Romeo & Juliet & Peter Webb

To the Prologue.
(Inserted at the end of this article because it's ... ahem, more of an emotional footnote. In it I tell the story of how this interview happened, of a chance meeting on the Web, and make another public apology. F.H.)

Peter Webb loves Baz Luhrman’s latest film. In this he’s no different from the millions of the record US audiences, who queued for blocks to see William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the Australian director’s second feature. The first, Strictly Ballroom, was an Australian box office success, a slickly workshopped stage review carried over to film. Fun but pretty lightweight. For Romeo and Juliet, Luhrman has again surrounded himself with an Australian crew and carried the ensemble to Mexico to create Verona Beach, the updated MTV era setting for his version of the most famous of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedies. Lines that we’ve all learnt over the years and that by any other name would sound like clichés, spill fresh from the lips of teenage actor Clare Danes and the young Leonardo DiCaprio. The film, most critics agree is clever, intelligent, fast paced and perfectly calculated for it’s intended audience. Cinema Papers called it the Film of the Year. But that’s not why Peter Webb, who has a big credit on the movie as a Digital Effects Designer/Supervisor, still enjoys it after having seen the film half a dozen times. He’s excited by the film’s creative application of the latest in digital post production and what he see's as a shift in how we'll work with film for cinema. "I’m so proud to have worked on it. Other films I’ve worked on have been a technical challenge, but this one is just a lovely emotional film. I was really distressed when I came to Melbourne because it wasn’t going to be released here until March. It was like missing a friend!" (The release was revised to Boxing Day Australia wide). Peter now works with the Melbourne post production facility Complete Post. Relative newcomers to film effects, they snatched the major part of the Romeo and Juliet visual effects, away from the U.S. company Hammerhead Productions, who were awarded the main special effects contract for the 20th Century Fox feature. Peter enjoys telling the story of how it happened and the pleasure he gained in helping create such a visual stylish film is clear. For him, it was the first feature he had worked on where creating technically satisfying digital effects merged with the whole creative thrust of the project. That’s significant because this is only the most recent of major Hollywood movies that he has worked on. In computer time, (that's like dog years) Peter is a digital veteran.

There are the usual obsessive fan web sites for both Clare Danes and Leo DiCaprio.

Webb dropped out of art school to join one of Melbourne’s first Multimedia companies, at the time he notes "when multimedia meant multiple slide projectors synchronised with multi-track sound, yet we did some pretty clever things for major trade shows and product launches." Computer graphic paint programs were just being used to assemble slide montage images, and Webb quickly became proficient with the software. A friend, Gary Tregaskis, asked him to help develop the prototype for a new image manipulation program he was developing. That software was to become the basis for the Canadian based company Discreet Logic’s, Flame, one of the top high-end Silicon Graphics based programs for video and film digital post-production. Webb became an expert on Flame, " I was writing the training manual while I was helping install the systems and train operators. As the Hollywood facilities realised how good the software was and more systems were sold, I was in the right place to also be asked to work on the productions". Coneheads, Man’s Best Friend, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Terminal Velocity, Jade and Batman Forever appeared on Webb’s CV and all added to his technical expertise.

The Flame software was used first for the effects on Super Mario Brothers, an under appreciated effects laden film, based on the Nintendo video game hit. When the producers asked who they could employ who knew how to use the Flame program, the answer was a hesitant, " Well, er... there’s really only Peter Webb".

