The Incredible Hulk | Behind the scenes #4 (HD)

The things that are really enticing about doing something like this are also the things that are terrifying about it and vice versa. I mean, it's the Incredible Hulk. If you put that picture up in Senegal, they know what it is. If you put it up in Thailand, they know what that is. There's nowhere they don't know what the Hulk is. We wanted to come up with the design of the Hulk that stood up to his most famous incarnations in the comic books. I wanted something really human. I wanted something really uber human. I wanted to feel some texture. I wanted to feel skin. I wanted to feel veins. So this was important for me to hone in on a great-looking Hulk. Not only are we trying to invent a Hulk that looks real, we have to also honor the original material that it came from. Well, I was basically the bridge between Louis' idea, his brain, and the visual effects house to create what they needed to create in the film. We actually, in our first conversation, looked at some of the previous designs and comics and film and TV and just tried to figure out and hone in what was that going to be. Is it the bones sticking out? What is it? So it takes a long time to kind of work through all the way he deforms in every position. So it just needs to be massaged a little more. Because that looks good. That looks exactly like the statue I always loved, you know? If you look at the television series, it was, of course, Lou Ferrigno, basically, six feet tall. If you look at the Ang Lee film, he was upwards of 15 feet tall. Which I think, in hindsight, we think is a little too big. The separation between Hulk and humans is much too great there. In the comics, of course, it varies from artist to artist, even varies from panel to panel. But he settles in around nine to ten feet tall. So we firmly establish him as nine feet tall in this film. Is that all you got? From the comic books, you look at him, you know, from the spiked hair, the really short hair, the longer hair. There's so many different ways you can go with it. But they all feel like the Hulk when you look at it in the comics. There was a design I did that basically had, like, kind of a military cut, you know, shaved on the side and kind of spiked. And it had an interesting look to it. And that was actually, for a while, that was the direction we were going, you know, until Louis went back to, I want the long hair. Went down on the forehead. He was going a teeny bit lower. He was going a teeny bit lower than the brow. And he was falling on the nose, you know, the bump of the nose. And I like that. I thought it was cool. And I tend to agree with him. I think it was kind of, it gives him a lot of character. And it's something we haven't seen in the Hulk yet in a film or the TV show. I wanted zero gram of fat, pumped, fierce, strong, tall, human looking, with some green skin guy. And that's what I wanted. There was a process where I was designing, thinking bodybuilder to start off with. And Louis said, no, no, we don't want the lats that big. That feels like a bodybuilder. It needs to be like a superhuman. It's a superhuman. I mean, it's really close to cities, but he's like on edge and everything, really powerful. Oh, good. Yeah, it's great. We didn't want him to look so bulky that we didn't feel like he could move quickly. We want him to look lean. He's more linebacker than bodybuilder in a way. And that was important to us. We went through quite a process to figure out what's realistic, but also what's the Hulk. I just wonder if Hulk should look to abomination like a normal person looks to Hulk. You know what I mean? You take a huge leap. You close your eyes and jump with some of this stuff because you can do fantastic drawings all day, but making it really come to life is a big roll of the dice. Because everybody was skeptical at first. Everybody was like, I don't know if you can pull it off. It kind of like gets better. Yeah, and then it gets, yeah. And it straightens out. Now it's like, you know, and then it's a cut. One of the criteria in the beginning was when they said that Hulk was going to be largely a digital creation was I said, well, if there's no way for me to play Hulk, then it's not really that interesting because as an actor, that's what sort of makes it complex. And you make that cut back, like he has a, you know, for the first time, like you're seeing Banner and Hulk starting to fuse and you can see him go like, I think that's like a cheer moment. Edward likes things that aren't necessarily just on the surface. He likes to go deeper. He likes to find things that are that are mythic. He has a very, very hard time focusing on on what it is that's coming at him. And it always seems in some ways worse than it even is. Once he bought into doing this movie and once he get on this movie, he invested himself so heavily that it's been an extraordinary experience for us. I can just keep going as long as you do it. The technology has come a long way and there are ways now to be able to literally act the emotional nuances of Hulk and actually do the acting, both the physical movements, but also even a very nuanced kind of work, even on his face. We invested in the MOVA technology because it gave us a very dense map of the facial muscle system and gave us a lot of detail in how an actor's face moves. Speed. And action. MOVA Contour Reality Capture allows us to capture flexible surfaces like the face in 3D and with a high degree of precision, down to about a tenth of a millimeter. So what we can then do is have Edward Norton's performance for The Incredible Hulk be exactly captured as he did it. And then the visual effects people can go and take that and stretch out his face and extend all the different sizes and whatever else they want to do and make him into The Incredible Hulk. It's all of those subtleties that make the difference