Oscar Week: Interview with 'Button' Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba

Saturday

21Feb2009

Oscar Week: Interview with 'Button' Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba

Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 9:58PM

Honored with 13 Academy Award nominations, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button combines an 80-year-old short story with 21st century visual effects mastery. The story revolves around a man who is born old and ages backward. So how do you accomplish that visually?

If you're David Fincher, you hire Digital Domain. In just the past few years, Digital Domain has worked on Fincher's Zodiac, as well as last year's visual effects Oscar winner, The Golden Compass, plus The Mummy Returns, Speed Racer, Transformers, and more. And for nearly the first hour of Benjamin Button, whenever you see Brad Pitt growing from a baby born old to a distinguished young man ready to head out into the world, you're seeing the work of Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba and his Digital Domain team.

Because of the film's landmark achievement in effects design, The Big Picture tracked down Barba to talk shop and try to get a perspective on everything you see in David Fincher's Best Picture nominee.

Big Picture: Before we talk about Benjamin Button, I know you guys did the effects work on Zodiac, too, and I had that as my top film of 2007.

Fantastic! So did I. (laughs)

And I didn't know until I saw the director's cut DVD how much of that movie is your work. You wouldn't think a cop drama set in the 60s and 70s would need a lot of effects, but it's probably, what, 20, 25% effects? And it's just fantastic stuff.

Well, thank you. We pride ourselves on the seamless nature for the work we do for David.

He was one of the many people who said this project could never be filmed, prior to now, because you just couldn't make the effects work. So was there one advancement that made it possible a couple of years ago when you guys started working on it, or was it the preponderance of evidence, that so many things just hadn't come together in this field?

I guess it would be the preponderance of evidence. You have to look at what has come before it, and we hadn't seen a CG character that we felt was believable - a human character. I think Gollum was a really great example of a CG character that really gave a compelling performance, but it wasn't truly human and it wasn't a known actor that was trying to come across through that performance. But I remember when I first saw it, I was blown away.

And do you look at that character and borrow some of those tricks they used to fill in the gaps that haven't been put on the map yet?

Yeah, I mean, some of things they did on Gollum that they did well and you go, "OK, we can take that to the next level." But the key part is, how do you get Brad Pitt's performance to come across in CG? Where we've seen previous facial performance capture fail is that it tends to look a little rubbery, a little stretchy. It doesn't quite feel alive. We've seen eyes that maybe felt a little dead, and that kind of frightens everybody, because the eyes don't work it doesn't matter if anything else is working.

So let's go through the scene that most people have seen, even if they haven't watched the whole movie. The faith healer scene in the church tent is in the trailers, and the clips have been online. So how much of that was there when you got your hands on it and how much did you have to put in after the fact?

Our work for the head replacements of the Benjamin character spans the first 52 minutes of the film, and it's 325 shots. And that church tent is one of the first big sequences we had to tackle, so every one of those shots is the CG Benjamin head on a body actor.

Who is not Brad Pitt.

No (laughs), the body actor was tiny. Of course, he was in a wheelchair, and he was trying to portray Benjamin at age 83...or 7, depending on how you look at it.

But in addition to just replacing the head, there's a lot of makeup involved, too, in making Brad Pitt believable as an 83-year-old seven-year-old. So how do those two departments work together, because I assume if what you're doing is great, it doesn't mean much without appropriate makeup.

Well, Greg Cannom and his team had started doing the make-up design for Brad and had shown David lots of tests and photographed it, so ultimately, when Rick Baker and Kazu Tsuji were brought in to create the three maquettes that would denote the age spans, we could create - there were cues taken from Brad's makeup that we could use to then go older and older [in CG]. Rick and Kazu then executed the physical maquettes to the ages you see, like in the church tent, which is the oldest age we did.

Was there one age in the character's life that was harder for you to do?

I think for us, the last age we do - age 67 - was the most difficult. It was more of a proportional thing with the body actor, and we had the least amount of shots at that age. For example, we spent a great amount of time on that early age, and the more time you work on something, the more you refine it. The team's up to speed and you know the proportions, and it just works.

And then, the 70s span body probably had the second most amount of shots, and it probably worked better out of the box. But then those age 67 shots, we got to those last in the queue, but because there weren't as many shots and not as many people working on them, they probably took longer than we expected.

But you guys did other stuff, too, right? It wasn't just all Brad Pitt's head. Didn't you do the age reduction on Cate Blanchett, as well?

We actually handled about 400 shots, 325 of those were head replacements, and the rest were matte paintings, set extentions and sky replacements. The work you just described, the youthening of Cate Blanchett and also Brad, that was handled by Lola Visual Effects, Edson Williams and his team. They handled close to 300 shots.

And you're all nominated for the Visual Effects Oscar.

Absolutely. Unfortunately - and this is kind of a drag - they only nominate four people to actually get those amazing gold statues, and if it were up to me, there'd be about 150 people up there getting one of them. It's not just my team, but all the visual effects companies worked so hard and passionately to make this movie as good as they could.

A lot of people were upset that Dark Knight didn't get nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, and they look at the tech categories and think it's a shoo-in. And you kind of have to talk them down, "Now, wait a minute - you need to understand what's going on in this Benjamin Button movie." I mean, it's one continuous effects shot for two hours and however many minutes.

Yep.

And I think people are still of the mind that when they see something they can't believe, it's a visual effect. But when they see something they can believe, there's no effect involved. And there are so many things in this film that your mind wouldn't trigger that you're seeing an effect, so you just don't even consider it. You don't think any work went into it at all.

I think you've nailed the dilemma we have. There's certainly an emotional pull for the fantastic work that was done in The Dark Knight and Iron Man, as well. It's really the members of the Academy who have to look at the work and understand what we've done. I know the Visual Effects branch gets it and understands it, because they helped us get to the final three, but when they open it up to the rest of the voting branch, if they take the time to understand what was done, then hopefully we can get their vote.

It's a masterpiece from a technological standpoint.

We spent two years working on it, and it hadn't really been done before. But those were our orders, and we didn't have a choice, and everyone worked really hard and passionately to make it that way.

And for me, I think that's what it is. I've seen stuff like what we got in the superhero movies that are nominated that I'd seen in superhero movies before. They're improvements, sure, but I never felt that I was watching something new. But I haven't ever seen anything like this.

Well, that's very nice to hear, and I hope the voters feel that way as well. I guess we'll find out on Sunday night.

But is that the bar? You know you're working on a story that's so fantastic and unbelievable, and yet you have to make it appear believable. Is the bar then just to show us something we haven't seen at all?

The intention was, and David told me this early on, that when people go see this movie, they're not looking at it as a visual effects film. They can't see it as a visual effect or he'll lose them completely. They have to go to see this man age backwards, and they have to buy his existence, his story, and his experiences that he builds up in those first 52 minutes are crucial until we hand off to Brad. David told me it has to be seamless or you'll lose the audience. It wasn't just me that felt so passionately about this project, it was all the department heads. They all did an amazing job and I think that's why the film has garnered 13 Oscar nominations. We couldn't let anybody down.

For behind-the-scenes material on the creation of the effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, check out Benjamin Button FX.com.

Colin Boyd |

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Reader Comments (1)

Very nice interview. Ironically for me the most fake looking part of the movie was actually the most real, the kid playing Ben at the end. Shoulda just had this effects guy generate a teen/child/infant Ben. And that really says something.

Sunday, February 22, 2009 |

Brandon M. Sergent

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