This summer, the two have teamed up again to write and direct the upcoming horror flick, Grind House. The film will comprise two 75-minute movies, one written and directed by Tarantino and one by Rodriguez, put together as a two-film feature with fake movie trailers in between. As we went to press, Rodriguez was shooting his part of the film in Austin, Texas, using the new Panavision Genesis cameras. Tarantino plans to shoot his part later in the summer.
Rodriguez is known as a multi-talented artist who produces, directs, writes, edits, lenses and even serves as camera operator or Steadicam operator, composer, production designer, visual effects supervisor and sound editor on his films (in addition to being an accomplished comic book artist). Which all means there’s never a dull day for the creative team at Rodriguez’ Troublemaker Studios in Austin.
“Robert wears many hats,” says team member, Rodney Brunet. “The guys here, including myself, we’re all considered generalists, so we can do it all. We all have to be proactive; we have to try to guess where he’s going.”
Brunet has worked with Rodriguez since the 1998 teen horror film The Faculty. He, along with ‘creative team’ members, Alex Toader and Chris Olivier, shun traditional filmic titles such as visual effects supervisor or creative director, but are generally referred to as the ‘Three Wise Men’ at Troublemaker.
“We’re the three that have been with Robert the longest,” Brunet explains. “When he’s thinking of a project, he’ll come to us first and we’ll help him develop the concept.”
“He’s a painter, a sculptor, a musician, so when it comes to conceptual stuff we can sit down and knock a lot of stuff out really fast,” adds team member, Toader. “Then we build on that and provide him with conceptual art, illustrations, animatics, storyboards and we work toward his vision to make sure it gets put out there on the screen.”
For Grind House, the creative team was called on to do extensive pre-visualisations, particularly for Rodriguez’ half of the film. “Robert loves it. Previz is a vital tool for him since he’s also the editor,” Brunet explains. “Any action shot in the movie that needs an animatic we’ll flush that out for him and give him multiple coverage. In CG we’ll build simple characters and simple environments, and we basically play out the motion and place maybe 20 cameras throughout that shot and let him pick moments he likes. Then he edits it and from that he usually builds a pretty good idea of what he wants, so when he gets on set with real actors in a real environment, he already knows where he wants to place the camera.”
Brunet admits that often those previz shots get thrown away when Rodriguez gets on set, but at this early stage of the process, “our main goal is just to help him work through the idea.” However, sometimes those early animatics can carry over right into post, serving as a starting point for effects artists.
“Sometimes you just use the animatic to resolve cameras issues or issues with blocking and timing,” says Toader. “Or sometimes we can use the assets – just detail them out. We’ve started to do more detailed animatics, so we can actually start using some of those early assets, and that can help us in the back end.”
Toader has worked with Rodriguez since the 2001 film Spy Kids. He explains that the creative team also creates many of the final visual effects shots in-house, depending on time constraints and what Rodriguez has next on the drawing board.
At press time, the creative team wasn’t sure how many of the final effects shots for Grind House would stay in-house and how many would be outsourced to various vendors. That depends on the schedule, and Rodriguez has a tendency to overlap projects and have two things on the go at once – something his creative team has learnt to deal with.
“Robert likes to keep really busy,” says Toader. “We’ll be in post production on Robert’s part and going into preproduction on Quentin’s, so we’re going to have pull double duty. We did the same when we were shooting Sin City and Shark Boy and Lava Girl, and we also did Spy Kids 2 and Once Upon A Time in Mexico in tandem – they were almost parallel post production and pre-productions.”
For Brunet, the challenge of working like that is “trying to shift gears. With Sin City, I was doing adult-type violence during the day, and then at night I was working on milk-and-cookies stuff with Shark Boy. It’s kind of difficult at times to shift gears.”
He adds that while the team has done some previz animatics for Tarantino as well, “Quentin is more hands-off when it comes to computers and graphics. He would rather design it on the fly. But for some of harder shots – things that are more expensive such as car crashes – we’ll do some animatics to help him with the R&D.”
He explains that for Grind House, Rodriguez is trying to get as many of the effects as possible in-camera, and the bulk of the effects work will involve rotoscoping and tracking for make-up enhancements.
“Well probably touch every frame in the movie,” said Brunet. “It’s mainly just digital enhancements – making things look bloodier or making the action a little more violent, or if there’s a stunt that a stuntperson can’t do, we’ll put a digital actor in there.
“For make-up enhancements we’ll have to track a lot of actors’ faces while they’re moving with arms and hair passing in front of things. So there’s a lot of rotoscoping and a lot of camera tracking. Robert doesn’t really use motion control cameras, so if we can’t get it through an automatic track, we’ll have to do some hand-tracking. We have a lot of techniques that we’ve developed over the years just because we’re used to working with Robert.”
He explains that when they do finish the final shots in-house, one artist will typically stay with the shot from beginning to end – modelling, animation, texturing, lighting and compositing. “It depends on the schedule, but a lot of times Robert lets us choose which shots we want to work on. Each one of us has different strengths and different interests.”
Troublemaker Studios has very strong ties to AMD, which is based nearby in Austin. The facility is using the new dual-core Opteron workstations, and Brunet reports that 64-bit processing has made a big difference. “That really helps with XSI – especially those heavy scene files. It really helps push a lot of polygons around. We have a relationship with them where they give us the latest toys.”
The company relies heavily on Softimage XSI, for its previz and effects work, along with compositing tools such as Shake. “We’ve been very happy with XSI,” says Toader. “We made the change to it during Sin City and we’re sticking with it.”
“Most of our software is off-the-shelf, right out of the box,” adds Brunet. “If there’s something that has a bell or whistle that helps us solve a problem, that’s what we’ll use. We really aren’t loyal to any of it. We use whatever we need.”
Built in a series of abandoned airplane hangars, Troublemaker Studios features a greenscreen stage as well as a prop and set department. Sets have been constructed outside on the tarmac for Grind House, which is scheduled for a 2007 release.
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Scott LehaneScott Lehane is a Toronto-based journalist and documentary film producer. He can be reached at scottlehane@sympatico.ca |