INTERVIEW WITH PHIL TIPPETT, VFX SUPERVISOR 'THE HAUNTING'

By Ron Magid

Look out George Lucas! The real phantom menace of the summer movie sweepstakes may just be DreamWorks' "The Haunting," produced by that other genre titan, Steven Spielberg, and also top-lining Liam Neeson as the leader of a paranormal team investigating a terrifying collection of spooks in a gigantic haunted mansion. Billed as a re-imagining of the Shirley Jackson novel, "The Haunting of Hill House," rather than a remake of Robert Wise's 1963 classic , which featured nary an effects shot in the entire picture, the new "Haunting" seeks to exploit digital technology to scare the pants off audiences.

The visual conceit of this version is that the house is literally the physical embodiment of its late satanic owner, Hugh Crane, who forms an odd attachment to the spinsterish Nell (Lili Taylor), targeting her for some of the more ghoulish goings-on in Hill House. But the real spooks in this show is animation guru Phil Tippett ("RoboCop," "Jurassic Park," "Starship Troopers," "Virus"), who, along with physical effects master John Frazier , collectively used every architectural nuance inside Hill House to bring it to supernatural life. Although director Jan de Bont and Tippett had both worked on "Robocop" for Paul Verhoeven , they had never worked together before. Hiring a character animator like Tippett turned out to be a brilliant stroke, since de Bont wanted to make a literal character of Hill House.

While Frazier handled as much of the mayhem on-set as time and money would allow -- including cracking walls and buttresses that literally flew, not to mention the signature sequence wherein twin intertwining staircases collapse -- Tippett Studios created the many ghostly manifestations that were impossible to conjure on-set, and truly created the demonic character of Hill House.

When you were doing your stop motion work years ago did you imagine that you'd ever be working on something about a haunted house?
No. Until recently, stop motion has been limited by the constraints of model photography. Any interaction with real physical props was just not possible in the way we can integrate effects today. Once the digital revolution began, we knew that the sky was the limit. All sorts of things would lend themselves to effects photography. There really isn't anything that can't be done, although that means shots can become a lot more complicated.

It sounds like they've really gone far afield from the Robert Wise "Haunting of Hill House" in terms of the images for this movie.
This is a completely different picture. I don't think you can consider it a remake of the Wise film, it's another interpretation of the Shirley Jackson book. It's aimed more at a summer crowd. The funny thing was that we'd hear in meetings, 'Hey, you know, what was really cool about the first one was that there weren’t any visual effects!' so we were walking a weird line of subtlety versus audience expectation. Our job was to create the character of the house and to try to really make the house come alive. We're doing a little over a hundred twenty shots.

That's a good number of shots, especially when you consider that the original "Haunting" had about three visual effects.
A lot of these are so-called invisible effects shots, effects that you don't really notice. We also had some wire removal and sky replacement shots, our bread and butter shots, but the paranormal effects are pretty involved and elaborate. A great deal of the material involved creepy things that are happening on the threshold of perception. I worked with Jan de Bont blocking the choreography and gaffing all of the effects work on set, while my partner, Craig Hayes , was up north at our studio figuring out the shot methodology -- weirdo approaches and techniques -- pulling these images together. The shots are quite elaborate and complex in terms of how we go about putting them together, but if nobody ever asked me about new technology again, I'd be really happy. It's boring.

Can you give some sense of some of the ways that you're bringing the house to life?
We tried to use a lot of the architectural elements. This is really a highly production-designed show -- Eugenio Zanetti masterminding the overall look of all the environments. The difference in this show was the tremendous amount of inter-departmental collaboration between the art department and the director of photography, Karl Walter Lindenlaub and us.

When I visited the elaborate Hill House sets, I thought this is probably one of the last productions where they will really be building huge practical sets going up forty feet into the rafters.
You mean in light of this new digital technology? I don't know. Practical set building still seems to be relatively economical -- it certainly is cool, and it certainly energizes everybody on the set. Acting on a bluescreen stage is not a whole lot of fun. It was really great to be involved on one of these Eugenio Zanetti designed extravaganzas, because projects like this come along so infrequently.

How does "The Haunting" rank on the Tippett scale? Is this as challenging or more challenging than "Jurassic Park," "Starship Troopers" or even "Virus"?
Every show is really defined by a number of contingencies. In many ways this show was a lot more complex than a dinosaur picture or a bug picture. On those kinds of films, once we get the system going, we're just putting bugs or dinosaurs into the shot with the actors. In "The Haunting," the character of the house was established in the architecture, the lighting, the direction and the visual effects. It was a tremendous coordination.

