By Matt Hurwitz, August 3, 2006
Bob Arctor doesn't quite know what to believe. The undercover narc of the near future-seven years from now, according to the trailer-doesn't know if those bugs coming out of his roommate's neck are real. He doesn't know if he had the life he remembers having, before he became an undercover cop. And neither do we.
Director Richard Linklater's second foray into animation, Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, centers around Arctor, played by Keanu Reeves, as he works under wraps to find the supplier of a banned drug called Substance D, all the while becoming a victim of its effects himself. Also in the fray are his "friends," the frenetic Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), dopey surfer Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and his would-be girlfriend, Donna (Winona Ryder). Arctor hangs with his pals as himself but dons a "scramble suit" when meeting with his superiors, who don't know his true identity. The suit, when worn, flashes a constant assortment of faces and bodies in place of those of the wearer.
The film was produced using a process in which live-action DV footage of the actors' performances on set was overlaid with animation to create a stylized vision of the future. The animation produces an unsettling experience for the viewer. "That's the Philip K. Dick feeling," says Linklater. "Not only what is reality, but how's my brain processing this, and what the hell is really going on?"
The first time the director used this animation method was in 2001 for Waking Life, which presented a similarly dreamlike experience to viewers. "Waking Life was more like a documentary," he explains. "It was shot handheld, not really lit, and with no attention paid to color. This was more filmic, more a fully designed movie, and it cost a little more."
To capture the live-action performances, Linklater brought onboard Director of Photography Shane Kelly, who notes that, in the beginning, the plan was to simply film the actors entirely against greenscreen, but it wasn't long before Linklater was building sets. "Eventually they started shooting it as a 'real' movie," he says.
Scanner was shot from mid-May to mid-June 2004 in and around the director's home base of Austin, Texas, where his Detour Filmproduction facility is located. Anaheim, where the film is set, was created in postproduction. "We shot a lot of exteriors in Anaheim and then composited them into the footage we shot in Austin," says Linklater.
To get a sense of the type of cinematography that would be required, Linklater had Kelly watch Waking Life. "He wanted me to get an idea of what the software [Rotoshop] did with movement," Kelly explains. "You could see what it did with textures and how you could pull those textures out, either by lighting them or just choosing your framing to accentuate them. We approached it with more of a graphic sense as far as the composition of the shots was concerned."
Kelly used three Panasonic AG-DVX100 cameras operated at 24p. "We chose that camera because it was a true 24-frame camera that would work well with the 24-frame animation," he explains. "Another nice thing about that little camera is it allowed us to shoot in these tiny little apartments," Kelly notes. Kelly operated himself, along with Steadicam Operator Ralph Watson (either on Steadicam or Losmandy Porta-Jib). A third camera was used for the occasional two-shot.
"Rick likes a lot of movement," Kelly says. "Initially, it was, 'Just set the camera up and don't move it. Let the actors move, because that's going to be much easier to animate.' But once he got in there, Rick really wanted to move the camera, which can be more challenging for the animators, since the backgrounds move, too."
Linklater's creative-and sometimes improvisational-cast required Kelly to be ready for anything. "Rick's very much a guy who loves working with actors and loves blocking," the DP explains. "Some scenes were heavily rehearsed, but you put Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. in a scene together and it's never going to be the same twice."
Kelly would arrive in the morning, get a sense of the scene to be shot and light for all possibilities. "I had to light really broadly and then finesse it after the rehearsal while they changed clothes. There was no makeup, so there wasn't much time. We just moved super fast, and, luckily, I had a crew that could do that."
Kelly opted for a general lighting scheme to give Linklater and the actors the freedom to move around within the set and change blocking if needed. Though Kelly had real actors to shoot, he was charged with covering scenes to suit the animation that would be done later. "The nature of the animation makes actors become more two-dimensional," he explains. "I approached the lighting more like I would approach shooting black and white-a lot of backlight and a lot of contrast-to make the actors easy to cut from the background."
