Sinfully good: bringing Sin City's graphic violence to the screen required rewriting the rules of VFX filmmaking—and not using film

Post, April, 2005 by Ken McGorry

AUSTIN, TX -- When Robert Rodriguez likes you, he really likes you, as Frank Miller, the creator of the Sin City graphic novels will attest. It will likely become the stuff of legend that Rodriguez virtually stalked Miller (in the nicest possible way) to get the quirky writer/artist to agree to have his work transformed into a motion picture.

Rodriguez's courtship involved some highly unusual steps. One was initially filming a Sin City vignette as a demo to convince Miller that the camera could capture his unique look and style; another was lifting Miller's dialogue directly from his book(s) to the script. And another was Rodriquez's eventual resignation from the Director's Guild so he could realize his promise that Miller, a non-director, could act as co-director on a Sin City film with all the authority that implies.

Frank Miller's books are stark. It's always night. Stark characters live and die tough-guy lives in a world that is so stark its black-and-white palette even excludes shades of gray. The characters' interaction is so brutal that you can become inured to the violence: What's a few bullets between friends? So policemen punctuate questions for their suspect with swings of their baseball bats? And, when planning an excursion, one savvy shopper--Marv from "The Hard Good-bye"--knows it's best to pack a sledgehammer and a hatchet.

Keefe Boerner, the visual effects producer and post supervisor for Troublemaker (www.loshooligans.com), Rodriguez's Austin-based production company, has a favorite line. Early in the movie, Bruce Willis, as an aging cop, takes six slugs in his back while trying to arrest a detestable fiend in "That Yellow Bastard," one of the film's three stories. In true Sin City fashion, the bullets are fired by Willis's own partner. "Don't make me have to kill ya!" is the partner's line, Boerner recalls with a rueful laugh.

SHOOTING THE LOOK IN BASIN CITY

But how do you shoot Miller's world? First guess might be color-desaturated film, or maybe actual B&W film stock. But Robert Rodriguez owns two Sony HDCAM F950 cameras and he is also the DP--the film Sin City is, strictly speaking, a great, big video. And nearly every set (or "environment") is a virtual CG construct--adding to the disorienting play between real and surreal scenes--which meant all the talent would be shot on greenscreen.

Achieving the "look" of Sin City (actually Miller's fictitious "Basin City") quickly became the focal point. Rodriguez ultimately decided against shooting for only black and white and admitted some gray scale into the shots. This was a fortuitous decision; his use of gray scale allows the viewer to perceive more detail and also lends a silvery richness and depth to most scenes. The look goes way beyond what most B&W movies give us while still retaining Miller's style of remorseless black and white.

Boerner says that Montreal effects house Hybride was instrumental in establishing the style of the movie: "Hybride is the company that we always go to first; we've been working with them for six or seven years." That includes all of Rodriguez's Spy Kids movies. Besides developing "the look," Hybride's VFX supervisor/producer Daniel Leduc cites two other major challenges: Sin City places all its actors in virtual environments, a reversal for post facilities that specialize in placing virtual characters in real backgrounds. The other challenge was the sheer number of environments needed to sustain Miller's graphic vision. "Normally, in a movie like Spy Kids, you create less than a dozen virtual locations," Leduc says. "You can define a location that will cover the action of 50 to 100 shots. Sin City is not like that--we had to design and create 45 locations for just one of the books!" One important step, Leduc says, was to design lots of detail into these CG environments. Then such details could be easily emphasized or deemphasized depending on the directors' lighting decisions made later.

INSTANT FEEDBACK WORKFLOW

Troublemaker's Boerner describes the movie's post challenge as one of "integration, trying to make the backgrounds match the lighting and make it look right. The biggest challenge was trying to match the books and still be somewhat realistic, but it's liberating that you don't have a real set that you need to tweak and tweak. We tried to do a lot of things that Frank Miller did stylistically in his books: Marv's bandages, for instance, or the glowing blood in 'The Big Fat Kill.'"

To make Sin City this way, Rodriguez, Troublemaker and the film's three visual effects houses graduated to Sony's new high def SRW-5000 deck, which boasts 10-bit, 4:4:4 processing. Sony designed this format for those who might want to add some visual effects to their footage. George Lucas used it for Star Wars 3. Now with Sin City, compositing--at Hybride, Cafe FX and The Orphanage--became crucial.

During tests, there was even a Flame artist routed to the set at Troublemaker, Boerner says. "We would be getting feedback from a compositor as we were setting up shots. We were using Sony's new HDCAM SR, which allows us to shoot in 4:4:4 color space. We shoot everything in color and, when Robert's filming, he has two [HD] monitors side by side that show the same thing--one in full color, so we can make technical judgments, and another one that's desaturated to black and white. We pushed up the contrast and it's kind of tweaked to see what it looks like, so he can make lighting choices. He lights it in the way we will treat it in post." Boerner says this on-set method of achieving instant feedback in HD proved to be a better app than using a video tap off a film camera; it provided "a lot better resolution."