Behind ILM’s 700 invisible visual effects shots for Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’.
Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman has worked on many projects that might be considered VFX-driven films. Films like Attack of the Clones, War of the Worlds and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But he’s also worked on numerous films that include largely invisible effects work, including Martin Scorsese’s Silence, The Irishman and the director’s latest release, Killers of the Flower Moon.
This most recent project of Helman’s is certainly filled with that same brand of invisible effects work, even though–startlingly–it involved around 700 VFX shots across 85 minutes of screen time.
“It’s hundreds and hundreds of shots, but this is not really a visual effects show,” Helman told befores & afters. “It is a show that is definitely tackling content and storytelling. It’s completely reality-driven. I would love it if people would recognize that this is also visual effects, just like those bigger films. It’s as important as anything else because the movie without visual effects wouldn’t be what it is. The same way if you don’t have wardrobe, if you don’t have production design, if you don’t have lighting. It’s the collaboration of all these different departments that make the movie what it is.”
“It’s an incredible thing to take a look at Scorsese’s way of directing where he’s using all these different disciplines as a brush on a canvas,” adds Helman, “it’s the same way that an artist would paint: you would do a base color, and then put some texture on, and then you’d use a different brush for something else.”
Helman attributes much of the success of the invisible effects work by ILM on the film to a thorough R&D process and close collaboration with the other departments and the Osage Nation itself during filming.
“When you are working with Marty, at the beginning of every movie–and I did this with Silence and with Irishman–he brings all these literary references. There’s an archiving department that works at his production company Sikelia. They have not only the artistic or aesthetic part of the vision Marty has for the movie, but also historical references; especially when we’re doing something like Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon. Then what we do is, we all sit down with the director of photography Rodrigo Prieto, production designer Jack Fisk, and with Marty himself and we look at that stuff together. I take all that stuff and I impart that onto our visual effects team.”
Oil rigs, trains…and cows
In terms of what ILM crafted as visual effects for Killers of the Flower Moon, Helman says the work included oil rigs, train enhancements, expansive environment work, and cows.
The oil rigs–crucial to the story of oil being discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land–and the subsequent murder of so many Osage people–feature in vast numbers in wide shots of the film, and up close. ILM based its digital oil rig on what Helman describes as a ‘maxi-ture’ build of a period rig built by the special effects department.
“We did all this photogrammetry around it with helicopters and drones and we took textures and then we populated a bunch of shots with hundreds of CG oil rigs with the right mechanisms.”
One of the centerpiece oil rig shots follows a car as it travels along, eventually revealing a horde of rigs. “It was interesting how Scorsese thinks about a shot like this,” observes Helman. “Marty’s very collaborative. I said, ‘How about we just put a huge rig going by, but we don’t really know what it is?’ And then he said, ‘Okay, well, that’s great. That’s a good idea. Let’s put some steam there.’ And then we reveal one oil rig and then two and then three, and then four or five. And then all of a sudden we see hundreds of them. We took a look at a bunch of period references and we made it. If you were to make that shot in black and white, it’d be the same as the reference from 1920.”
Scenes at the train station were expanded and enhanced, as well as other moments for views of the town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. “Production design built two blocks of Pawhuska,” discusses Helman. “We would complete the town going one way or the other with CG cars and CG people.”
CG cows were necessary for some scenes, too. An initial attempt was made to film as many real cows in-camera as possible, in fact, Helman asked for 350 cows, which the production delivered. However, the heat of the location shoot would intervene. “We started with about 352 cows at 7am, but by 10am it was 96 degrees. It was really, really hot. And it turns out that these cows are pretty smart. What they do is they go and get under the trees and they just stay there. You cannot move them. So then we ended up with really great photogrammetry of the cows because they’re not moving, and then we did them in CG.”
One scene required cows to go very close to the character William Hale, played by Robert De Niro. “But,” says Helman, “the cows got really scared of the camera going over them, and they were also very scared of Bob, so they didn’t get close to him. There, again, we had to put them in.”
Even more invisible effects
There are several moments in Killers of the Flower Moon where ILM went even further into the invisible effects realm. For instance, a character killed in a car crash required some digital augmentation to help audiences connect him to earlier scenes. “In the two or three scenes before the crash, he appears with a hat,” outlines Helman. “But when we shot it in the car, he didn’t wear a hat, and then nobody knew who he was. So we had to put a CG hat on him and some blood on his face. Otherwise, they wouldn’t make a connection. That’s another part of the storytelling-side of VFX, where we’re helping to say ‘this is the person’ to the audience.”
“Another example was where Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is reading a book about the Osage,” continues Helman. “We had the book and he was reading it, but he didn’t have the right pictures in the book. So all those pictures were put later on into the book. He’s turning pages and doing all this stuff, so there were a number of lighting and simulation considerations and putting all the right contrast in for those pictures to tell the story that Marty wanted to tell.”
The invisible effects shots continued to help tell the stories of how the four sisters in the film are poisoned. While make-up effects were utilized on set, the scenes were shot out of continuity. “The edit can change, and that makes it difficult to see the progression of somebody getting sick,” states Helman. “So we had to map all that stuff out and change all that continuity of being sick.”
Crowds were yet another element dealt with by ILM, including for the radio show theater and for the final pullback shot from a drum of the Osage people dancing in circles. Says Helman: “We had about a hundred people, but we needed 700 or so. So we shot a bunch of passes and we did some CG people, and then we completed the circle so that it did what Marty wanted.”
Finally, an important addition to the film–visual effects-wise–came in the form of reconstructing historical documentary footage, since not all the original footage that existed could be restored. “We actually shot with a Bell & Howell camera from 1920, but we shot it with color film,” explains Helman. “And then we processed that to look exactly like the original footage, and then re-created Washington DC for that historical footage. It really was a great big show filled with complex visual effects, but the audience will see this film and not know that we did anything at all until the credits roll.
