The jet scenes in the film were realized with a combination of a modified off-the-shelf model plane kit and digital visual effects.
At one point in Ari Aster’s Eddington, we see a group of heavily armed men aboard a private jet heading for the New Mexico town of Eddington amid a brewing storm combining corporate greed, Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Exterior views of the jet—one view showing the jet flying towards camera on a very long lens with the sun behind it, and another tracking the jet from the side above the desert—were achieved via miniature and motion control photography orchestrated by FX WRX, with Phosphene then responsible for compositing the jet into backgrounds and for additional visual effects.
Phosphene visual effects supervisor John Bair was already on the movie crafting other VFX when the plane shots came up for discussion. “The edit of the film always had a piece of stock footage in it that had just a shot of a plane flying over a desert mesa,” he says. “It was just a placeholder. I then started doing animatics for both of the desired shots, and we went a few rounds tweaking those and getting the position and the timing and framing just the way Ari would like them.”
Bair had initially assumed the shots might be all-CG, given the initial use of animatics. But, he notes, Aster wanted to explore the use of models instead. “He always likes to have different mediums mixed into his films, and he loves working with models. I was excited about that, too. I’m not precious about wanting something to be all-CG at all. It was just as enticing to me to be able to play in that world, which I don’t get to do all that often.”
Co-producer Luca Borghese then connected Bair with Christopher Webb, the co-founder of FX WRX, which specializes in model photography and motion control. An initial challenge was budgeting a miniature build for the specific private jet required for the shots. Luckily, Webb is a model RC plane enthusiast and happened to find an existing RC business jet that had a four foot wingspan and could be purchased off-the-shelf. “I said to them,” relates Webb, “if they liked this specific jet, we could get our team to re-work the model and re-finish it to be the jet in the movie.”
The filmmakers said yes.
Shooting a model plane
That led to FX WRX executive producer Graceann Dorse and producer Cheng Liu ‘crunching the numbers’ and working out that the model re-fit would need to be done in three days. At this point, FX WRX brought in art lead and model builder Daniel May-Applegate to oversee the refit. “The challenge was,” says Webb, “we had bought a couple of these model jets, but they looked like beer coolers. They were styrofoam, they were all bumpy and all of the control surfaces on the wings and tail were completely not to scale. So, there was a daunting amount of work to do. Indeed, if you look closely at anything that’s molded in styrofoam, there are hundreds of little pricks where they inject the styrene into the mold.” All of these had to be removed by hand.
Enter model consultant Chris Wolfe. “He is literally known as ‘The RC Geek’, and he is an enthusiast who specializes in re-finishing foam aircraft to a museum-quality level,” explains Webb. “This process can actually be very tricky because most things will dissolve the styrofoam. Also if you sand it too much it gets hot and then the styrofoam puffs up. Chris was kind enough to consult with us and we could not have done this without him.”
At FX WRX, the re-finishing began with setting up a spray booth. Here, a small team carried out spackling and priming. “We had budgeted three days, but it actually took eight,” shares Webb. “I did four days myself in a hazmat suit in there with the jet. It took 40 coats of a Japanese lacquer paint to do this. We had to wet sand every coat by hand and then do another one. Eventually we went from this styrofoam beer cooler to a really sexy, glossy hard white finish, with a little bit of texture to help keep it looking real.”
Some of the decals included with the model kit were actually used on the final model. Says Webb: “We trimmed them and made them neater, and took some of the shine off of them by giving them a matte spray. Where the lines in the wing would be for the ailerons flaps rudder—the things that control the jet—we actually used a very, very fine pin striping tape. They’re just barely there because on a real aircraft, they’re almost invisible in the lighting. The model even came with strobe lighting, as in, working navigation lights, which we installed and used.”
With the time and budget limitations, only one side of the jet (matching the animatics) was finished to a high level. Then, while a hero version model was being finished, a second stand-in model was relied upon for setting up the motion control shoot, also done at FX WRX. Here, the jet was rigged onto a model mover that could rock the jet about its center point. “We used our three-axis motion control head, a very heavy duty rig that is meant to hold a big movie camera,” notes Webb. “We just rigged the jet off of that and we actually mounted the whole thing on an old Italian Cricket dolly. That’s what was holding the model.”
Camera-wise, FX WRX shot with their Sony Venice 2 full-frame, 8.6K camera. “We put that on our ‘Black Widow’ motion control crane,” outlines Webb. “All of this equipment is so heavy duty that it’s really smooth. You get very graceful cinematic motion. It’s like a proper crane that moves in the way, I think, a cinema crane should move. We were using Kuper motion control software.”
