What’s a Movie Before It’s a Movie?

There are still several months to go before the crew of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” steps onto the set to start filming. But director Andrew Adamson and a crew of artists in Glendale have been sitting in front of their computers since October, planning precisely how each frame will look.

One team of artists, relying on photos from geographical surveys and NASA satellites, has mapped a digital replica of a 5-square-mile area of New Zealand, where the film’s climactic battle sequence is slated to take place. Another crew is placing virtual warriors and other creatures on this map, orchestrating every movement. A third group is animating sketches of how these digital Narnia creatures will interact with human actors.

By the time filming begins in December, a rough version of the entire film will be complete.

“When you have a movie where the budget’s about $175 million, it’s good to know what you’re doing before you get on set,” said storyboard artist David Duncan, who is working on the project. “You can’t get to the set and just wing it. You have to know what you’re doing way ahead of time.”

That sentiment is taking hold in Hollywood. With more complicated stunts and cutting-edge visual effects, and with studios increasingly focused on the bottom line, a growing number of movie crews are using computers to create a blueprint of each shot.

Known as previsualization, the process is essentially a high-tech version of traditional storyboards -- drawings resembling panels of a comic book -- that filmmakers have long used to outline the action.

Andy and Larry Wachowski, the directors of “The Matrix” trilogy whose roots are in the comic book industry, have each film captured in thousands of boards drawn in painstaking detail.

The artwork is gorgeous, but the boards lack motion and depth. A director can’t see the sides of the props, or the ceiling, or what’s just around the corner. All they have to work with is what’s facing them, said David Nakabayashi, creative director for visual effects giant Industrial Light & Magic.

Animators were “among the earliest people to start using previsualization because it was so similar to the way they would normally block out the scenes of an animated movie,” Nakabayashi said.

Hollywood’s live-action filmmakers have been yearning for such blueprints. Directors saw the potential for the technology long before it could be delivered. In the late 1970s, for example, George Lucas cut together movie footage of World War II dogfights and used it as reference material for the final battle sequence in the original “Star Wars” movie.

“I’ve seen tapes of [artist] Joe Johnston and [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren using dolls, mini storm troopers and a mock speeder, and shooting video footage to figure out a chase sequence,” Nakabayashi said. “Clearly, the technology has advanced.”

For directors, previsualization means they can illustrate their vision in minute detail -- the smallest prop, the biggest spotlight, the motion of an actor and the angle of the camera. They can figure out how they want to shoot a scene and whether it’s technically possible.

For cinematographers, the video clips can alert them to technical problems and hurdles.

For actors, particularly those working on a bare stage or against a blank screen, the rough drafts can ease preparation by offering clues about what embellishments visual effects artists will add later.

“The point isn’t to tell people how to do their job,” said Jonathan Rothbart, president of postproduction for San Francisco visual effects firm Orphanage. “The point is to save time by letting people see their options.”

The previsualization process is not cheap; costs range from $15,000 for a simple shot to $500,000 or more for an entire film project. Still, many producers and directors agree that the system can save time.

And in the world of making movies, time is money.

Producers say a typical day of shooting on a Hollywood film costs about $100,000, which translates to an hourly rate of $5,500 to $7,000. That means even a 10-minute conversation for a director to clear up a simple question with the crew can cost $1,000.

Directors say previsualization can help them decide how much of the budget should be spent on set design and production equipment.

“From a logistical point of view, you don’t need to build a 360-degree set if you can get away with shooting only 170 degrees or 280 degrees,” said “Lion” director Adamson, who also used previsualization extensively when he directed the animated hit “Shrek.”

“What happens if you rent an 8-foot crane for the camera crew, and you really needed a 20-foot crane? What happens if there are no 20-foot cranes available? Or that the closest one is in Iowa?” Adamson said. “You’re stuck, wasting time and money. On these big-budget films, the less money you waste, the better you’re off.”

Project Go-Ahead

The drafts also can help directors persuade a studio to greenlight a project or boost its budget.

Director Baz Luhrmann prepared an extensive previsualization tape before he pitched “Moulin Rouge” to 20th Century Fox, industry executives say. “The Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson has said his previsualization tape was one of the key reasons New Line Cinema Inc. agreed to spend about $300 million to produce the trilogy.

“Studio executives can see what’s going to make it to the screen, not just envision it through an amazing stack of drawings,” said Colin Green, founder of Pixel Liberation Front, a Venice-based effects firm that specializes in previsualization work.

Often, such work is handled weeks or months before principal photography begins. If a director decides to take a different approach or if the action sequences become more intricate, the need for planning shots can extend through the production process.

When Orphanage was hired to map out the coming horror film “Jeepers Creepers II,” the visual effects staff worked closely with director Victor Salva on location near the Grapevine section of Interstate 5 in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Each night, while Salva directed the action, Orphanage executive Rothbart and his crew stood on the sidelines with a laptop that held many of the previsualization files. As ideas and questions about the shoot arose, the Orphanage team pulled up the animated clips and modified them.

“When there was a question, I’d load the file onto my Sony Clie [hand-held organizer] and show Victor,” Rothbart said. “If there were changes, I’d be able to make the adjustments on the laptop and show them right there.”

Sometimes, even several months of prep time is barely enough.

For the team at Pixel Liberation Front, which handled some previsualization for “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions,” the task was clear: figure out a way to make the films’ action sequences defy physics, yet still be physically possible.

For a daredevil freeway chase sequence in “Reloaded,” it couldn’t get more complicated. Dozens of cars and big trucks roared along the stretch of new highway that visual effects house ESC Entertainment built on a former Navy base at Alameda. Hundreds of other computer-generated vehicles filled in nearly every empty spot on the freeway.

Cars carrying gun-toting bad guys flew in and out of traffic. Evil agents bounced from automobile hood to automobile hood as they chased hero Trinity, played by actress Carrie Anne Moss. Shrapnel rained everywhere, along with bullets.

Through the Chaos

Moss’ stunt double needed to somehow climb aboard a motorcycle and zigzag through all this chaos. And a camera crew, also riding on a motorcycle, needed to follow and film it.

Over several months, artists mapped out every inch of the freeway on the computer. They laid out the traffic patterns of cars cruising down the highway at 40 miles per hour and calculated how to stagger them to avoid collisions with cast and crew. Perfect timing meant the difference between filming the scene safely and calling an ambulance.

The artists also experimented with various camera angles by positioning a virtual camera in different positions. Would the lens capture more of Moss’ stunt double if the camera crew were shooting a foot above the motorcycle? How about half a foot below it? From 10 feet behind it, on the right? Or 6 feet behind, on the left?

Once the directors reviewed and approved the footage, previsualization artist Kyle Robinson of Pixel Liberation Front set the marks on the highway that the stunt drivers and camera riders needed to hit. If they were an inch or two off, the visual effects teams wouldn’t have been able to insert the digital cars and other effects into the footage. The shoot, one of the film’s most expensive, would have fallen apart.

“This is empowering to a filmmaker,” said John Gaeta, visual effects supervisor for the “Matrix” films. “You can try things out here that one could never conceive of on a stage.”