Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis has once again teamed up with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for his latest movie, Here, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire. The movie uses an artificial intelligence-assisted aging and de-aging process to convey the lifetime of a married couple, played by Hanks and Wright. The film, which was shot from one camera position and angle that jumped back and forth in time, brought unique challenges to the production and post team – Don Burgess, cinematographer; Kevin Baillie, visual effects; and Harbor senior colorist Maxine Gervais.
Here not only reunited actor Tom Hanks with actress Robin Wright, the film also brought back together the team working behind the scenes – Gervais’ first collaboration with Burgess was in 2010, on The Book of Eli, and Gervais, Baillie and Zemeckis’s team also worked together on Welcome to Marwen (2018) and The Witches (2020).
“Don is a very professional man who has been doing this for a long time,” says Gervais. “I remember at the beginning of the movie there were rumors that it would be ‘easy’ for us all, as it was ‘one point of view’ with the camera not moving. That made us giggle, as we knew there would be no such thing as ‘easy’.
“Don and Kevin are so efficient at executing Zemeckis’s visions – they are a well-oiled machine,” adds Gervais. “They are very creative in finding new ways to do things that haven’t been done before. Kevin is one of a kind, always pushing boundaries and ahead of his time for sure – he and Don work in harmony.”
Burgess, began concept discussions and camera and lens test shoots in June 2022, along with director Zemeckis, Baillie and Gervais. “Bob Zemeckis expressed the idea of locking off the camera and shooting from one position on the planet,” said Burgess. “Most of the movie was in the hero house and some before the house was built or would fade in as characters would enter the house. The set was still in design, but we had a good idea of size and where the window and front door would be.”
“It took many hours of trial and error to find the perfect spot from where to tell the story,” adds Burgess. “We had to talk through and test every scene before we started shooting. The lighting was designed for every hour of the day and every day of the year. The weather was also talked about with Bob – will there be cloud, sun, rain, sleet or snow? Once again, all worked out before we started shooting.”
Following thorough testing, Burgess picked the Panavision 35mm P70 series and the Red Raptor Camera.
With VFX so heavily involved in the movie, Baillie was also part of these very early discussions. “I was invited into discussions before Bob had even finished writing the script with Eric Roth,” recalls Baillie. “Different directors deal with visual effects in different ways, and Bob happens to be one that considers visual effects a key component of the process. This is not only fortunate and fun, but it also allows us to plan how best to shoot the movie.
“Often, people think of visual effects as merely a process that happens in post-production, whereas really good visual effects are considered as a tool to aid in the course of production,” adds Baillie. “Especially when you’re doing something new or extensive like we were for this film. We had approximately 43 scripted minutes of de-aging that went as far as to require a full digital face replacement of our four lead actors. And this ended up expanding to 53 minutes in the final film.”
“We knew we weren't going to be able to accomplish this through traditional face replacement techniques with CGI, because it was going to be too expensive and time consuming. And it would also be difficult to maintain consistent quality, so we knew we would have to rely heavily on machine learning and AI-based techniques. We spent time doing the necessary diligence to figure out what techniques would work and what vendors we could partner with – something that we absolutely had to do before the shoot.”
The team shot the interior of the house on two sound stages in Pinewood, and the window exterior was an LED wall portraying over 80 different eras, weathers and times of day in the neighborhood.
“The LED wall required a lot of prep work,” says Baillie. “We used Unreal Engine to create the world outside and, because we had a real-time environment out the window, Don was able to adjust the lighting to match the time of day or weather to accommodate what he wanted to see in the story. He could then adjust his practical lights to match what was happening outside.”
“Most of the shots had the LED wall showing exterior background out the window,” says Burgess. “The wall performed best at a cool color temperature, so we set up the camera at 1600 ASA, 4300K and exposed at T5.6. The LUT was set up on set with Maxine and our DIT, Chris Bolton.”
The story was adopted from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, which made heavy use of panels (a picture-in-picture effect, where parts of the image are showing different scenes at different times of day or time).
Zemeckis used this same graphic novel/comic book iconography for the film, which brought specific challenges for the team. “The transitions between scenes were primarily done through graphic panels, in the style of the original graphic novel,” says Baillie. “So, we could have multiple scenes playing on screen at any one time and juxtapose two moments that were spiritually or thematically ‘connected’ – which is something that you can't really do in a traditional movie.
