CafeFX Creates Snakes on a Plane

CafeFX achieved new heights ­at 35,000 feet to be exact­ of realism when it unleashed hundreds of killer CG serpents on a Boeing 747 in the much-anticipated feature film "Snakes on a Plane" (New Line Cinema), which opened August 18. As the lead visual effects studio, CafeFX created more than half of the 500 VFX shots, including some 100 photoreal snake sots as well as all of the airline exteriors. CafeFX also handled all the airplane inflight exteriors shots and the Boeing's climactic emergency landing at LAX.

"CafeFX has a lot to look forward to in films once people see their work in 'Snakes on a Plane,'" states Erik Henry, VFX supervisor for the motion picture. "I'm so pleased with everything they did."

CafeFX's role began in the spring of 2005 with prepro planning, reference material collection and suggestions as to how shots might be staged. The CafeFX team, which ultimately learned more about snakes than they ever imagined, completed their work in mid-June, 2006.

"We looked at every single movie with snakes and airplanes in them to set a benchmark to beat," notes Scott Gordon, CafeFx's VFX supervisor who was on-set for the filming of most of the VFX shots. "Most of them fell short on snake performance not because of the look of the snakes, but rather on their performance. With technology today it's relatively easy to make snakes that look realistic, but giving them believable movement motion was the challenge. We had to allow enough time in each of the shots for the snake to travel at real-world speeds, which are slower than what most people think."

CafeFX "started with reality as our basis and tried to work within that," says Gordon, "but there were constraints. For example, we had three minutes to show a snake eating a person when it might really take an hour to swallow something that size. So we had to speed up the process. We look some liberties but nowhere near the kind of liberties you might think."

Hundreds of CG Snakes on the Loose
While a crateful of deadly snakes was loosed on the flight, CafeFX crafted hundreds of snakes, many more than could possibly fit in a crate, including a 17-foot python, Kong; a gaboon viper, Scarface; an iridescent Boelens python; an eyelash viper; and a red moccasin. Many were composites of several species.

"We did a great deal of research," says Gordon. "We poured over thousands of photographs and hours of footage to figure everything out. We wanted to make the different species recognizable but more interesting looking at the same time. For example, the eyelash viper has horns above its eyelids so we pulled out the horns to give it a more prominent feature. Kong, the 17-foot python, looks like an alligator when he opens his mouth and you see all these teeth. We made the teeth a little bigger than in reality but, honestly, I have a picture of a python killed on an electric fence and it has two rows of teeth and a huge jaw line. They have evolved big teeth to grip their victim after they've squeezed it to death."

CafeFX also had footage of a python regurgitating a baby hippopotamus. "You're talking about something the size of a human being so if you think the snake eating a man in the movie is fake, they do this in real life!" Gordon declares.

Snake wranglers corralled real snakes on the set for some sequences. "We frequently added CG snakes to scenes begun with practical snakes: CG took over when the snakes got close to the actors," explains CG lead Gabriel Vargas. "We put a great deal of effort into integrating the snakes into the scenes as fully as possible. There were so many subtle nuances to contend with. Take Scarface, the gaboon viper. He had lots of very spiky scales which had to be individually modeled --you had to see the detail in the shadows.

Vargas modeled, textured, rendered, layered, composited and animated Scarface for the dramatic cockpit attack on the female lead, played by Julianna Margulies. "The scene was 14 long shots," he recalls. "The first shot was something like 600 frames, and some scenes had up to 30 layers. It was pretty tedious going."

In the complex first shot, Scarface slithers down the electronics corridor, hits some wires and shorts out the electrical system. The plane loses its lighting, and the snake gets its trademark scar . "We created two models, one with the gash and one without," says Vargas. "After getting burned, Scarface comes face-to-face with the camera and you see the scar full-screen. I had to model each individual scale to get the right look. That was a nine-month project!"

Animating the deadly serpent was also more difficult than animating a character walking. "Snakes do not travel in a straight path; they slither, coil and push their way along, You see their muscles," Vargas points out.

Steve Arguello spent a year as lead modeler for many of the snakes, including the eyelash viper and the black-and-white striped, iridescent Boelens python. He also built Kong, using a python set up in a habitat in CafeFX's offices, as a reference. "Our snake was a juvenile, and the director wanted the CG snake to look meaner so I built a different brow and removed the puppy-dog look from its face," he reports. "I also modeled individual scales for its head for the close ups."

"Kong" Swallows a ManOne of the most terrifying scenes is one in which Kong swallows a man whole. "We watched the movie 'Anaconda' and had problems with how monster-like the snake was," says Erik Henry. "Our snake was nearly the same size and had gobbled up a dog before attacking the man. CafeFX had to come up with a CG snake that looked real, moved real and did things that were monster-like. With director David Ellis's support, and within a quick-cut sequence, he gave CafeFX shots that were long enough to allow the snake to progress through the shot as it's realistically intended to move."

