VFX Pro
It was late 2005 when Alex Wuttke got the call: He had two years to rebuild the extinct. But it wasn’t the digital archaeology that forced Wuttke, computer-graphics supervisor at London F/X house Double Negative, into what he half-jokingly remembers as “sheer panic.” It was that damn saber-toothed tiger’s close-up—snarling, fur-bristling and, if notoriously over-the-top director Roland Emmerich had his way with the CG frenzy that would become 10,000 B.C., soaking wet.
“Obviously, it’s a lot of trepidation,” Wuttke says, remembering what his team was feeling during early effects planning for the epic action-adventure flick, which opens this weekend. “Whenever you’re talking about fur and close-ups, that instantly raises the bar. But then the fur’s interaction with water—it was majorly obvious that it’d be highly challenging for us to complete this work. But we jumped at the opportunity.”
Creating a photo-realistic animal isn’t like building a kick-ass robot from scratch or even rendering a giant tidal wave that will take out New York City. Creature work is tougher than that, requiring specially modified CGI tools, numerous visual-effects companies, hundreds of hours of HD video of living animals and thousands of photos to get the job done. Even though Wuttke and co. had an animated version of the tiger with the fur package ready six weeks after they landed the job, it took a year to develop the final version.
The saber-tooth, a mythical beast that can speak to only one crucial character in 10,000 B.C., actually had its digital birthday a few months before that frightening phone call, when visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas came onboard. Though mammoths and so-called “terror birds” combine with the tiger to make up 280 of the film’s 641 F/X shots, all those tight shots of the dripping feline made it her primary focus. “Everything on the tiger’s face is moving subtly,” Goulekas says. “Water by itself is really hard, fur by itself is really hard, and suddenly you have the two of them interacting with one another. That frightened me.”
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