“The process of creating and designing those panels involved bringing in my longtime friend Dav Rauch, who was one of the original designers of the Iron Man Heads-Up Display, in the first Iron Man film – so he’s a graphic design genius. When I invited him to help us work on these transitions and ‘design some boxes,’ he jumped at the chance to work with Bob and to use a simple looking design language to do something very creatively nuanced.”
The team set up a system in conjunction with editorial – Rauch would sit on a machine in the editing room with After Effects and collaborate with Zemeckis and the editor Jesse Goldsmith to create these graphic panel transitions. Those approved transitions would then get fed into Avid, where they would recreate them, so they could maintain editorial flexibility without having to do cumbersome graphic design work within Avid.
“Once those were signed off, we assembled an in-house team led by Woei Lee to do the graphic panel transitions as a visual effects task,” says Baillie. “And some of the panels required layering in front of or behind other live-action elements in shots, so by using an in-house compositing team in Nuke, we were able to do some very cool subtle effects with the transitions. You don't see it on the screen, but the graphic panel team also provided detailed, labelled masks for every single transition in the film, which allowed Maxine and her color team to be able to consistently treat the color of not just the shot, but the shot as it transitions through an outgoing panel and into the next shot. There were mattes for every border of every panel and, since some of these transitions have over 20 different scenes that go into a single transition, it was quite the logistical challenge to both create in the Nuke workflow as well as to manage in the DI.”
Gervais was given mattes to isolate all the panels for color grading, but there were sometimes multiple panels showing the same scene (which needed to be graded the same way) that would fade in and out at different times or be cross dissolved with other scenes that needed different grades.
“Not only did we have to find a way to deconstruct and rebuild the shot into their panels using mattes, but there were also mattes within mattes,” explains Gervais. “This meant that if I wanted to color a panel to match its full screen before transitions, and the full screen used mattes for windows or different elements, these same mattes needed to carry these color tweaks within the panel themselves – and then carry on and blend/dissolve seamlessly into the transition.”
FilmLight’s Peter Postma dedicated a few days at the beginning of the process to help Gervais work out the most efficient way to build the timeline in Baselight – allowing her to focus on the grading without constantly having to copy grades around between the panels every time a change was made.
“Let’s just say the workflow was very complex and needed a lot of organizing and labelling,” says Gervais. “I had never had such complex timelines before, but thanks to our talented team we were able to make it happen.”
“Grading Here presented unique challenges which forced us to rethink the way the tools in Baselight could be used to deliver the best grading experience,” says Postma. “It was great working with Maxine and her team to push the boundaries of what our tools could do to meet those creative challenges.”
As VFX was so integral in the movie, Baillie was also involved in the color process. “I sat with Don and Maxine to create initial color passes of all these scenes,” he says. “Which was a challenge because every scene is connected – so if one scene isn't done, the next scene and the scene before also can't be finished. That meant that the color timeline remained open until very late in the process, with us making informed choices along the way with unfinished visual effects. Once we had the full movie in place, we went through it many times trying our best to spot everything that needed to be addressed – counterintuitively, the static camera actually made everything much more difficult. We had nowhere to hide in this film, so the final color and the nuance really ended up being a team effort – driven by Don Burgess with the hands-on done by Maxine, and with me making sure the visual effects were doing what they were supposed to.”
Gervais also utilized several features in Baselight to support her creative and technical goals. “I used everything that was at my disposal in order to make this work,” he says. “Baselight, thankfully, has very powerful compositing tools like grid wrap, painting tools, texture tools and blending tools – the list goes on. These tools were not only necessary for making this happen, but also a great help for VFX where we could contribute via VFX work in the DI. I can only humbly say that I am very grateful for such an opportunity. Although Don has a long history with Panavision, I’m lucky to have had these few projects together where color wasn’t just an artistic goal, but often a technical challenge.”
“Bob created a very unique way of telling the story, which became visually challenging for me, and it was great to collaborate with Maxine to bring it to the big screen,” says Burgess.
“It was a huge pleasure working with Don and Maxine,” adds Baillie. “When Bob came to review the work that we prepared for him, he was extremely satisfied and had almost no notes – which is always the best compliment that you can ask for.”