Peter had been returning to Australia between projects to be with his family, and after an abortive attempt to move them to Los Angeles, finally decided it was time to return to Melbourne. Some time before, he had helped Chris Schwarze, the owner of Complete Post, one of Melbourne's 'boutique' video post production companies, to set up a Flame system for their digital film effects department. It was to Complete Post he returned and he began the task of chasing visual effects work on local feature films. When the chance came to quote on Romeo and Juliet, Webb pulled out all stops in a quoting frenzy. The team at Complete Post had the advantage of a close working relationship with Jill Bilcock, who was the editor on Luhrman’s Strictly Ballroom and was an associate producer on Romeo and Juliet. Yet they were the outsider, quoting against a number of established US companies and even though Webb felt they offered some unique creative enhancements, they missed out on the contract. The work that they had done on that submission however, had made an impression. When additional effects requirements came up during production, Complete Post were called in. By the end of production they had enhanced over thirty of the sequences in the movie during post production. A synergy developed between Webb’s team and Luhrman and Bilcock as they edited, first in Melbourne then in the US. The cutting was being done by Bilcock on a Lightworks non-linear editing system, and the film negative was being cut to match, at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, north of San Francisco.

Peter talks about the chance meeting that lead to Complete Post being asked to submit a quote for the film's effects, and the quoting process.

To facilitate the communication across the Pacific, Complete Post installed a video fax at both locations. This allowed Luhrman and Bilcock to approve an effect in a matter of hours. The technology minimized the distance problem but Webb believed it went beyond that to give them a creative advantage. The arrangement with Complete Post and the film’s producers went beyond the usual effects house relationship, and Luhrman, Bilcock and Webb began to create sequences that could only be achieved digitally. Many of the effects shots were used just to add visual excitement, such as small crash zooms, pans, speeding up action and adding extra camera shake. Some of the sequences however are emotional high points of the movie. Peter is particularly proud of the sequence on the beach where Mercutio is killed by rival gang leader Tybalt. The sequence was filmed in a wind storm that adds to the drama of the scene, with palm trees being tossed and sand blowing. Unfortunately it was also in bright sunshine and with blue skies. Luhrman’s request was for Peter to add an approaching ominous storm cloud that then darkened as the storm hit. The result, complete with moving cloud shadows, all added digitally by Peter, is a masterful sequence and totally convincing.

"When I was talking to other facilities in LA about how the fax helped get fast approvals, they’d say ‘you’re kidding, we can’t even get our director to drive across town from the cutting room to look at a test’, so it sounded like it may have even been better than being there".

"It was the first shot we got involved in", Peter explained. "They really wanted to set up the idea that this approaching storm was like the hand of God, so that when it hits, something really bad happens. Baz used to call it Mr. Storm, he said it was just like another character in the film". Luhrman worked with Peter to develop the look of the storm clouds and to make sure that they didn’t just take over the scene and stop the audience looking at the action. In one of the shots the dead Mercutio’s chest is moving, heaving with the exertion of the scene and the storm. "The take that Luhrman liked best also had a big scratch on the negative, right down the middle", Peter noted, "so as well as adding storm clouds we repaired the scratch, stabilised the camera movement from the wind and stopped Mercutio's chest moving". The scene is an emotional peak in the film and Luhrman wanted to have a slow fade to night on the ruined stage. Unable to re-shoot the sequence, Peter was asked to create a matte painting, removing the hard daytime shadows and adding realistic light sources. The sequence also shows that high quality digital manipulation has become just another resource in the filmmakers tool kit. From the scanning of the original negative to its output back to film, the digital image editing process is transparent. "It means", Peter concludes, "that it is now possible even after the film is shot to say ‘We can enhance this’. We can even go as far as altering the lighting in a scene to change the mood". That this will change the process of filmmaking is inevitable, and it could take cinema in its own unique direction with effects that are impossible to distinguish from or even create with original cinematography.

Details of Discreet Logic’s Flame software and their other products are available on the company’s web site at http://www.discreet.com, or from the Australian distributor Future Reality at http://www.futurereality.com.au.

The excitement for the future comes not just from giving digital effects artists such as Peter Webb, the software and hardware to create the images, but from giving them involvement in the creative process. Digital visual effects that extend the creative tools available to filmmakers, designers and cinematographers promise a new kind of cinema.

Methinks, Romeo and Juliet is a creditable start.

The Prologue

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