Behind the invisible effects in the film, which also included crowds, a paper airplane and even wallpaper.
In Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, now streaming on Netflix, an intense argument on Thanksgiving Day between Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan)–all played out in one four minute long shot–is followed by an out-the-window view of a Snoopy balloon traveling along the New York street.
That view was a digital environment of Central Park crafted by Phosphene, and included a CG Snoopy balloon that was actually curated to reflect the impact of the argument on Bernstein.
It’s just one of the many invisible visual effects overseen by Phosphene visual effects supervisor John Bair for the film. Others included crowds and transition moments for several of Berstein’s performances, a paper airplane scene, and even a sequence where some wallpaper behind the composer was added to amplify a moment.
Cooper was especially pleased with the ability of VFX to completely rebuild specific environments, and often to a level that flourished beyond what was previously planned. “To me,” he says, “the most exciting elements we created were the Kennedy Center out of the Rose Theater and the Carnegie Hall side stage out of a black box.”
Read on to hear how from Bair how Phosphene pulled off those sequences, and several others.
b&a: As soon as I saw the film, I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t even know what visual effects have been done even though I saw Phosphene’s credits in there’. It’s one of those great kind of invisible effects films. What kinds of conversations did you have with the filmmakers about coming in as that invisible side?
John Bair: Well, I feel like this might be the year of invisible effects between Killers of the Flower Moon and a bunch of other films. It’s excellent that all the films are getting recognition for these huge contributions. I was actually building up the showreels, and noticed that there’s a lot of long shots we worked on. It of course has a much lower overall shot count than most films have, but nearly 80% of the film has visual effects of some kind.
The conversations were about several things. One thing was crowds, which were an important part of the movie. Beyond that, especially as I built up better and better communication with Bradley, he really started to embrace options. He was very much into building options that he could have during post just to cover his bases.
Indeed, a lot of times, things were invented during post, and we realized we could elaborate much more visually on something than we had ever initially anticipated. What really helped us was that the production via both producers and Netflix all were very much on board with our desire to LiDAR scan everything, not just for the crowds necessarily, but even beyond that, such as having scans of The Dakota apartment and scans of Carnegie Hall. For those scans, we worked with John Ashby at Aura FX, and apparently that’s the first time Carnegie Hall has been scanned entirely as a location.
Having LiDAR scans of all these locations really helped us in the end, not just for the crowd, but for certain scenes that really expanded during post. For example, there’s that backstage scene where the camera ‘pulls’ Lenny offstage and he embraces Felicia and we look behind them. Well, that was always envisioned as just a black box moment. It was filmed in darkness at Steiner Stages, and it was going to be used that way. Then Bradley, while editing, realized he could tie that directly to a moment in Carnegie Hall.
So, because we had the scan of Carnegie–we didn’t have a scan of backstage, so that was all created later–but we had at least had the building blocks of having Carnegie completely scanned and that let us build out an entire CG environment where there wasn’t meant to be anything.
b&a: There’s a couple of transitions, including some with quite sweeping camera moves, that I really liked in the film, too.
John Bair: Many of the others were planned. There’s one in Carnegie Hall that had a cable-cam movement. It’s the one where he hops up out of bed and he runs down the hallway and through the doors. That was all done with a crane on a set build, and then it ties into a cable-cam move seamlessly into Carnegie Hall and then back. Then there’s also the moment where he’s at the picnic in the backyard and they hop up from the table and go flying into the Broadway theater.
Those moments were planned ahead of time and Matthew Libatique, the DP, was super helpful. He’s been through everything with visual effects. So he obviously knew what he was doing and was flexible and happy to help facilitate our specific needs to get those things done.
b&a: For the crowd duplication work, did you have a singular approach to those, for example, was it tile work, or CG crowds?
John Bair: There were a couple of different approaches, and that also ties into production embracing us, covering our bases and being flexible. We did LiDAR scans of locations, but we also carefully planned to do cyber scanning of extras. We always had a group of extras who were willing to be scanned in case we needed to use digital doubles in specific shots.
