To New York Yankees fans, their stadium is more than just a ballpark. It's a holy shrine. It's the House That Ruth Built.
Or in Billy Crystal's case, it's "his cathedral."
That's why in Crystal's HBO film, 61*, which recounts the famous 1961 season when Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle competed for Babe Ruth's seemingly unattainable 60-homer record, it was imperative to re-create the stadium as it was 40 years ago.
"There's a whole generation of baseball fans who look upon the structure with such reverence," said Mitchell Drain, special effects supervisor for the film. "It was a huge responsibility ... but when we got it right, Billy let us know how pleased he was."
Deciding how to re-create the stadium was no easy task for the filmmakers. Should they go digital? Film in an existing stadium? Or even more daunting – actually build a new ballpark?
The movie, airing on April 28, couldn't be filmed at Yankee Stadium because its renovation in the early 70's made it impossible to capture the feel of the original park. To overcome this problem, the production team considered building a replica of the lower level of the stadium, while digitally re-creating the upper decks.
But that was an expensive proposition.
"We were doing Gladiator on a (tight) budget," said Rusty Smith, production designer for 61*.
Due to these constraints, the production team looked for already existing baseball stadiums with similar architectural elements for making the film. They found it in Detroit, where the Tigers had left the venerable Tiger Stadium at the end of the 1999 season to move into Comerica Park.
Because Yankee Stadium had three decks, and Tiger Stadium only had two, the filmmakers had to digitally recreate a third level and make some architectural changes to the second. They also had to remove the second deck in center field to include a big scoreboard, and add the Bronx skyline as backdrops, Drain said.
To recreate the third deck, the special effects team hired a matte painter, an artist who paints photo-realistic paintings that can be digitally composed into a movie scene. Because old Yankee Stadium has a distinctive façade, the matte paintings had to be precise. They were done using archival photographs as guides, Drain said.
Other digital elements included re-creating the crowds in the stands. Because there were times when only 100 extras showed up for the casting call, Drain's task was to shoot the people in as many orientations as he could, and then cut and paste their images into different scenes.
"Hopefully you can't detect that the same people are being used over and over again," he said.
The other task was to re-create computer-generated baseballs. Because "Billy wanted a ball's eye view of Roger Maris' record-breaking 61st home run," Drain created a sequence that follows the ball from the pitcher's hand to Maris' bat and then out of the ballpark. "It makes sense why they would want to do the baseball sequences in computer generation," said Eric Jennings, a digital animator for Noiz Studios. "It's virtually impossible to create a camera system that follows a baseball going 100 miles per hour."
Drain said that before shooting began, the actors had three months of baseball camp to learn how to play. Because of that, the crew had to digitally simulate only three to four shots of the actors hitting the ball.
"The only time we had to create something digitally was when someone hit a home run, because hitting a home run is so difficult," Drain said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, the actors were hitting the balls and playing the game."
Both Drain and Smith said digitization was usually the last resort to re-creating the set because of its cost, and due to the importance of giving the actors and directors an actual "stage" to work with.
One big cost was the repainting of Tiger Stadium (which is light blue) to the old pale green of Yankee Stadium. Instead of digitally retouching all of the shots to have a pale green background, 80 percent of the stadium was physically repainted.
"We hired the painter who had painted Tiger Stadium for years," Smith said. "We painted with soap, and although we only shot for two weeks, it took the crew three months to remove the paint."
Smith said that although painting the stadium and then removing the paint ended up costing a couple of hundred thousand dollars, it was still much less than it would have cost to have done it digitally.
"I'm a little surprised that they decided to paint the stadium," Jennings said. "But if you're going to pay an entire animation crew to paint touch-up, it may not be as cost-effective (as having) people physically strip the paint."
Jennings said that deciding whether or not to use computer generation or digitization when filming comes down to the scenario, but that usually "the more fantastic the thing is you're creating, the closer you're going to get to making it (by) using computer generation."
The broad scope of the film Gladiator made computer generation a necessity.
"(Digitally) we built the top of the Colosseum, changed the inside of the Colosseum and then populated the Colosseum with people," said John Nelson, visual effects supervisor for Gladiator in an interview in the DVD version of the film, explaining the making of the movie.
"The other big challenge that we had was creating the sheer quantity of digital people," said Ivor Middleton, the lead animator for the film. "It wasn't just a question of realism. There was one shot that had 80,000 computer-generated characters simulating people moving toward the Colosseum."
To accomplish this, animators took six actors into a studio and had them wear motion capture suits, bulky outfits that digitally recorded their movements. From that data, they could animate whole crowds inside and outside the Colosseum.
Digitization may not always be necessary in every situation, but it seems to be the wave of the future in filmmaking.
"We can basically do anything," Nelson said. "Given enough time, given enough money, anything is possible."