Some of Kelly's duties were unique to the animated project. "I tried to get a good image for the animators to work with. I worked off the monitor a lot because something that stands out on an eight-inch monitor to me will stand out down the line," he explains. "I definitely shot and composed with the animators in mind. I also gave them a color palette to use because they sample colors from the live action. The colors used in the animation are the colors that appear on the tape. It's a sort of heightened realism. Philip K. Dick's book takes place very much in a normal, everyday suburban setting, except for the parts with the drugs."
Shooting footage that would be translated into animation meant the production team didn't need to sweat every detail. Since the film would be animated on top of the live action, makeup and lighting were less of a concern, as were equipment like booms or mics sneaking into a scene. They could be "animated out" later. "The good thing about this movie was we could just screw a camera into a little base in the wall and just leave it there, and then just not animate things we didn't want you to see. There were cords and equipment everywhere," Linklater says. "It was a new area for me to deal with. I learned what the animators can fix and what they can't fix, what I can get away with and what I can't."
This production flexibility was particularly handy for a scene in which Reeves' character is sitting in the police station viewing surveillance footage shot in his house in hopes of catching one of his roommates in an illegal act. "We had 12 little Canon interlaced cameras [probably Canon ZR80s, shooting 30i]-15 at one point including the DVXs-all over that house," Kelly says. "My two assistants and I would run around, turn everything on, and then leave the room and watch the monitor and just let things happen."
The advantages of shooting DV over HD or film were the small size of the cameras and the relatively low cost of equipment and recording media. Having 10 or 15 cameras going at once generated a tremendous amount of footage. "It became kind of an assistant editing nightmare, with all those cameras and all that footage, just to be able to cut between them. It was huge," admits Linklater. Editing duties were handled by the director's longtime editor, Sandra Adair, Assistant Editor Christopher Roldan and a group of interns.
Once all live-action footage for the film was shot and edited, Kelly and Linklater spent four weeks holed up in one of the Detour offices color-correcting the final cut in Adobe After Effects, mainly to get the footage from the different cameras to match. A Scanner Darkly was shot, locked and edited just like a normal live-action film
. After transferring to the animators via QuickTime, "We bring it into the world of animation," says Producer Tommy Pallotta, "and make the same movie twice."
Interpolated Rotoscoping
The "second movie," which gives the hard reality of the first a trippy, pop art twist, was created by a 15-month computer animation process designed to paint reality, not mimic it. The animation for Scanner takes the viewer on a hallucinogenic trip much like the one poor Bob Arctor is on. "I always thought the story would work with this style of animation because it puts your brain in that place of, 'Is it real? What is it?'" Linklater says. The addition of production sound, rather than pristine sound booth overdubs, adds to the experience. "It's the sound of the real world and the actions of a real person, and it maybe even looks like a real person. And, visually, we only step out of that a few times. It's an artistic construct that puts you in a pretty close representation of Bob Arctor's mindset. So that, in itself, has a hallucinatory quality."
The animation system, as used on Waking Life and also put into service on Scanner, was designed by Waking animation director Bob Sabiston. Rotoscope software, an interpolated rotoscoping program developed by Sabiston in the late '80s, allows an animator, working on a Wacom tablet and working from a frame of the live-action video, to fully draw characters by tracing over the DV footage. The animator then can move ahead to another keyframe, say 10 frames ahead, and the program will "tween," interpolating the in-between frames automatically. "It's a vector-based program," says Animation Supervisor Sterling Allen. "It not only tweens shapes, but it tweens color and opacity as well."
The "painterly" process of interpolated rotoscoping allows animators to paint over live-action DV footage in ways similar to putting brush strokes on paper or canvas. The process frees animators from having to hand-draw each line in every frame. Instead, the computer connects fluid lines and brush strokes across a wide range of frames to create lifelike human movement.
While Waking Life offered a variety of looks, Linklater wanted a more consistent appearance for A Scanner Darkly. "The style of Waking Life changes each time a different animator took the pen," notes Allen. "Sometimes it's big blocky passes of color, sometimes it's really fine line work and sometimes it's floaty. For this film, the goal was to be consistent-keep the characters consistent, keep the line weight consistent, keep the coloring style consistent."