“We also at this point started working out lighting,” continues Webb. “We couldn’t apply any heat, given the make-up of the model. However, it’s supposed to be sunset. There’s a specific shot where the jet appears in silhouette coming out of the sun. And, of course, we wanted heat distortion like a mirage. So, in spite of all the warnings about the foam and heat, we got a bunch of high powered quartz space heaters and took all the safety switches out of them so they could point straight up and we put them in a row under the lens between the camera and the model. We got a fair amount of heat distortion that Bair and his team at Phosphene could build on top of.”
The jet was shot against gray, after Webb consulted with Bair on what would work best. “We didn’t want spill or a non-complimentary color or lighting values that wrap around this reflective thing,” advises Webb. “So we went with gray and we just controlled the lighting values. In fact, when we started the conversation with John, my thing was, the lighting shouldn’t be perfect. It should not be a car commercial with perfect studio lighting. There should be something a bit unbalanced with the lighting, a little too bright, a little off angle, something that you would have to deal with if you really went out and shot it.”
For the shoot, Aster visited the FX WRX studios, with Webb and team nervously looking on. “Ari came in, he walks right up close to the jet, and folds his arms. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, he’s not going to like it.’ And he just turns around and says, ‘Looks good, let’s shoot it.’”
Using the Kuper software, FX WRX programmed in the movements to match the animatics. “I handed Ari an encoder, a hand wheel control, and then we would play the background plate back on a live monitor with a rough composite. He could use that control to rock the wings and manoeuvre the jet,” says Webb. “We could then play that motion back to review. Once that looked good, it was like building a music track. You would play back the jet rocking its wings while you push the camera crane in, and then you would play those two things back and you could operate the pan and tilt on the camera just a little bit, as if you were an operator in a camera aircraft flying next to the jet, getting the shot.”
The digital visual effects side
During the shoot, Bair took reference photography of the jet, and surveyed the lighting, as part of readying the digital visual effects side of the work. He had also arranged multiple passes to be filmed. These came in handy in particular for the shot of the jet coming out of the sun. “That shot would suggest the light should be coming from behind the plane,” notes Bair. “However, there were going to be these two exterior shots and then it would cut inside the plane, which had been filmed months ago. Here, the light was coming in perpendicular to the plane, streaming in through the windows. That’s why I suggested shooting a pass with the light behind the plane and then doing a different pass with the lighting in a different position, more raking alongside the plane where it felt like it could be going into the windows.”
“The amazing thing about having this motion control,” adds Bair, “was that I ended up using both of those passes and just subtly, using an animated depth pass, slowly changed the light throughout the shot. So, the plane comes out of the sun, you cut to it on the side, and it feels like the light has moved to the right location for when we cut inside.”
Phosphene made only a few slight CG enhancements to the model jet, including adding some logos that had been undecided at the time of the shoot. The team also cleaned up a few areas and added reflections from the background onto the plane. This background onto which the model photography was composited was a stock piece of footage. “It was not the greatest piece of stock, but trying to find exactly what we wanted that matched the area was challenging,” says Bair. “Once we got that in there, we created a pass where you could see it subtly reflecting on the fall-off edges of the plane. The background itself was pretty heavily enhanced in CG as well.”
A fun addition to the side shot of the jet was the silhouette of a pilot, added by Bair after a quick greenscreen shoot of his son standing in for the pilot. “It’s just a silhouette, you can’t really tell. I know he is there, but at least it had something in the window sitting there.”
For the shot of the plane coming straight to camera with the sun behind it, Phosphene added digital heat haze to augment what had already been filmed at FX WRX. “There were also some subtle textures of clouds around the sun that received that heat haze treatment,” notes Bair. “The background with the sun itself was a combination of many things. We did shoot a hotspot at FX WRX just to get something that could play as a sun. We isolated the center and blew it out. The clouds were something that I shot just to add in a little more detail.”
Phosphene’s work on Eddington extended to several other visual effects, including a digital explosion in the desert, fire trails that spell out a message, and a range of blood and gore. “It was a super-fun project,” concludes Bair. “I had a great time working with Ari. I would eagerly work with him again because he’s so smart and just so passionate about the films he is making.”
Webb concurs, and was pleased to offer up a way for the director to film something effects-related with live interaction. “Ari could guide us in real time and walked away with something he liked. I think that’s worth a lot. You bring your team together in a space where you can interact with these things. All of the digital work that’s done is essential and is at least half of the process. But I think there is really something to giving creatives that space to get their hands on the levers of control. It made it really fun for everyone.”