What you hope for in any show is that as you get into the project, about halfway through the production, you figure out what it is you're doing. Creating a tyrannosaurus rex or giant bugs -- things that once existed or are based on something that you can concretely quantify -- is one thing. Creating ghostly, spectral events that occur in the mind's eye didn't give us a single key image that explained everything. The problem with this show was, I think, was that a lot of the spectral events were based on Jan de Bont and Steven Spielberg's imaginations as to what was possible with computer graphics. CG is very process oriented. If you're dealing with shadows and wind and elements like that, it takes a great deal of programming and super heavy computer graphics laden engineering to make those kinds of effects work and appear photographically real. We weren't just building a model of a single character and putting it into a shot. We were dealing with conceptual issues like ‘What does a ghost look like?' and then evaluating what processes were available in computer graphics to realize that image. It can become very, very top heavy and cumbersome process that hasn't really been made easier by this new technology. It's intrinsically difficult.

When you're building a CG tyrannosaur or a bug, you have the advantage of working with the same model over and over again. In "The Haunting," a great deal of effort was put into coming up with quite convoluted, complicated processes that were only used once or twice. On a schedule like we had, that was brutal! There were so many different kinds of phenomenon and throw-away ambient effects -- from the subtle effect of Nell's hair being coiffeured by a ghost, to entities appearing as condensation or ice on windows. These events don't happen in big elaborate set pieces, they unfold as the house is beginning to manifest the presence of Hugh Crane. Creating this volume of effects in such a restrictive time crunch was quite a challenge.

What other events do we see where the house is manifesting this presence?
There was a scene where Nell's hair is turned into Carolyn Crane's hairdo by an invisible being. We did a number of tests manipulating the actress' hair with wires and gloves to figure out the blocking and to see what would work. It ended up it was not as effective as what we could achieve with animation. Craig Hayes gaffed all those effects using different kinds of plate warping and adding computer graphic hair. We also worked with the hairdresser to make one side of Lili Taylor's hair completely plastered down and the other side normal; then we did hair replacement on half of her head.

Did you literally have to animate ghostly fingers manipulating every strand of hair?
Well, no, we didn't, thank God. We had to create a very swift, ghostly effect. If we had really extended the moment, trying to make it look absolutely realistic, then it would have looked kind of funky. We ended up kicking it into submission.

I understand there's some interesting shadow work in the film?
Yes. There are ghostly shadows that form into eyes that stare at Nell from the architecture of her room to spy on her.

Do the shadows have a 3-D aspect or are they flat against the wall?
It's a 2-D kind of a thing. But when Crane comes into play, he effects the architecture -- a precursor that foreshadows all the paranormal events. We also created icy condensation for where the actors' breath was fogging. It would have been impossible to ice the sets up, so we did animated quite a bit of that.

You know, the icy breath effects in "Titanic" looked kind of 2-D to me, so Eric Levin and the effects animation department got into some very heavy effects animation late in the show to improve on that. Eric and a crew of about eight animators came up with some pretty good looking particle programs. We tried to make the actors' breath interesting by developing breathing motifs that recreated the turbulence of breath. Sometimes there were candles or wind in the rooms that gave the breath a feeling of volume and a sense of what it was doing. This gave it some materiality so that it wasn't just a 'puff' in a room that didn't have any atmosphere.

How does the big set piece in Nell's bedroom fit into the story?
That occurs at the beginning of the third act where there is no doubt now that the entity that is haunting the house. Hugh Crane is coming after Nell to make her his own and the house begins to come alive. The whole scene was handled as if Nell was hallucinating that her room is coming alive, like classic children's nightmares. At first you're not sure if something's wrong, then you see things changing and the ceiling begins to warp and crack. As the scene develops, the entity of Hugh Crane begins to manifest itself on the ceiling and pushes itself towards Nell, all very much in the spirit of a hallucination.

When you say the room starts to come to life, are we seeing objects in the room actually animating?
Yeah, there's a very threatening bed whose headboard begins to descend like a guillotine and pins Nell down. That was realized on set as a practical effect supervised by John Frazier. Our pre-production time was spent nailing a number of the basic concepts, creating a lot of animatics even before storyboards were generated to conceptually block out the whole of Nell's bedroom sequence. Initially, we were going to do a number of shots of this CG headboard coming down. As we got further into pre-visualizing what all the elements would be, it became pretty clear that the headboard could be a practical gag. By laying out the scenes in computer graphics, it helped us define what could be practical and what would be a reasonable digital approach where it wasn't immediately discernable by reading the script or even looking at a storyboard.

