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The Mummy
Producer Jim Jacks believes the visuals are so compelling, because they had the costume people and production people form the Bond movies, from the Star Wars movies and from Titanic. They had the best people in the business working on this project.
The effects team want to make sure all effects are done as well as they can possibly do them. It has to look absolutely real. ILM has been involved from the beginning, creating most of this technology. They know what can be done and what cannot be done. "You can be assured if you give a problem to ILM that they will solve it. I believe they are the best of the best - their knowledge and creativity is spectacular." is Jim Jacks' opinion of his special effects team.
John Berton is the visual effects supervisor from ILM. He likes to do something new and exciting with every new project they get. "We try and infuse it with something we can bring to the movie, that's why people hire us." The practical effects are done first, like sand blowing up in the air, which are difficult to use interactively between an actor and a computer graphics effect. All the action and adventure in Bredan Fraisers performance is combine with the effect works the team on the set are doing and glossed with really beautiful computer graphics. The end result is a scene that combines really great action with stunning special effects. The great thing about movies is that you can create something on the screen that we could not see in reality.
This mummy has got to be mean, fast and dangerous. He starts out as a walking animated corpse and as he proceeds to do away with the four unfortunate people who opened his tomb, he regenerates more and more and turns into different monsters, until finally he is the actor Arnold Vosloo. There are stages where he is part computer graphics and part actor. The team took Arnold Vosloo and put him into the motion capture studio and had him replicate the actions that he had done on the stage when the background plates were photographed. That data was used to make sure that the mummy walks and, moves, gestures and behaves just like Arnold Vosloo. ILM has their own software which converts that background into a skeleton and once that has been constructed into three dimensions, then the artists can map anything they want onto that skeleton. {Image - Mummy3}
There are lots of chilling things thrown in as well; shrivelled corpses, flesh eating beetles, sandstorms, rivers of blood and eclipses. As well as a Mummy that owes more to the terminator than a bunch of stunt men from yesteryear. But of course it is the computer that is the real star, creating effects that are so chilling that you will believe that the mummy is out to get you as well.
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South African actor, Arnold Vosloo, is not just a guy in bandages, he is the guy in bandages, the mummy himself. Universals 1932 classic movie - "The Mummy" has been recreated by a special effects team from Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). They have created the most realistic monster yet seen on the big screen, they even had to develop their own software to create these incredible special effects.
Stephen Sommers, the director and screenwriter, believes the special effects are going to help them create the ancient Egypt of 3000 years ago as well as the Cairo of the 1920's. Most importantly they are going create the magic of the mummy.
Stephen Sommers says ILM challenges him and unlike some of the effects teams he has worked with, ILM gives him what he asks for and more.
The effects team for Star Wars were developing the software to handle, hundreds, possibly thousands of images. "We used the same technology to create the sand storms which were also a part of Imhoteps powers" says Ben Snow a computer graphics office "he raises up these sandstorms that come racing across the desert and this has allowed us to build on some of the things we have done on "Twister" and "Deep Impact" and push it that extra step."
To create the face in the sand storm Imhotep conjures up, a model of the actor's head is taken and digitised and a depth map is created (a depth map is a map where the nearest point of the face comes out white and the furthest point comes out black). Using the information from the coloured
particles, the graphics artists are able to push that face through the depth map and are able to reflect what happens to the particles of sand based on that image. This all results in a final image of a face appearing in a sandstorm
JOHN ANDERSON - PRINCIPLE COMPUTER GRAPHICS ENGINEER, ILM
The creature is generated in layers, the first layer is the skeleton, built on top of that is the muscles. The skin is then layered and on top of that we attach the pieces that need to move and then we apply procedural animation on the various layers. Imhotep, in all his stages, contains a great amount of procedural animation; it is meant to add life and detail to the creature, so the large scale of animation is done by the animators in the traditional fashion. The procedural animation is used on soft parts of the body, like the visible part of the brain, the guts, the visible internal organs, since you can see through the creature, and also the skin, which provides a pliable surface pulled over the muscles. This is the first movie that's used the skinning technology, the technology using procedural animation to produce the skin.