Having seen CafeFX's initial work on the sequence, the studio asked the company "to amp up" the action extending the scene in which Kong crushes a man and chomps down on his head to devour him.

"Making a snake eat someone in CG is really difficult," says compositor Votch Levi. "It's pretty challenging to make the snake wrap itself around a guy and engulf his head since we had to integrate a live-action character with a CG actor and snake. We had to make it look like the snake was attacking the guy and wrapping itself around his head and body squeezing the life out of him and then swallowing him.

"Kong had a detachable jaw and Erik felt it was important to show the membrane at the lower lip of its jaw as it was laid over the guy's head in close up shots," Levi continues. "The scene shows the snake's mouth closing down over the actor's nose, but we actually animated the scene all the way down to his chin."

He notes that all of the action was shot in the plane set, not on a greenscreen stage. "That made it even more difficult to composite especially since there was lots of smoke in the plane from the electrical shorts. We had to match the smoke levels on top of the CG elements we generated." Levi also comped numerous cockpit shots adding clouds, rain and lightning strikes outside the plane's windows.

Montreal-based Hybride Technologies, with whom CafeFX had previously teamed on "Sin City," the "Spy Kids" series and "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D," was also charged with creating many shots featuring different types of snakes. "CafeFX and Hybride had a kind of natural competition going," Erik Henry recalls. "Neither company wanted to be one-upped by the other. But it was all in good fun. Everyone was the better for it and the film was too."

To attain the level of realism CafeFX achieved with the snakes the company devised a rig to help animate the creatures. "It essentially enabled them to make the snakes do what snakes do," says Henry. "Snakes are much more complicated than a biped. They don't stretch if you pull it. They stay on a slithery path."

Tracking also proved more difficult than usual. "CafeFX had to deal with the fact that the plane set was rockin' and rollin' with its own hydraulics," Henry points out. "It was a 100-foot tube that was torquing and twisting all the time."

Flying a CG Boeing 747
Speaking of planes, CafeFX CG artist Mike Fischer spent 12 months to craft the Boeing 747 exteriors. "I've had the opportunity to work with several companies on CG planes, and you cannot tell that ours is not a real plane," he says. "The movie opens with the plane leaving the airport and I take it all the way to coming in for a landing."

Fischer did extensive research "to get intimate with the details" of the 747 studying numerous photos and moving footage to observe how the plane body stretches and the skin wrinkles under pressure. He also looked at other movies "to see what worked and what didn't work" in designing and animating CG aircraft.

"We looked at a lot of movies but most use models and miniatures, and it is often easy to see that it's a miniature or that the clouds are a photo," notes Scott Gordon. "We scrutinized all of this in more detail than I think anybody else would."

"Mike did a fabulous job -- I've never seen a model or CG plane in any film that looked as good," says Erik Henry. "The plane on the tarmac at the end is indistinguishable from a real plane."

"The quest for realism was the biggest challenging, adding more and more detail even if the viewer wouldn't notice it all," explains Fischer who headed a team which included animators and particle artists. An additional particle artist came onboard for the shot where the unpiloted plane comes dangerously close to crashing into the water. "It required 20 layers as a huge jet of water spray is kicked up the plane," Fischer explains.

Peter Lloyd, and Robert Stromberg, one of the industry's premier matte painters, provided storm and breaking dawn backgrounds for the aircraft's harrowing flight. To capture the inexperienced pilot's POV for the LAX approach Erik Henry and Scott Gordon stopped traffic at the mammoth airport for helicopter aerials down the runway. Unfortunately, they also captured unwanted fog.

"In 60-70 shots CafeFX had to digitally eat away at the fog until it was a sunny day that matched the weather in the shot where everyone deplanes," Henry says.

"Every shot in 'Snakes on a Plane' had to tell part of the story. Every shot in the movie had to be there for a reason," concludes Scott Gordon. "We wanted to accomplish that goal and still pay attention to reality. By getting involved early we think the results pay off on the screen."

Janet Muswell-Hamilton served as Erik Henry's producer on the film.

ComputerCafe Group is headquartered in Santa Maria, CA, and maintains a studio in Santa Monica, CA. The company, founded as ComputerCafe in 1993 by Jeff Barnes and David Ebner to produce broadcast promotion and television ID packages, today works on major motion pictures, including Fast and Furios 3 Tokyo Drift, Scary Movie 3,Sin City, The Aviator, Flight of the Phoenix, Spy Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Master and Commander, LXG, The Core, Spy Kids 2 & 3, Panic Room, The One, Armageddon, Flubber), while its Santa Monica-based commercial and music video division The Syndicate creates commercials for national advertisers, including BT, Ford, Nissan, Adidas, United Airlines, California Milk Advisory Board, Kinerase, Microsoft); broadcast projects (CBS, HBO, NBC); and music videos for top bands such as Green Day, Dave Matthews, Incubus and J.Lo. Both the Santa Maria and the Santa Monica studio are outfitted with the latest effects, design, compositing and rendering technologies.

CafeFX: http://www.dexigner.com/directory/detail/3381.html

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