VISUAL EFFECTS AND ANIMATION BRING HISTORICAL EVENTS TO LIFE FOR DOCUMENTARIES

By TREVOR HOGG

When it comes to covering historical events, documentarians go on a journey to find and acquire rights to archive footage and photographs or fill in the visual gaps with talking heads or reenactments. In some cases, the reenactments are more about being authentic to the emotion of a moment than to the actual physical details. With technology becoming more affordable and accessible, the ability to have visual effects and animation within a tight budget has allowed for even more creative and innovative ways to bring the past to cinematic life.

Bad River

“We do social justice documentaries,” states Andrew Sanderson, Associate Producer at 50 Eggs Films.“Bad River deals with a Native American tribe called the Bad River Band, located in Northern Wisconsin, who are fighting for their sovereignty. Some things are happening now, and some things happened back in 1845 or 1850 that we don’t have any photos, footage or music from, so we had to be creative when we were making the film. We want to tell stories the best we can. A lot of the Elders who we interviewed from the band would tell stories of Chief Buffalo, the historic chief of La Pointe Band of the Ojibwe, and other Ojibwe leaders going to Washington, D.C. in 1852 to try to convince President Millard Fillmore not to remove them from their land. These are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation, and it’s important for us to get it right but let the folks doing the interview tell their story.”

“There is a great sense of community, so we wanted to include Bad River as much as we could in the filmmaking process. We would identify some local youth artists in the area. They would make sketches for us of different scenes or elements we were trying to capture. Then we take those sketches and give them to Punkrobot, an animation company in Chile, which would bring them to life.”

— Andrew Sanderson, Associate Producer, 50 Eggs Films, Bad River

Sanderson employed unique approaches to making the film. He remarks, “There is a great sense of community, so we wanted to include Bad River as much as we could in the filmmaking process. We would identify local youth artists in the area, and they would make sketches for us of different scenes or elements we were trying to capture. Then we take those sketches and give them to Punkrobot, an animation company in Chile, which would bring them to life.”

Animated sequences were expanded upon. “There is a scene where one of the interviewees is describing when he was younger, people from the Bureau of Indian Affairs driving around the reservation trying to catch kids to bring them to boarding schools,” Sanderson explains. “We had one of our youth artists draw a man coming out of a car. Then we would have Punkrobot animate that and bring it even a step further into a whole animated sequence. Sometimes, it would transition to another still that we had or another piece of media, so it flowed well. In another example, we had licensed some black-and-white footage of the front lawn of the White House that had sheep eating the grass. We had Punkrobot sketch out what would be the next scene, and from there, it transitioned into the sketch of the interior of the White House where they’re plotting to take land from different reservations.” A legal battle between the Bad River Band and Canadian oil and gas pipeline operator Enbridge is included. “They had a case that was in Madison Western District Superior Court, so we weren’t allowed to have any photographs or recording devices in the court, but we wanted to show what was going on. We hired a courtroom sketch artist, told him who the key people were, and had him get a selection of sketches over two days. Then, we had Punkrobot animate those sketches to tell the story of what was going on in the courtroom when we couldn’t have told it any other way visually.” Sanderson adds, “We basically used different mediums and blended them all together to make sequences that are visually appealing and can help bring people into the story.”

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story

“We developed an interesting visual effects process where we ended up with something that was shot relatively inexpensively, and through clever piecing together of strange techniques, we made it look as though 20,000 frames were painted by hand.”

—Luca Tarantini, Director of Animation, Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story

Piecing together the life of a trans soul singer, who is revered along with her contemporaries Etta James and Little Richard, and who vanished from public view 40 years ago, is Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, directed by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee and produced by Banger Films and the National Film Board of Canada. “We had to bring Jackie’s story to life, and roto seemed like a cost-effective way to do that because we are starting with an actor, not doing animation from scratch, which can be expensive and not look good if you don’t have the right team,” remarks Director of Animation Luca Tarantini. “We developed an interesting visual effects process where we ended up with something that was shot relatively inexpensively, and through clever piecing together of strange techniques, we made it look as though 20,000 frames were painted by hand.” Machine learning and Stable Diffusion were cornerstones of the animation process. “Stable Diffusion is meant for you to type in a sentence, and it generates an image of that thing. But we were using it where you start with an image, type in a bit of prompt, and it gives you an interpretation of that original image. If you get the settings just right, it doesn’t distort the original image enough but stylizes it in the correct way.”

As the edit evolved, it became clear that the animation was a major component of the storytelling and consequently went from 15 to 40 minutes of screen time. “Not only did the amount of animation and the time we spent on it have to change, it became impossible without experimenting with new techniques to try to make it feasible for a tiny team of two or three people to deal with that volume of content,” notes Co-Director of Animation Jared Raab. “We managed to mix a bit of everything that everybody knew from shooting on an actual soundstage in a scrappy, music video-style way, greenscreen. Luca pioneered simple camera tracking to get camera position data for when he created the backgrounds, which were made in 3D using Cinema 4D, then I did a ton of Adobe After Effects work to create some of the 2D animation of the space. Last, Luca created entirely 3D lighting using the camera data to get the lens flares and some of the stuff that we loved from early archival music documentaries. It was a sprinkling of a little bit of everything that we knew how to make a film into the project, and the chemistry gave us just the right recipe to pull it off.”