John also had eight or ten architectural objects called palmettos, which were decorative buttresses surrounding the periphery of the room on huge hydraulic tractors. The palmettos were like cones standing on their tips. As they tipped over from their base, they converged together, creating a claustrophobic effect, making the room smaller, until the Hugh Crane entity explodes from the room and tries to consume Nell over the course of the sequence.

We've seen these kinds of effects before. How have you given them a different spin?
The trick in this I think was to straddle the gap between it being real and a hallucination. It wasn't like dropping fifteen tabs of windowpane LSD, where everything will bend and swirl, which has a tendency to look like rubber, which is the easy solution. We tried to come up with a palpable material feel. Craig Hayes, my partner, who was involved with designing all these effects, put a great deal of effort into basing the material composition of the room on Eugenio's production design, so that the actual architecture begins to transmutate within the world of the materials of the room.

So when the entity is moving behind the plaster, we get the sense of the plaster cracking as opposed to stretching?
We tried to maintain the properties of every material. There's a tremendous amount of richness in the production design -- lot of trim and a lot of velvet and behind the velvet, a lot of lathe and plaster. All this material takes on the look of Crane's face as it pushes out of the ceiling.

Was there a practical ceiling on the Nell's bedroom set?
There was at one point, then we flew the ceiling out so we could put ours in later on. We had a very supportive relationship with Walter Lindenlaub, the director of photography, who was extremely helpful in making sure things were going to work for us.

Did your animators create Hugh Crane's gigantic visage from scratch?
The production hired an actor named Charles Dunning, who came in for a lot of photo sessions for their paintings and old photographs, but he never shows up as an actual actor. However, Craig Hayes scanned Dunning's face so we could use that data in our animation.

Did you do any facial capture of Dunning's expressions?
No, but when Craig scanned his head, he had Charles do a number of actions as a basic reference. If we had just used motion capture then had everything swirl and move like it was rubber, then everything would have looked the same and we'd be yelled at for being incredibly phony looking. The standards that we set early on were that the actual materials of the room were being transformed. The idea was to bridge the gap between a human face and the world that's being created. This required mostly key-frame animation. The level of detail we needed, the material stressing and straining, really wouldn't have come through in a motion capture performance.

Hand-animating a human face, in whatever medium, must be one of the hardest animations to do.
It's a huge pain in the ass! It's horrific.

Did your animators use any practical elements?
No, actually not. We usually use a small modicum of practical elements from our library of dust effects, but I think pretty much everything is being done by effects animation.

It seems like it would be much easier to film real plaster cracking than to try to animate cracking plaster in CG?
But then you have to put it in and it has to be lit, so you have to have some ability to manipulate that. You have to be pretty darn flexible with this stuff because, again, the production schedule was everybody's enemy -- the picture opened nine weeks after principal photography wrapped. If we had plotted every effect and shot them with practical photographic elements, we would have been absolutely dead. We had to build a lot of detail and a lot of furniture because Jan being Jan introduced some very complicated camera moves. Within the camera moves themselves there might be five key beats that we would have to hit, then within that there might be three or four action events. If you get on stage and you try to time all that together, you'll be on the set for weeks just trying to figure it out. There were so many considerations. If Frasier just pushed the walls out, once the walls were broken, we had to consider the reset time. It took two hours to redress that thing! If we had twelve takes of that effect, it effectively shut down production and turned everything into a giant insert stage. It was much more practical to hit the camera beats and handle the cracks in the walls and things like that in post-production with CG. In the broader context, CG was the more practical approach.

The production schedule was just so accelerated that we were inventing stuff and coming up with procedures and looks all the time to determine how effects were actually going to be handled. We also had such a truncated pre-production time that we kind of plotted everything as best we could and just kind of plunged into it. Our design problem on this and the problems with the production were certainly all driven by the schedule and the release date. This was by far the tightest schedule I've ever worked on.

It was tough show. We all knew that going in, but it seemed like such a departure from the kind of things we were usually called on to do. These accelerated production schedules kill everybody, all the way down the line -- editorially, it's horrific, particularly for the sound department. The closer you are to the final stages of production, the more squeezed you are for time. It's certainly an industry-wide problem. But we rose to the challenge.

It sounds like torture! Are they paying you enough to make this worthwhile?
I'm never paid enough.

What do you do this for?
Why? Because I'm stupid! That's the most honest answer I can give you.


Jul 23 1999