We ended up scanning many different groups of people because we went through so many different eras. Even beyond the eras, some of the performances required more casual attire and some had more formal attire. So we always did scan extras just in case we would need them.
The number one plan was to go in and try to cover it with tiling. The scanned extras were just there as a backup because we were changing camera shots and camera movements every day–every morning things would change. I really wanted people scanned so that we would not be in trouble in the event that there was a sweeping move.
There’s a shot where Lenny walks onto stage at Carnegie Hall for the first time. That was all tiling, even though there is a lot of parallax on the crowd. I think the way that we sweep across it just allowed it to work. We did the move first, and then that afternoon I had time with the extras and we were able to tile in the sections. In fact, we could cheat each little section, that is, cheat parallax into it. But that tied into the camera tracking and the LiDAR scan helped us immensely for building those tiles.
The only time we really used CG crowd was for the Ely Cathedral scene where he’s conducting, towards the later stages of the film. In that case, we tried to do some tiling but ultimately the actual dimensions of that place are mind-boggling. I’ve never been in a space that’s that big in my life. So once we started tiling, we realized, wow, this just goes on forever. Bradley really wanted it to be packed full of people, so much so that there’s even people standing at the back of the cathedral. So, we started with tiles. Then we ended up kind of tossing those aside and just doing it digitally in a few shots. Some of those are quite long shots, but performance wise it’s fairly straightforward as the audience isn’t applauding in any of those. They’re quite wrapped up in Bernstein’s performance.
b&a: Can you talk about the Kennedy Center scenes, where one shot is this long push-in to the box?
John Bair: We filmed all of those at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall, and that ended up playing as two different locations. They were all filmed with the idea being that we would just clean up the front face of everyone’s box seats because there was a lot of modern rigging on there and modern lights. For Kennedy Center, we were going to just replace the box fronts and put some red panels there. But once we got into it, I did a quick pass of that and I found it to be very unsatisfying in terms of really transforming that location. Rose Center is an amazing space, but it’s really modern looking in its overall structure. Also, everyone’s dressed in period formal wear, and it’s meant to be this moment in 1971, and this wasn’t juxtaposing well with the modern architecture.
So I asked Bradley if we could pursue replacing the whole thing and just keeping the people, and he said, ‘Yeah, we should go for it.’ So we started playing with that. It’s one very long shot and then two follow-up shots, but I think it just gives us a nice moment, like a burst of red in the color palette that ties into everything. I found that to be one more satisfying moment where a scene flourished during post and became something even better than we had imagined when we were shooting.
b&a: There’s the Thanksgiving Day balloon parade and a bunch of New York backgrounds, which just play out in the background of a very intense scene. What were the challenges there? It feels like you did have to actually build out a fairly extensive background, even though it’s seen through the windows.
John Bair: The Dakota apartment was built at Steiner and it was one of the most incredible sets that I’ve seen, just because of the detail that went into it. Kevin Thompson is an incredibly talented production designer, and he was a joy to work with because he was very open and collaborative with visual effects. Even when we were designing some of these things during post, I would get in touch with him and go over some ideas and make sure that he was on board, just to make sure we were always fluidly communicating.
The shots inside The Dakota were dynamic and took place during both the daytime and nighttime. The scenes there also carried a lot of emotional weight, and we wanted the outside world we were creating to reflect that, so we immediately started VFX explorations of the vista seen from the apartment. Bernstein’s apartment was on the second floor, but we did do some visual experimentation with the view at various heights over the trees in Central Park. Ultimately, staying authentic just felt correct, and we ended up with a view that is fairly accurate.