between a CG character and a human. So the more of that that we get from our actors, the less we have to keyframe once again. The more organic it'll look, the more you'll believe in the characters. Could we do one where we go from angry and then maybe the curious? So that technology is going to help us create a real organic movement to their facial performance. What has been done before with motion capture is there's been dots put on the face, either little markers or painted dots. And you get very little information, just a few spots, maybe 200 spots on the face. What we do is we actually sponge on a phosphorescent makeup. And you get this random pattern that glows in the dark. And that glow from the phosphorescent makeup has a random pattern all around the face because it was sponged on. So one camera sees a random pattern. Another camera sees the same random pattern. They triangulate. And that gives us the 3D surface. It's almost like we're barcoding every millimeter of his face. And that's never been possible before. I mean, literally a year ago, there was no technology that was available to make that possible. And in the end, I think we got a pretty nice Hulk. He's a bit more of a street brawler. He's less bright green. The stuff that our guys did with the muscles and the skin, the translucency and the veins, and it makes these shots just sing in terms of realism. It's really fantastic stuff. Perfect. Beans, come on. That's what I was doing last night. You see him looking and you see him go... You know what I mean? Like you actually see him, you see Banner fight for control. We also frankly just did something much more lo-fi, which was video reference. Just me acting out the creature's moments just in a video camera so that the animators can reference it, which is very lo-fi. You know, just literally them being able to look at it and use what you're doing as a reference for the animation. Lots of trial and error. We tried, didn't work. Then we tried again, didn't work. Change the texture, did this, like until the last minute. I mean, we literally found, you know, the shape of the face of Hulk last minute. It was finding the right balance between staying true to those caricatures, those extreme expressions, but at the same time, what Rhythm and Hues has done with the technology is, I mean, the skin and the muscle and the textures, it looks real. There are close-ups in this movie of him flexing his arms and even just moving and panning up his chest, where you will swear that we took a bodybuilder and painted him somehow. And it's not. It's all Rhythm and Hues. It's all computer generated. I think we've gone well beyond even what I remember in the best of the comics. I think this is a much more 21st century high impact kind of an experience. It's very important to have a good villain. And Hulk, the problem with Hulk is that he's so powerful that nothing can hurt him. You can shoot him with anything. He won't die. So Hulk versus the army becomes all quite fast. Until, you know, you present them with a real enemy, somebody who's as strong, maybe a little stronger, as smart, maybe much smarter, and also who's vicious and wants to hurt, you know. And now you have a problem. It's difficult stuff. I mean, Hulk and the Abomination are some of the most advanced CG creatures we've ever made before. And they're the stars of the movie. So they got to look good. That is a huge challenge because the first 95% of that is technical and very difficult. But the last 5% is near impossible. And so that's the hump we have to get over on this movie. We had to create a character that was dominant to Hulk in almost every way. His name was Abomination. So we returned to some of that base material in the comic books. And so Louie and I came up with this idea that Abomination's gamma injections have caused his bones to kind of grow towards the outside of his body. I love that, you know, that bone that comes out here. That's the idea. And we thought it would give us not only a different structure than Hulk, a structure that's got hard surfaces like on his chest and his head and his back. His spine grows out of his skin. And he would look like the Abomination. He would be something that is just ugly but giant. He's 11 feet. He's two feet taller than Hulk, which is a significant advantage in our movie. Three, two, one. Yeah! The motion capture has really allowed us to bring a very organic, human type of animation to our characters very quickly. That was nice. That stop, huh? That interactivity is crucial to us. We found that when he jumps and he throws his arms forward and up like this, it feels too much like the Hulk. And where this is, he's bringing his arms, elbows up. What I wanted to do was really create two characters that had their own signature. That each stood out as individuals. Yeah! That weren't just two big, hulky guys fighting. That's it! The way they move, the way they act, the way they fight is character-driven. Abomination will just change directions and just, boom! Yeah, he has the ability to put himself through the concrete, through the glass. And there's no grace to that aspect of it. We're trying to work out choreography. And because the characters are so different, we're looking for different textures in the character, not only in timing, but also how is Hulk different from Abomination? Boom, yeah, exactly. Good. And then watch out for pivoting. Hulk's gonna pivot. You're stuck. You're, boom, boom. To break it down into its simplest of terms, the Hulk is a steel ball and the Abomination is a cubic triangle. How does a steel ball fight a cubic triangle? When we were talking about doing the movement stuff, my thing was lock, load, and fire. Like, he can spring. He can go so fast and so quickly. Because he can go in any direction at any time. Yeah, he doesn't have to, like, wind up like the Hulk would. He's just... He's Special Ops