From Transylvania to Paris—next stop, the belfry tower of Notre Dame for Van Helsing’s encounter with the full CGI character of Mr. Hyde, high above the streets of Paris. Because of the complexity of the scene, which would combine live-action, a computer-generated character, and a practical set with visual and special effects, ‘pre-vis’ (3D animated storyboards) were created for the more than 70 shots called for in the sequence. The use of a CG character provided the filmmakers with a great deal more flexibility in the types of action that could be executed in the scene.
Once additional shooting was completed back at Playa Vista Stages—scenes played against the sets for Castle Dracula’s skylight and laboratory—production wrapped principal photography after 109 days of shooting, on the first day of July.
Well before the beginning of principal photography, many departments were involved in a heavy period of pre-production “R&D,” some of it falling to the visual effects teams and the artists at ILM, Captive Audience and Illusion Arts, charged with creating digital environments, transformations, creatures and effects that would extend the work and world produced by their practical counterparts, equally busy with their own pre-production schedules.
Production designer Allan Cameron points out, “We had to incorporate digital environments to extend the scale of the practical ones, as well as to accommodate some of the visual effects that were going on. On one of the soundstages, for instance, we built a 200-foot section of a bridge that, when completed on film, would be more than 1,000 feet long. To build something that large would have been practically and financially impossible.”
Production can indeed build a bridge—but what about a Wolf Man? Led by Van Helsing visual effects producer Jennifer Bell (who collaborated on both The Mummy and its sequel) and associate visual effects producer Joe Grossberg, ILM’s multiple Academy Award®-nominated Scott Squires (Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace) and Ben Snow (Pearl Harbor, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones) were the ILM visual effects supervisors responsible for creating all of the 3D creatures populating Van Helsing. Early conceptual creature drawings were executed by noted illustrators Crash McCreery and Patrick Tatopoulos.
CGI would be responsible for the final Wolf Man, but with a cooperative effort from the CG artists, actor Kemp was incorporated into the transformation (for as long of the transition as possible), resulting in a seamless morphing from man to beast. Kemp traveled to ILM, where his body was scanned and placed into effects artists’ computers. “They can move me, turn me, blow me up, shrink me, make me do this amazing stuff. But I tried to convince them to let me change as much as I can before the computerized ‘me’ takes over,” he notes with a smile.
Perhaps one of the most inventive marriages of CGI and practical effects results in the vampiric Brides while in flight. Ducsay says, “Some of the things that have to be done with a creature would be too dangerous or difficult for an actor…or just downright impossible. The Brides are a great example of combining CGI with reality. They’re executed by melding digital bodies, which have been fashioned after the actresses’ movements, onto the actresses heads in makeup—this gives us an ‘organic’ creature. We wanted a combination whereby the actors’ performances provide a level of realism you couldn’t otherwise achieve, but the fantastical elements are sheer computer creation.”
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