This has led one of the big advertising companies – Unilever – to make the move to the web, spending some of the money it would have spent on TV advertising (both on ad production and buying space) on an internet commercial that directs people to its website.
Unilever went searching for something they could hang their hat on (in this case for one of their antiperspirants), and they felt that 24 was the most iconic option. They went to Fox with considerable sums of money and asked what it would take to be admitted onto CTU (counter terrorist unit HQ) to tie in a parallel story. The idea they had was about a rookie who isn’t yet allowed to participate as a real agent, so he gets to go and fetch the coffee when everyone else is heading for the situation room.
While he’s out there getting a coffee – or in a second story, driving his boss’s PDA out to the desert – he’s exposed to problems and danger, which he solves skilfully without anybody realizing it, except maybe Angie, who’s his handler and helper back at CTU.
Fox agreed, and a joint venture was developed, with Fox providing the franchise name, environment and structure and Unilever providing the story and, of course, the money. One of the conditions Fox set for Unilever was that the 24 brand be a continuation of the show. If they were going to spend time in CTU, they had to make it look and feel like the TV show. So Fox thought of me. They figured we were already doing so many double-up days that they could split me off for a week without it being too troubling for the show, which is why they let me go and direct it. Unilever came up with a 40-page script called The Rookie, and we shot 20 pages of drama over six action-filled days.
Previsualization
I have directed episodes of 24, but in this case I figured it would be less complex if I were DP too. I had a completely new team, so directing them as well as a new DP in the 24 style seemed unnecessarily difficult, given the pace at which we work. But I had a wonderful commercials crew and it gelled perfectly. No issues at all, except for the usual, “how can we fit all this action into the amount of time we have to shoot it?” They found it refreshing too. On commercials, they’re used to shooting 20 frame shots with 50 takes. Here we were shooting in three and four minute bursts and moving on after three takes.
In my duties both as director and DP, about five years ago I discovered a program called SketchUp. SketchUp is one of those extraordinary programs that allows architects to sketch in 3D. It was extremely simple to use, and you were definitely in the 3D space, where you could structure and define and shape to the needs of whatever you were doing. It was meant for architects, but production designers, who usually have an architectural background anyway, jumped on it, and then cinematographers and directors began to see its potential. The SketchUp people made available a library of 3D components that were film and stage relevant. Obviously, all the architectural components – the interiors of rooms, kitchen sinks, tables and beds – were there right from the beginning, but the number of components has exploded since.
What happened next was that another program came online. This was Google Earth, funded by the immense power of Google, and you could see as soon as you looked at the program how extraordinary it was. You could fly over a seamless series of aerial photographs from a satellite showing the ground beneath your feet. You could travel along your drive to work and see places you might want to visit; and then there are all the community aspects, such as being able to name and place things such as buildings.
When Google Earth came out, New York City was fully modelled. You could fly down to the middle of Manhattan and drive down streets. They were all very simple buildings, but I immediately realised that they were created in SketchUp and integrated into the Google model.
It wasn’t long before Google bought SketchUp and fully integrated it, and now we’ve reached the point where you can download a free copy of SketchUp and Google Earth. You can go to their 3D warehouse and pull in thousands of different 3D models and place them on the Google Earth map and fly around them, with the ability to go from a straight flat-down elevation, as seen from the satellite, almost down to ground level, where you see the placement of buildings. As I found when I used it to previz the episodes of 24 I directed, I could model the bank I needed for The Rookie and put 3D figures in it just using SketchUp. I had them placed in the bank where I thought they would be able to play it, and I worked out the geometry and the actual physicality of blocking the scene. But the real innovation is the integration with Google Earth. In the second short, which was set in the desert, it was a lot easier to take the vehicles and the plane that we were dealing with and drop them right onto the appropriate spot on Google Earth. It worked impeccably well.
In one scene, we needed an airfield in the desert, with a plane landing; I also had a welcoming party of SUVs that the CTU guys use. I pulled an SUV model from the warehouse and plonked it down right on the runway, to the side, and we were able to see what it would look like in the exact location. I was then able to email that to the producers and the writers so they could see exactly how I intended to place the vehicles. They could fly around them and manoeuvre the viewpoint, and everyone got very excited. Now, things have moved on even further. You can go round cities such as New York and see buildings that have a photorealistic skin on them, and they’ve managed to achieve an amazing degree of realism.
