I.E. Effects completed key visual effects sequences for the Michael Jackson concert film This Is It. While the theatrical release will be a standard 2D presentation, the Culver City-based postproduction facility delivered all of its VFX work in full stereoscopic 3D, opening the door for a stereoscopic version of the film in the future.

The facility was originally contracted to produce 15 stereo 3D shots for Jackson’s concert tour, but following Jackson's untimely death, the project was put on hold. The upcoming feature film, and the special edition Blu-ray that will follow, allowed I.E. Effects to complete the project and fulfill their role in Michael Jackson’s final show.

“I thought we were perfectionists, but Michael’s attention to detail just blew us away,” says David Kenneth, visual effects producer and founder of I.E. Effects. “He had invested himself completely in this, and when he died, we lost him, and we thought we had lost the opportunity to finish the project.”

Aaron Kaminar, I.E. Effects’ visual effects supervisor and lead artist on the project, explains that the original stage design included a giant 90-by-30-foot multi-panel LED screen behind the performer on which stereoscopic content would have been displayed during the live performance. Through careful choreography and advanced special effects, Jackson would have interacted with the backdrop in a never-before-seen combination of live performance and stereo 3D.

“When the whole thing started, it wasn’t anyone’s intention to create a feature film,” explains Kaminar, “but that changed after Michael Jackson’s death. We felt it was our mission to honor his vision and finish the work, according to the instructions in his notes to us. Those notes, from the days before he passed away, were our final directions.”

The shots completed by I.E. Effects include key sequences for the "Thriller" video, a new "Thriller" logo, a full CG animation of Vincent Price’s head, and a stunning CG Boeing 707 for the grand finale—all delivered in stereoscopic 3D.

"Thriller"
“The bulk of the 'Thriller' section was a rather complicated effect from the technical standpoint,” notes Kaminar. “There is a chandelier swinging around inside a creepy old haunted house, with ghosts swinging on it, whooping and hollering.”

Practical footage for the "Thriller" sequences was shot at Culver Studios under the direction of Bruce Jones using Pace HD’s FUSION 3D stereoscopic camera rigs. The shots were then matched to CG effects created at I.E. Effects.

“The ghosts were shot separately on a greenscreen stage using a large stand-in for the chandelier. We then tracked the CG chandelier to the set prop and added dynamics so that all the crystals on the chandelier would behave properly,” continues Kaminar. “Ordinarily that’s challenging enough, but when you add the fact that it’s stereoscopic, it becomes exponentially more complicated.”

Adding to the complexity of the shot, the two-camera rig was positioned on the end of a moving crane, panning, tilting and zooming. “The chandelier stand-in was rocking and moving around, so the tracking was pretty complex. To deal with this, we worked out a pipeline for efficient manual tracking and matchmoving that worked very well,” says Kaminar.

“The biggest challenge we had on this project was staying consistent between left- and right-eye in the compositing stage.”

To deal with the convergence issues that inevitably crop up with a moving camera, the artists at I.E. Effects relied on metadata fed directly from the Pace HD camera rig. “The camera metadata gave us frame-by-frame information on the convergence distance, the separation between the two cameras, as well as the focal length and the f-stop settings.”

Vincent Price Reprises—in Full CG
The "Thriller" sequence also includes a visualization of Vincent Price’s famous narration, with the actor’s head floating inside a crystal ball. In the middle of his monologue, a CG crow flies in and sits on his shoulder.

“There was an audio voiceover recording of Vincent Price doing the monologue, but there was no video associated with it,” explains Kaminar. “So we did a performance capture with an actor and mapped the movement of his face onto a CG Vincent Price.”

Facial motion capture is one of the most difficult challenges in animation, especially when it’s lip-synched to a locked audio track.

“Rather than using a traditional motion capture rig, where you lose some of the fidelity based on the capture resolution, we used a technique that required a little more grunt work. We painted a grid of lines and dots on our actor’s face and shot his performance with three HD cameras at increments of 45 degrees. The extra effort paid off,” says Kaminar.

“The rig for Price’s face used curves instead of bones. Those curves followed the musculature of the face so the deformation looked natural and behaved the way that muscle and skin do,” adds Kaminar. “Obviously, our model’s face has different proportions, so we had to write custom scripts for converting the animation of the actor’s face to the relative positions on Vincent Price’s face. We tried to find an actor with similar features, but it’s impossible to find someone who has the exact same proportions. So we had to take all the animations of the actor’s face relative to a pose of his face in a relaxed state and translate them onto the rig of Vincent’s face in a relaxed state.”

This process provided a reasonable approximation of the final animation. The I.E. Effects team then used traditional facial animation controls to fine-tune the performance.

I.E. Effects also animated the CG in the scene, as well as the "Thriller" logo, which, according to Kaminar, was designed to reference artwork from the original ’80s music video.

The Grand Finale
Jackson’s concerts in London were intended to end with a full-scale stereoscopic Boeing 707 taxiing out onto the stage in profile, with its wing appearing to hang out over the audience. Then a real gangway would lift from the stage up to the door of the CG aircraft. A real door was built into the screen. Jackson would then exit the stage through the door into the CG plane. As the music played, the aircraft would taxi into the distance, turn around and take off over the audience's heads.

“The technical challenge in that shot was that it had to line up perfectly and interact with the stage and the performance,” says Kaminar. “During the rehearsals, first at the Forum and then at the Staples Center, they set up the screen on the stage so we were able to do tests with the actual door in the screen and see the stereoscopic footage of the plane behind the stage.”

“We’re constantly refining our stereoscopic pipeline, and this project, with all its unexpected twists and turns, really tested us,” notes Kaminar.

“Michael Jackson was a pop icon who redefined music,” says Kenneth. “It was an honor to be working with him, not knowing it would be his last performance. Our entire crew felt a significant emotional loss when we heard the news of Michael’s passing, but getting to finish meant we could do our part to realize his vision for his final project.”