Canada: A virtual reality history
David Migicovsky
Globe and Mail
'Make the meteorite warmer and slower, please!"
This, if you can believe Steve Dutcheshen, was a typical director's request
to CBC-TV's special-effects department during the creation of Canada: A
People's History. Four new episodes of the 16-part, $25-million series are
airing this month and producer Mark Starowicz has given the go-ahead to
show how the magic was done.
The first half of the series, running from prehistory through early
settlement and up to Confederation, is mostly about the prephotographic
era. To get visuals of the British fleet attacking Quebec in 1763, or of
Iroquois torturing French missionaries, it was necessary to generate the
images by a variety of clever techniques. One involved filming actors
climbing stepladders, then shrinking down the footage so they could "seem"
to be working the sails on a 5-foot museum model of a warship.
Another called on computers to create a huge village of native tepees out
of film footage of a single tepee "which, on top of it all, was too
narrow," says Roger Hupman, an effects director. "We had to make it twice
as wide, which means each tepee has the same wrinkles twice."
Not to mention slowing down a meteorite, changing daytime footage of a
steam locomotive to nighttime, and, says Dutcheshen, "my favourite
instruction of all: 'Keep the French bodies, the heads haven't arrived
yet.' "
Now, this may seem unnecessarily complicated to those who have kept up with
developments in Hollywood. When the producers of Titanic wanted to recreate
the doomed liner racing through the ocean, they built their own museum-
quality "model" (14 metres, the length of many houses), and then used
prototype high-power computers to create an ocean for it to slice through —
binary point by binary point — likewise calling up the throngs of
passengers from the cyber-ether.
But the Titanic team had 100-million bucks (U.S.), and CBC didn't. Although
the 30-hour series's $25-million (Canadian) budget had the usual right-wing
critics choking in indignation (waste of taxpayer's dollars, splut, splut),
it works out to less than $1-million per hour — about what the average U.S.
sitcom costs.
That had consequences. Take 18th-century warships, for example. Even with a
bank of shiny new effects computers, the CBC simply didn't have the
gigabytes, or the time, to generate an image of a warship. The Royal
Ontario Museum kindly let them film a magnificent, fully detailed 5-foot
model of a period British battleship, which the new computers were then
able to duplicate many times over (the whole British fleet bearing down on
Quebec in the summer of 1759 is in fact the same ship, promiscuously
cloned).
"And," says series executive producer Mark Starowicz, "when you have a
close-up of a prow cutting through water with a crew hanging off the bow,
the ship you see is actually the Endeavour." A CBC crew captured footage of
the working replica of Capt. James Cook's ship (based in Sydney, Australia)
off the North American east coast.
By such devious devices was a vanished world recreated. And yet, despite
his exacting passion for accuracy, and the knowledge that video clips from
the series would be "freeze-framed in Canadian classrooms" for decades to
come, Starowicz knew that compromises would have to be made.
"Take the battle of the Plains of Abraham," he says. "In the real event,
the muskets sounded like popcorn popping and there was so much smoke the
soldiers couldn't even find the battle after the third volley." A far cry
from the clear vistas of soldiers on the TV screen, and the satisfying
thunder of musket volleys.
Starowicz considers it a triumph that CBC spent as much on current-
generation graphic compositing computers as it did. And, remembering all
the jibes he endured about how young viewers would not be interested in
"musty" history, it is an additional sweet pleasure that "the graphic
compositing department is full of kids with green hair."
One of them, a twentysomething named Jennifer Vuckovic (who has, as it
happens, alarmingly jet-black hair), was responsible for creating the
celebratory ball which marked the signing of the British North America Act
in 1867. "It's what I call rotoscope hell," she says, recalling that the
director of photography who oversaw the original filming of a small group
of actors dancing in period costume, "didn't realize we'd need a middle
layer of dancers to fill the historic ballroom we were using."
The trick here is that the costumed actors were filmed against a neutral
background in Toronto, and later superimposed on the historic ballroom
located in Prince Edward Island. Fair enough — it saves travel expenses —
but why not just film a whole lot of actors in the first place? "The
costumes cost a fortune," replies Vuckovic.
Instead, she created the "middle layer" of dancers out of the existing
footage, picking one here, one there, shrinking them to the appropriate
size, and setting them spinning in the background of dancers who are — are
you still with me? — themselves. "But they're rearranged and smaller, and
we're real sure that nobody has noticed," says Vuckovic. The feat, however,
required her to sit in front of a rotoscope camera for two weeks, rolling
the film backward and forward a few frames at a time until the job was
done. "It's worse than carpal tunnel syndrome," she says morosely, before
rushing off to meet friends at a club.
