HOW’D WE DO IT?
Operation Avalanche is a fake-documentary period piece, set in the late 1960s. It
follows 3 CIA agents who are sent to NASA in 1967 and once they discover NASA
can’t get to the moon by the end of the decade, the team decides to fake it.
The conceit of the film is that it appears as if recovered from a time capsule, buried
in the ground for 40 years. It was shot digitally, using vintage French lenses and
then painstakingly transferred to 16mm colour film to appear as a documentary
from the era (like something the Maysles brothers or Haskell Wexler was making at
the time).
To achieve the documentary feel, much of the film was improvised. For this reason
this was not a typical VFX workHlow. The film required an organic, resourceful,
outside the box approach at all times to keep up with the ever evolving narrative.
The film contains 4 complex visual effects sequences ranging in length from 30
seconds to 3 minutes and boasts a Hinal tally of 76 visual effects shots. Each
presented a new challenge that required a unique approach.
Matt Interviews James Webb
When I Hirst met with Matt Johnson about the project he discussed wanting to use a
lot of the same techniques that Rober Zemekis famously employed on Forrest
Gump. Basically, he wanted to appear as his character in archival footage. Early in
the film, his character interviews the head of NASA James Webb. The editing team
scoured the archives and found some black and white, grainy footage of an old interview with Webb. I oversaw the shoot of green screen materials of Matt’s side of the interview and then painted out the original interviewer and composited Matt into the footage. This was then printed to 16mm B&W film and projected in the context of the scene where Matt and Owen
watch the interview.
Reanimating Stanley Kubrick To gather intel on how to fake the moon landing our protagonist needed to visit the Film set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A space Odyssey. We quickly realized how little footage existed and how poor the quality was of that we could Hind. The image
sequences were laden with video transfer ghosting, colour loss and drop frames.
That shift in quality wasn’t present anywhere else on our timeline so we deemed it
unacceptable. Luckily, the still photography taken (in most cases by Kubrick himself)
had all the data we needed. Now VFX had a plan.
We reverse engineered the photographs by triangulating a 3D environment using
information like Kubrick’s known height (1.69m). We proceeded to build geometry representing
the sets, props and personnel. This work allowed us to postulate lens length, film back, and
camera location for our onset shoots.
We built our 3D environment again, this time in a green screen studio. VFX dictated
what parts of the original 2001 sets needed to be built in order to disguise where the
photographs began and where the real sets ended. This allowed our characters to
interact convincingly within the space suggested by our source material. More
importantly we were free to introduce our handheld aesthetic because lock offs
wouldn’t make the cut.
The VFX department began building high-resolution models of the iconic 2001 spacesuit, which required rig and animation. And a version of the Dawn of the Apes set, because the photographs available weren’t holding up to scrutiny. Furthermore, Matt needed to be there to discover front screen projection! These shots became fully CGI.
Lastly, Matt wanted a moment with he and Kubrick together but it seemed
implausible. What could Kubrick be doing in this moment that would allow us to use
as much of the source material as possible?
An autograph!
That would allow us to blend the subtle hand movements of someone signing their name while
maintaining Kubrick’s facial perspective found in the photograph. We set up the scene like the other shots, cast a body double for Matt’s interaction, covered fake Kubrick’s face with tracking dots and projected real Kubrick’s face on our actor. With careful compositing the moment
was sold.
Editorial and VFX spent months building a convincing sequence. Hard cuts between
photographs felt contrived so began introducing leader, pre-roll, and bumpers, all of
which became unassuming visual effects existing only to serve the ebb and Hlow of
the edit.
NASA sent our producer dozens of hours of footage that documented Apollo’s space
race from the inside. We sifted through the footage and picked our selects. The idea
being we would integrate our characters into the footage to help sell the period.
Footage in mission control was in abundance, so we toyed with the idea of building a
scene that cut between two archival cameras, which we would consider to be our
camera team’s cameras respectively (as this is a found footage film, the cameramen
are characters in the film).
We ironed out sequential beats, timing, and layout in crude animatic form with temp
audio and presented our pitch to the director. He would have to write a scene that
adhered to the sequential parameters of our proposed sequence. The result is all
three characters are present in a bustling mission control at the height of Apollo.
As mentioned above, there was no recorded onset data to aid. So there was a lot of
educated guesswork. Luckily, the crew had been granted permission to shoot in the
actual mission control at NASA months before, and although we didn’t take
measurements of the room, we did know how tall Matt was!
The mission control entrance was the most complex of all the setups. The source
material was handheld, walking through Z-depth, through multiple lighting
conditions. We tracked the footage and rebuilt the scene to the best of our ability
referencing Matt in a situation from our footage. After the track was generated we
uncovered a ghost! There was the walk cycle of a long forgotten cameraman shot 40
years prior.
We built mission control to scale in a green screen studio and began recreating the
camera move. The Techno Dolly had failed to reproduce the high-frequency
animation curves we needed (even with stabilized footage). So we opted for a
lightweight glide camera rig and asked our DP to study the walk cycle, timing, turn,
roll and the step-up of the original cameraman.
The scene is a celebration of resourcefulness.
Model by Wallace Kirkwood
Shader design with Renderman