Pigeon Tunnel

Union VFX made a shift from working on feature films and high-end episodic to contributing to the Errol Morris documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, which explores the life and career of John le Carré through a series of one-on-one interviews with the former intelligence officer turned acclaimed novelist. “Generally, visual effects for documentaries are all about enhancing the audience’s understanding of the real-life events and subject matter that the narrator is talking about,” observes David Schneider, DFX and Technical Supervisor for Union VFX. “It is important for the work to focus on realism and subtle ‘invisible’ effects that stay true to the historical moments being described during the interview. The core value of a documentary is to educate, so we generally have to keep augmentation minimal, not exaggerate, and retain a factually accurate depiction of events.” Digital augmentation was not confined to one aspect, as there were 154 visual effects shots, and five assets had to be created. Schneider adds, “We handled everything from equipment removal during interview shots to creating CG creatures and augmenting environments. The film’s many dramatizations gave Union VFX the chance to shine with standout assets, like an unlucky pigeon and a Soviet freighter. One of the highlights was a nighttime airplane sequence where we delivered several fully CG shots that brought the scene to life.”

“For the Monte Carlo pigeon shoot sequence, we needed a close-up of a pigeon being shot out of the sky. To achieve this, we had to create an entirely new feather simulation system that captured the realistic movement of feathers when the pigeon was hit. While we’ve worked with CG birds before, this was the first time we had been so close to the camera that individual feathers were clearly visible.”

—David Schneider, DFX and Technical Supervisor, Union VFX, The Pigeon Tunnel

Early on, Union VFX received detailed storyboard animatics. “It helped us get on the same page, and since documentaries don’t typically use heavy visual effects, this was invaluable,” Schneider states. “Some scenes required complex augmentation. For example, the sequence in which Kim Philby makes his escape to the Soviet Union required us to build the Dolmatova [a Soviet-era freighter], place it into provided plates, and enhance the surrounding dock with cargo and a digital gangway leading to the ship. All of this was integrated into the practical fog that was present on set. For the Monte Carlo pigeon shoot sequence, we needed a close-up of a pigeon being shot out of the sky. To achieve this, we had to create an entirely new feather simulation system that captured the realistic movement of feathers when the pigeon was hit. While we’ve worked with CG birds before, this was the first time we had been so close to the camera that individual feathers were clearly visible. We meticulously modeled the texture and styled the pigeon’s feathers to ensure they moved naturally, both in flight and when they detached from the bird.”

Endurance

Cutting back and forth from the ill-fated 1915 Antarctica expedition to the South African research vessel S.A. Agulhas II searching the Weddell Sea in 2022 for the sunken ship captained by renowned Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton is the National Geographic documentary Endurance, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Natalie Hewit. “There were 28 men, and most of them wrote diaries or were able to tell their stories after the fact, so there is a lot of historical detail,” states Producer Ruth Johnston. “We used AI voice conversion technology so that every word that you hear is from one of seven guys [from the expedition] who lead us through the story [by reading from their writings].” Virtual content was built for three separate re-creations of three different campsites with various types of ice flows in the backgrounds. “These ice flows were important because it was something we would not have been able to easily recreate in real life,” remarks Virtual Production Supervisor Eve Roth. “We color-corrected the virtual snow around the camp to match what the art department ended up putting down. Because we knew what kinds of harsh weather we were trying to recreate for the campsites, the virtual content was created in a way where we could dial up or down the wind and snow effects. We were also able to change the type of clouds in the sky, to dial that up and down.”

“These ice flows were important because it was something we would not have been able to easily recreate in real life. We color-corrected the virtual snow around the camp to match what the art department ended up putting down. Because we knew what kinds of harsh weather we were trying to recreate for the campsites, the virtual content was created in a way where we could dial up or down the wind and snow effects. We were also able to change the type of clouds in the sky, to dial that up and down.”

—Eve Roth, Virtual Production Supervisor, Endurance

Stept Studios focused on the reenactments. “We had the urge to chase some fancy camera work, but ultimately, we wanted to shoot it the same way Frank Hurley [Endurance Expedition’s official photographer] would have – on sticks with composed frames,” explains Nick Martini, Founder and Creative Director of Stept Studios. “This visual approach allowed us to intercut our footage with the archival material seamlessly.” Most of the visual effects work was completed before production.

“Our efforts were centered around building the environments where the story takes place using Unreal Engine,” Martini states. “Those worlds were then projected in LED volume stages to be used as interactive backgrounds on a stage in Los Angeles. This allows for an organic in-camera look when we shoot and provides more realistic lighting than a traditional greenscreen approach. In post, some additional clean-up and effects were added to sell the gag.”

Atmospherics were added to the archival still photographs. “We didn’t want effects to overwhelm or take away from the original photography, rather to enhance the imagery or add impact in dramatic moments,” states Josh Norton, Executive Creative Director and Founder of BigStar. “Blowing smoke and snow were added only when we felt those moments of drama were necessary or the original photo called for it.”

Orienting the audience is a collection of maps showing the progression of both expeditions. “The filmmakers had a desire to make sure the film’s graphics didn’t feel too expected or conservative,” Norton remarks. “We were able to work with colorful type, energetic transitional language and texture while still making sure that we were being accurate to the historical research, especially on the maps.” As for any lessons learned from the project, he replies, “Don’t go to the Weddell Sea without a backup plan!”