Dutcheshen, a Manitoba native who studied fine arts in Winnipeg and design
at the Ontario College of Art, feels that much of his team's work was about
pictorial design. Actors supposedly dining on a train were actually shot in
a studio, with footage of countryside racing past being projected on a
train-window cutout behind them. The result looked miserably fake until
Dutcheshen's team created reflections of the actor's faces and wineglasses
in the window glass. "As a fine artist, I found a lot of it came down to
painting skills. I had to know which details would make it look real."
And it was with a pang that I learned that the Confederation-era locomotive
steaming off toward the horizon in one episode was in fact lifted from the
1974 CBC series The National Dream. The locomotive was originally shot
moving through rocky Ontario countryside by day, and Roger Hupman
demonstrates the painfully tricky business of generating a new setting for
it — the Prairies by night — as demanded by the script. Why not just shoot
such a train again? Here's the answer that causes the pang: "The National
Dream was shot when such a train could be found."
The team is rightly proud that it managed to weave material from so many
sources, in so many media — real and virtual — into a convincing on-screen
result. And their commitment to historic truth was obsessive. In a War of
1812 scene they realized that a U.S. general had been filmed in a brick
fort at a time when forts were actually wooden palisades. It wasn't hard to
computer-brush in a wooden palisade, but there were gaps between the logs
where you should have seen the general's brass buttons.
"So we put them in, and it's pretty good," says Dutchesen, "except that
when he moves, his buttons don't."
But you didn't notice, did you? Not the first time, anyway.
Getting it right
At the other extreme from computer legerdemain is the rock-solid reality of
what is called "materials history". In Canada: A People's History, the
native war paint was made from coloured clay and the chiefs' armour from
plaited reeds, exactly as they would have been centuries ago. "The reed
armour looks bizarre," says Peter Twist, "but it worked against arrows."
Twist, an engineer by training, became a builder of museum displays and
Parks Canada installations out of a passion for history. Asked by CBC to
help out on one episode of A People's History, he soon became a fixture. He
was the one who found out what caps and badges were worn by the Midland
battalion which fought Louis Riel, and that the French cannoneers on the
Plains of Abraham wore red coats. He fully expected to see them stuck in
blue coats, like the French infantry, in order to avoid confusion with the
red coats of the British, "but to my amazement the CBC was absolutely
rigorous about historical accuracy." This contrasts with U.S. films he's
worked on where the "historic sensitivity is laughable."
In Ontario-based episodes, Twist also advised on native history, which
sometimes caused friction with natives certain they knew their culture
better than he did. "But a lot of natives' impressions of their culture
have been corrupted by Buffalo Bill shows and so on," says Twist. "So I'd
have to say 'No, you [your ancestors] didn't dress like that, they dressed
like this.' "
He emphasizes that most natives who participated "built up trust in us;
they liked what was happening."
In the Quebec shoots, native adviser Marco Bacon, a Montagnais from Lac
Saint-Jean, was in charge of historic accuracy. Not surprisingly, he sees
the issue differently. White advisers, he says, find it hard to accept
"when we try to validate things through oral tradition. And it's true that
many of our rituals were condemned and people were afraid to practise them.
But they remembered them and told their children. That's why a native can
disagree with a historian. The historian presumes, but the native can feel
in his bones whether something is right or not."
Bacon worked for many years as a film actor, playing native roles that were
"more folklore than authentic. I found if I was going to argue with a
director, I needed authoritative facts to change his manner of seeing
things." He became a self-taught researcher, and willingly used any
European documents he could find. Today he laments the paucity of
documentation of his own people, the Montagnais. "They weren't taken back
to Europe like the Iroquois."
Bacon and Twist both agree that there were dark spots where no information
exists, and here it was necessary to guess. "You try not to overdo it, or
imagine too much," says Bacon.
"We'd take a best guess," says Twist. "A film isn't like a book, you can't
leave a black box. When guessing, we'd go with the mundane."
And both agree that the world hasn't necessarily caught up with what the
CBC was trying to do. Some U.S. reviewers, says Twist, "were horrified by
our sympathetic treatment of the natives. They didn't like it that we
quoted, say, an American who survived a native massacre of his shipmates
and wrote that Americans like him had it coming to them. One of the things
I liked about this series was that we could not change a word or sentence
of an original document."
>>David ========>
--
David Migicovsky, Evil Overlord of ACF
d m i g i c o v at n e w s c e n e dot c o m
http://www.topica.com/lists/A_C_F.
Proud Moments:
It was to anoy one person, and not through the ng. The fact that it
annoyed so many was just a bonus