fxguide: Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes in Neil Burger’s Divergent is the mirror room, where ‘Divergent’ Beatrice ‘Tris’ Prior (Shailene Woodley) explores a room of thousands of her own reflections. But, it was also one of the most challenging for the pic’s visual effects crew, since acquiring the necessary reflection imagery would have been impossible to film with a real camera and mirrors. Here’s how overall visual effects supervisor Jim Berney, working with visual effects producer Greg Baxter, The Third Floor and visual effects supervisor Matt Dessero and his team at Method Studios, realized the unique shots.
3 comments:
Damn. The mirror room in Divergent was a crazy challenge. First Jim Berney had the art department build a model. I loved reading that he stared at it for an hour a day for weeks attempting to figure out Neil Burger’s approach to the scene. Next was previs, courtesy of The Third Floor. I would really like to see the previs sequence. This is the only thing missing from the excellent fxguide article that seems to cover every aspect of the making of the scene. Then techvis. Finally shooting. And then the daunting task of putting the pieces back together. Yikes. The short video of Method Studio’s VFX work – including amazingly organized/labeled greenscreen shooting – nicely complements the interviews from Matt Dessero. Now I need to see the movie!
What a crazy technical design challenge. I haven't read the Divergent series or seen the movie, but clearly this shot was something that the author felt was important to the script and needed to be realized through film. Although a lot of the specifics of CGI and special effects go over my head, watching the first video showing the way the visual layers built up was really interesting. Movies like this one always make me wonder about how much physical scenery exists in a film and how much is computer generated. Even as someone who is not knowledgable about computer graphics, this article was interesting because it explained the process of solving a complicated design challenge. It was interesting to see their approach from planning and brainstorming, determining what may and may not work, and then working through the actual process of producing this scene. Its great to read the statement of one of the men who worked on the project saying that it was "the most tricky, challenging and most rewarding sequence I’ve ever done."
Wow this seems like a lot of work which at first seems fairly feasible. Its very impressive how much this scene had to be thought out. I love the solution to this scene and how they put a camera where there would be a mirror to capture every reflection angle. Its insane looking at how different the scene is from when they filmed it to how it looked after composition.
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