with physical blocking,” says Jonze. “If there was a scene where Donald is walking around the room and the motion-control camera would have to follow Donald, then we would have to shoot Donald’s scenes first because that is going to motivate the camera movement.”

In other scenes, “There wasn’t as much physical movement,” Jonze says. “It was more who drove the conversation energy-wise. If one person is leading the conversation and one person is reacting more, we would shoot the person who is leading first.”

“The great thing about Spike is that he doesn’t try to overdo” the effects, says Marshall. “He would have been just as happy if he had found an actor the caliber he wanted who just happened to be twins. So Spike’s great gift is his ability to not fall in love with effects but use them when it is appropriate.”

Marshall also worked with the film’s editor, Eric Zumbrunnen, on the final edit of the film using computers to alter the pacing and timing and tighten certain scenes. “It came out of the collaboration comfort level that we have achieved with Eric and Spike,” Marshall says. “Typically part of an editor’s job is to control the pacing and it’s also the director’s job to control the pacing of the scene but often things change when you go to edit. You find out how things work together. Traditionally the way an editor changes the pacing is where they choose to cut and cut away from. We are finding ways to tighten things up, to speed things up or in some cases to slow things down without cutting away from the shot, staying in the shot.”

“We could create pauses or shorten pauses,” says Jonze. “It was a huge help in terms of making the performance more natural. Those ideas started with things we were doing with Charlie and Donald, and once we saw how easy it was for Gray to do it, we realized we could use the tool to fix other problems.”

It took Marshall and his bee team of animators five months to create a bee looking for honey among orchids in a scene between co-stars Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper.

“Probably when you watch the movie you are totally unaware of the bee,” says Marshall.

Creating the bee was the most interactive work he did with Jonze.

“We started with the rough form of the bee. The challenges were it had fur and it had to be interactive with the flower and it had to move like a bee.”

That was easier said than done.

Initially, Marshall says, the bee was “acting too much.” In fact, when Jonze saw early footage of the bee he told Marshall to make the insect “dumber.”

“Our initial bee had too much character and was too conscious of what it was doing,” says Marshall. “Once we realized bees were clumsy and we made it less deliberate, it came alive. “