guy. Right. It's like a new being, a new creature, a new version of human. Two, one. Tim, if he moves a little bit in the hollow, let's keep him upright. The great thing about having Tim here is he's gonna be Bolonsky in the film. So we want to try and get some of the elements that Tim brings to Bolonsky into Abomination. So it's absolutely crucial that Tim be here to be able to see what we're doing, to be able to give us input, to be able to marry those two characters together, the characters of Bolonsky and Abomination. Not looking for your descent. Not looking for your landing. Yeah. That's sort of... You're just, like, waiting for your landing. That's so cool for you. That's so cool for Bolonsky. Yeah, he's so like that. In contrast to the way that the Hulk moves, I think my character's more spiky and harsh, and also shark-like at times. He's like, you know, he hovers, like, and then he turns. If he's looking at you, he's walking down, and he turns and, look, you're dead, you know? It's like old-school theatre, I think, really. It's high-tech version of it, but it's really old movement. It's like back to the early days of theatre, really. Three, two, one. And you get to get angry and fight and roll around and throw things. I mean, it's pretty cool. We're going out like this tonight. Here we are. My intention is to lose all dignity. That's why I signed on to this movie. It's kind of the actor's chance to speak to the sort of animation guys. There we go, there we go. It's kind of ridiculous, as you can see, but, yeah, it's fun. It's extraordinarily embarrassing, and you feel utterly ridiculous. But what they had were these big monitors up, and then as you were moving, you saw a rough sketch of your character. Yes! That was killer. Then you rear up and go the other way. He's like, put me in the suit, mate. Come on, let's go. He just likes to get in there and get in the trenches and go for it, and that's the great thing about him. Well, you're at an angle, and then you increase the angle. Okay. You know what I mean? It was extraordinary. I'd never seen this. This is my first time of doing this, and I thought it was wonderful. Three, two, one. We're in a giant video game, you know? So it's like, before you know it, it's lunch. We're like, oh, hang on a minute. So it's been fun. I can't call it a job. Cool on this thing. It's all right. Rear up and look down. It was really important to get not typically... I mean, she's not going to look like Tim Roth, and Hulk's not going to look like Edward Norton. But just sometimes they move. Sometimes they do something. Sometimes, you know, a mission moves like this. That will remind you of Tim Roth or Emil Blonsky, the character he plays in the movie. Ready, and action. Great. We're going to see a lot of Tim in there. We're going to see a lot of Tim's eyes and a lot of Tim's mouth. So we're really going to bring his look and that sort of cheeky attitude he's got as Blonsky into Abomination. Good. It's good. Very strange thing to do. Yeah, it's starting to feel like home in here. A little scary. No, this is home for us. And that's the beautiful thing about the motion capture is that it gives the animators a really solid base to work from. And it gives them sort of a soul, a little spark of reality, of something that's come from something organic. The stride has to be big. That's key. Yeah. I mean, now that I see what you're doing, I understand. But it's very hard. You can't have tea and talking about, you know... It's more of a triangle and it's more of a ball. When Terry watches the film, he'll be sitting at home and going, you know what, I remember doing that action. And I remember doing this action. It's never used on a frame-by-frame basis. It's always taken by our animators. And the animators import it into that file. And then they use what works. And what doesn't work, they reinvent. If you can start from realistic motion and work from that, that's where you want to be. Rather than spending weeks and weeks and weeks just getting to that point, it's great to be able to start from there. The motion capture really gave us that basis in human physiology that I don't think we would have been able to achieve so quickly otherwise. And then from there, it was weeks of really polishing, making it superhero style motions, making it really fit each plate and fit the story. With Hulk, you know, you can take a human and you can use them as reference for Abomination. You can only do that to a certain extent. And then you've got to go off into, you know, crazy land. Crazy land. One of the benefits was that all of our technology that we're developing for Hulk, we knew we were going to be able to use on Abomination. But one of the major things that they told us was, Abomination's this guy who's like exploded out of his skin and his bones and muscles are like visible. And at that point, we're like, oh God, you know, what are we going to do? There were certain parts of Abomination that were actually harder to figure out than Hulk because of the exposed bone. The spine was a very difficult thing that we had to tackle. The way that it flares out and the way that it compresses. And also the clavicles being exposed and the hips being exposed. So there's the pre-animation stage where we kind of build the theoretical model of what we think is going to work. Then we go in and we give a texturing for the color. We actually do another pass of displacement that kind of gives all the veins and the ripped muscle qualities. After that, then we have the blood flow into the muscles. He always has a heartbeat. So you actually see the blood going through his veins at all times. Everybody who works on the movie puts their own little spin on it. All the artists, they're part of the character. It's a lot of fun that way. I mean, they're so proud of it when they're done. It's going to look great. Is that all you've got?