Notes Linklater, "On Waking Life, one scene could be wildly different than the one that followed. But on this film, we were always thinking in terms of a graphic novel that would have a similar design throughout. It would require more consistency and much more detailed drawing."
Despite the shortcuts that technology affords, animation is still a painstaking process. It took up to 500 hours to create one minute of A Scanner Darkly with 30 people working full-time on the project every day.
About 120,000 individual frames were animated using the system. The team worked at Detour's offices over a year's time, from October 2004 to October 2005. The staff of artists, consisting of about 35 character animators, three background artists and 18 who just focused on the "scramble suit," came from a variety of backgrounds and locations.
While characters were hand-animated, Allen notes that backgrounds were drawn separately and using a different methodology. "The program is 2D, so all of the background movement you see was created with 2D planes." The planes could be warped on the X and Y scales and arranged, he says, "like setting up a room by painting four playing cards and moving them around in space."
The designs effectively combine with the character figures to produce a realistic setting. "We had some really awesome guys doing background who had previous experience doing environments in video games," says Allen. "They did an amazing job making that feel real."
Sabiston's proprietary Rotoshop software allowed the backgrounds to be set in a "frozen" layer of the animation. The backgrounds are animated once in great detail, scaled, positioned and locked in place-or, as would be the case in Flash, moved around the frame, like a "symbol" item-simplifying production.
There were occasional exceptions. For example, when Arctor's hallucinations make the walls appear to move, the animators took advantage of a quality produced by the software that is more of an aberration caused by the way the system interpolates the polygons that make up objects. "The backgrounds sometimes have a 'swimmy' effect, where things appear to float in the frame slightly," Allen explains. "In Waking Life, it was something they weren't really able to eliminate. Now we're able to control it and manipulate it, and use it to our advantage."
Scrambled Faces
The most fascinating animation in the film is, without a doubt, that of the "scramble suit." "It's sort of the central metaphor for the movie," Linklater explains. "It's a concealed identity, but with an everyman kind of quality." The suit reduces the appearance of the wearer to a vague blur. Once put on by the wearer, images of men, women, old, young, white, black and Asian all flash by in various pieces in place of the wearer's own face and body.
"In the book, it's a little vague," says Linklater. "He wrote it in the '70s, and it's sort of left up to the imagination. But the key is that it's always in motion, constantly changing."
A considerable amount of time was spent in R&D for the suit, Sabiston and his team creating a handful of options for Linklater to choose from, with one look coming fairly close to the final design. "One of the designs would have been so time-consuming to do, we'd be animating the movie an extra year just to get that look," Linklater notes.
The final design utilizes three separate threads of animation transposed over each other, each with different opacity frequencies fading in and out. Within each animation thread, the character changes every 30 frames. "You might have, say, a Hispanic male, then 30 frames later an African-American lady, then 30 frames later an old grandpa," explains Allen. "That's just one thread. That's then laid on top of two other threads, each changing on and off. You can never focus on one particular person. You just get that vague blur."
Entire animation threads were animated by individual artists creating both the body and the head; this process differs from the film's regular character animation, for which animators specializing in faces were assigned those tasks, while others drew the bodies. The source for the faces, amazingly, was not a library developed by the animators. The faces were created individually, person by person, for each of the three threads in each scene. "They basically just come out of 15 crazy people's heads," Allen jokes.
Key to the success of the scramble suit animation is its ability to pass the actor's expressions in the original video footage through the rapidly changing faces. "Despite the sci-fi element of the suit, it still needed to be anthropomorphic enough that you could feel something for Fred," Linklater says. "The characters have to be real people and keep your attention."
Linklater found that the animation process on A Scanner Darkly gave him the opportunity to let his imagination run wild. "I don't feel there are any limitations to what we can do in postproduction," he says. "That's what's fun about this. We've created another world."
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