It was very helpful to me to be able to size the plane then have it fly at an appropriate height for us to film it. We have an incident in a valley, surrounded by desert rocks and cactus, where the plane is flying low over a group of people. I wanted to show where that was in the real valley and send it to the pilot and ask him to see if it was plausible. He immediately came back and said “no”, because there were houses about a mile away that he would have to overfly at a low height, and that’s not permissible under FFA regulations. He could see all that just from the Google map I sent him.
In another scene, where I had the helicopter unit go out to make car flybys, I placed the car on the exact interchange on Google Earth where I wanted to film the scene. They went straight to the map and tracked it, then they went out and shot it and it looks exactly as I’d previzzed it.
The great things about SketchUp are that it’s free and it’s really easy to use – and it works on both Mac and PC. In the menu there are extra plugins that allow you to bring in a Google map from anywhere in the world and lay it into the SketchUp workspace as a 3D background plane, allowing you to drop in your buildings and objects. In SketchUp you create slides, which means you can segue between them and move from an exterior Google Earth map to a building interior you’ve created in SketchUp. It’s seamless. You can actually make a movie. But I find it a little more useful to pretend that they’re storyboards. So once I have my basic figures in place, I can track around them and very accurately see the space I want to shoot in. If you learn the program well, you can go into a real room, take a picture of the wall, then skin that picture onto the walls of your 3D model.
You can also change your angle of view to see what it would look like to shoot from anywhere in the space. The viewing angle is not set up in millimetres, but it does allow you to change horizontal field of view, so you can emulate both camera position and camera angle. You can walk your way through the spaces too. So it’s a very powerful tool for sorting out what you, as a director, want to do with the cast and the space, and see if that space works for you. Of course, all of these boxes and rooms can be accurate to the millimetre, so you know exactly where your shoot-off is; and if you put lights into the ceiling, you can see how low you can go with a given lens angle and work out where the trouble spots are.
What slows the program down is the complexity of the models you bring in. The basic cars and people you get with SketchUp are not particularly complex or sophisticated; they have a limited number of polygons. But if you go to the 3D warehouse, you can find very smooth and perfectly realistic looking Mercedes Benzes and so on. If you bring one of those in, it does take a bit of a speed hit, because now you’re not only dealing with the 2D maps, you’re also bringing in 3D geometry of a high quality polygonal model. So carefully consider what degree of accuracy you want if you need to move around the scene rapidly. I bought in a fairly simple plane, but I opted for a pretty realistic looking SUV, and that did slow it down a little, but it made it look more believable. Besides, I was only interested in exporting stills, so I would just go to the angle I liked, take a screengrab of it in the right format, then place it on a page in its own box, with space underneath for a brief scene description.
I ended up putting all the grabs into a filemaker program, which included all the data on the shot – the stock I was using and the lens and so on. Then I had the Google map with the real object in place, and sometimes even a photograph – the two complementing each other really well. In some ways it’s a little easier to use the Google map than it is to comp a picture of a car onto a photograph.
There may be a lot of other previz programs that are more sophisticated, and perhaps in the end do a better job, but they’re a lot more complicated to learn. SketchUp is not at all like that, which is why I’d say it’s the first thing people should try out. It’ll get their feet wet. In literally seconds you can build a cube, put a hole in it, make a window and go inside and look around. You put in your bathroom or bedroom, or wherever you’re going to play the scene, and add some figures. The one problem with the 3D figures at the moment is that they’re all in a fighting mode. They’re all stunt figures. But you can use the 2D architectural figures too. And if you’re just taking stills out of it, they look totally cool.
One thing to note is that I did all this in version 5 of the software. Version 6 has now been released and it doesn’t work properly. I’m sure they’ll fix it soon, but for the time being, try and get hold of v5.
SketchUp offers the ability to take not just a building, but the added extras of trucks and cars and people and so on and lay them on a Google map, with the exact same mountains in the background as you’d find in the real location. It really helps solidify everybody’s understanding of what you are trying to achieve. But more importantly, it gives a glimpse of what your final product will look like.
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Rodney Charters ASCRodney Charters has been the DP on 24 for all six seasons, directing a number of episodes. He hails from New Zealand, and his extensive credits include Roswell and recent TV movies Pixel Perfect, Sounder and Molly. |