So, because of the elaborate camera moves, and knowing we could use a New York Central Park environment in a few different shots, we put some extra effort into the CG build for the view outside the windows. We created buildings across the street on the city side and a massive section of the park with densely packed trees, then a stretch of Central Park West was built to provide an accurate staging area for the parade floats to travel down. Having such a detailed model let us focus on composition and depth as Bradley was always pushing for an effective use of depth in his shots. Finally, we were able to focus on the finer details of the environment – there’s even people walking around in the park the whole time in these shots, including during the big four-minute shot where Snoopy eventually floats by. There are people walking around on their way to see the parade.
b&a: How did you then tackle Snoopy?
John Bair: For the scene of Lenny and Felicia arguing, which is four minutes long, Bradley realized that he wanted to do that whole scene with no coverage, just one long shot at that distance. He recognized the performances and blocking were powerful. So as soon as we knew the shot was going to play for four minutes uninterrupted, it triggered me to want to build it out really nicely.
I started playing with Snoopy right away, even while we were still shooting. I quickly got a rough Snoopy model in there and just started creating different performance options with it. Bradley was very engaged in the process, seeing multiple versions and experimenting with giving Snoopy a real performance. Snoopy might appear to be blindly floating through the shot, but there was a lot of thought and effort put into the subtleties of that performance.
At first, I had Snoopy very upright like the old-fashioned Snoopy balloons used to be. Bradley suggested Snoopy being kind of hunched over, and then he wanted to experiment with Snoopy having a bit of a drunken stumble as if a little out of control. We were trying things that would really reflect what Bernstein was going through in his own life at that moment.
The process was very exciting, and, ultimately, the version that’s in there, the performance is meant to really mirror Lenny as he’s feeling the weight of everything in that shot. They’re eventually juxtaposed back-to-back with Snoopy kind of hunched over in the same way. It’s a subtle thing, but the journey that we took to get there was really fun.
b&a: There’s another great scene of the child throwing the paper airplane down. I was watching it and thinking, I wonder how they did this. How did you do it?
John Bair: That was the lobby of the Osborne Hotel in New York. It’s a very quiet location and productions don’t really film there, but we were granted a couple hours in the morning to film the scenes. That’s all from the location, the shot looking up. I had Bradley mime catching the gliders. He had it in his hand the whole time, of course, and he would just put it up as if he was catching it and bring his hand down and read it. And we painted it out until he catches it.
Atop the stairs is Lenny’s daughter, played by Bradley’s daughter who we captured in front of greenscreen during post. The paper airplane is all CG, but I wanted to get some really cool reference for it, so I went into the stairwell in our building with someone from the office and we shot gliders flying on an iPhone. I made two types of airplanes to shoot for the reference. The first was one that was folded just like the movie prop, a simple design that intentionally looked like the work of a young child. It didn’t fly very well, and it kind of tumbled and lurched all the way down. So I also filmed a glider that was folded to fly in a very aerodynamic way, and in a smooth corkscrew pattern.
I made a paper airplane that glided better than the prop in the movie because the prop in the movie is designed to look like how a child would fold up an airplane. It’s super cool and it’s easy to open, but it didn’t fly very well. So I made one that flew better and did that a few times just to get–not that exact flight all the way down–but just to get moments of what a glider would look like at that height, spiraling down.
I built up a library of references and I cobbled together a performance in After Effects to come up with what would be a guide for our CG performance. At first, we had a version that looked very much just like a pristine glider flight, slowly corkscrewing all the way down. But in this scene, the music is very slow and evocative, and you hear the voice of Lenny’s daughter calling to him, so what I tried first did work, but it didn’t gel perfectly with the mood, and it wasn’t incredibly interesting. I went back and tried some versions that had the tumbling style of the original prop glider, the style a 6-year-old would’ve made, which flips and flops in flight.
I tried that and ran it at slightly slower than real speed, and it ended up working really well with the music. Fairly late in the game, Bradley agreed we should switch it to this. I think it’s much more authentic and it just fits the mood of the film. This was one of many moments where it was great to work with him on something that’s really about performance and fitting the story of the film. It was yet another occasion where he embraced visual effects and realized we could experiment and try different things and he could find the right tone for the moment.
