Creating Scarlett Johansson's Computer-Generated Body Suit

(dramatic music)

This is Major.

I'm on site.

(dramatic music)

(gun shots)

I'm going in.

(dramatic music)

(glass breaking)

(gun shots)

Hi, I'm Mike Seymour from fxguide.com for Wired.

This time we're looking at the brilliant visual effects

from MPC in the film, Ghost in the Shell.

(glass breaking)

The film opens with the shelling sequence,

which pays homage to the 1995 anime opening,

in which we see the creation of a cyborg,

later revealed to be Major.

This was created using a blend of computer graphics

and practical animatronics from Weta Workshop.

While MCP referenced the live action,

in the end to get this really detailed skeleton with muscles

it's fully skinned, that is Major,

the majority of the shots ended up being digital.

The sequence was fully previewed

and almost every shot was filmed as live action.

But it's testament to MCP and the approach

of director Rupert Sanders that this opening sequence

is so realistic and yet, in the end, about 70%

of the sequence is, in fact, fully digital.

Now this allowed for more backlighting, scattering,

as well as having slightly more complex camera moves.

The production design in this film is remarkable.

And it's not just Major that benefits from this.

From the evil spider tank to the assassin Geisha bot,

there's a host of characters

and complex visual effects work.

(screaming)

The production VFX supervisors were

Guillaume Rocheron and John Dykstra.

MCP's team worked really closely,

not only to match that production design

and incorporate all of the digital versions

of Weta Workshop's props where needed,

also to match the complex lighting on set.

Major has a special body suit, that allows for invisibility,

but it required a glimmering effect,

even when it's not transparent.

MPC had to roto their suit and it many shots

remove wires and rigs.

So it was decided that Scarlett Johansson's suit

that she wears would actually be fully digitally replaced

throughout the film.

(dramatic music)

In fact, apart from two shots,

every time you see the white suit, it's entirely CG.

The only two practical suit shots in the whole film are,

in fact, her out of focus and close to camera.

Replacing the suit was particularly complex

in this sequence, where Major's suit

and the invisibility effect are shown

in this really complex water fight scene.

(dramatic music)

(yelling)

These shots also highlight the futuristic city

that MCP had to build and it's holographic signage.

Ghost in the Shell was shot in the streets of New Zealand,

but the team had to not only do set extensions,

but also populate the word with futuristic signage.

Both these signs and the other holograms

that are in the film were created using a large number

of cameras in one of two different special camera rays.

For the deep dive sequence,

the team used 150 digital still cameras,

but for the solid holograms, or solograms,

they used 80 2D computer vision cameras

recording moving footage.

The deep dive had 27 characters,

but the team also filmed 50 to 60 actors

to be used in the solograms.

The idea of the photogramatry solved having to

model, texture, and animate all of these characters.

But the approach basically used photgramarty on each frame.

So in total there were some 32,000 3D scans.

The voxal grid that we actually see on screen

was lower resolution in the poorer neighborhoods

making the signs seem older

and much higher resolution in the wealthier parts of town.

This approach has no correspondence between frames.

Each frame is a new 3D model.

As these per frame model sequences of high resolution

point clouds are fed into the voxal grid,

it distributes them in these effectively small boxes.

What we see on film are these different boxes

being lit up by the average color of the points inside them.

The output from this Houdini software is a

lego style 3D model that the team can now relight

and also cast, bounce light onto.

If you look carefully, some of the solograms

light up buildings near them,

but some of them are also are themselves lit

by streetlights, cars, and other signage.

MCP's RND team developed completely new software

that allowed them to reconstruct, process, manipulate

and deal with this huge amount of volumetric data

and place it into these shots.

Well, don't forget, please subscribe for more

behind the scenes action.

I'm Mike Seymour for Wired.

(clapping)

(gun shots)

(dramatic music)

[Major] I'll find out who I was.

(dramatic music)

[Man] Everything they told you was a lie.

[Major] Who are you?

[Man] They did not save your life.

They stole it.