Let’s hear it for Hollywood going green while translating Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen. In the movie, thanks to Sony Imageworks and Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Travers and his team, Doctor Manhattan is sustainably covered in 2500 LED lights.
Quite the feat.
A little reference on the novel for those of you not up to speed. It’s 1959 and we find Dr. Manhattan, famed for his work at a nuclear research center, accidentally locked in a test chamber and caught in an “Intrinsic Field Subtractor.”
Being turned into a blue-skinned super being (thanks to bad timing with the aforementioned test chamber), Doctor Manhattan is contracted by the United States government and is the only character in the story who possesses real superpowers. Who wouldn’t with 2500 eco-friendly lights strapped on?
Over time, he becomes more and more detached from humanity, (think a futuristic Grizzly Adams) illustrated by the fact that he wears fewer clothes over the passing years and goes into self-imposed exile away from the earth.
Is this where Peter Travers got inspired to create the famed blue man for the big screen? I caught up with Travers recently to have him field a few questions I, a Watchmen fan myself, was curious about. Here’s what he had to say.
Amy: I read an interview on Popular Mechanics that you blew through reading author Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in one sitting. What was it about Dr. Manhattan that made you want to create him for the screen?
Peter: The desire to do the character came from how challenging it would be. Anytime you have the opportunity to create a digital human, however blue he may be, for a live-action motion picture, you jump at the chance.
Whose idea was it to load up Dr. Manhattan with all the LED’s?
It was a group decision and it had to be. And the early discussions went on even before I came on board. The whole concept had to be embraced by everyone on set, including the Director and the Director of Photography. The light suit was a lighting tool on set, and was used even when Doc was not in frame. We would sometimes have Billy Crudup standing just off camera, not saying anything, but he glowed onto the other actors. We called it above the line lighting.
LED’s run pretty hot generally. How did Billy Crudup fare with the heat of 2500 of them?
The LED’s did not actually run that hot, and they were not on for any length of time. We turned the suit off as soon as the take was over. The suit was never on for more than 10 minutes straight. If it did provide any warmth, that was a good thing because we shot the movie in Vancouver, BC in the middle of winter.
Bad guys in the movie get atomized frequently. How did you make Dr. Manhattan’s muscles flex so realistic while destroying them?
Very carefully. The thing about this stuff, visual effects, is that we are usually doing something that has no typical frame of reference, so we are kind of winging it. That’s why it’s an effect. You just try to get some kind of reference that is as pertinent as possible but nothing ever completely translates. We took reference video of a bodybuilder, acting out certain poses, but we could only use it in spirit because Doc’s body proportions were different.
Was it difficult to make his skin look real with all the blue lights?
Yes, the main dilemma with Doc was that he had to appear as if he was a light source, but he couldn’t be so bright that you could not read his performance. It was something that we had to balance in every shot. The skin itself was challenging, beyond the glowy nature of it, just because getting realistic looking skin in computer graphics is very difficult in itself. The textural quality of the pores and the tiny hairs etc. The devil is in the details.
Have you started thinking how that same blue glow could be used in other animated projects?
Not really, because every show has different needs. Sometimes it’s airplanes, sometimes it’s robots. But if some new show comes in that requires a glowing naked character, I’ll know exactly what to do.
I was reading an article in New York Magazine about, well, Dr. Manhattan’s manliness in the face of human evil. Do you think altering the size of his penis changed anything about what Gibbons was trying to say about politics, society, and the human condition?
I have no idea. I think that would be reading too much into it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, even if it’s blue.
Photo Courtesy of Sony Imageworks