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Mill Film Spices Up
'Chocolat'
By Bjorn
Thoresen
January 26, 2001 06:01 PM PST
Caught in the icy grip of
winter, frozen by the stifling monotony of "tradition," the inhabitants of
the provincial French town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes find themselves
liberated by the arrival of a mysterious stranger who sets up a chocolate
shop opposite the village church just in time for Lent. Vianne Rocher
(Juliette Binoche) and her daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol) hope to make
a fresh start in the town, but find an immediate adversary in the Comte de
Reynaud (Alfred Molina), who is offended by their challenge to his
authority. While Reynaud tries every measure in his power to shut down the
chocolaterie, the town's citizens succumb one by one to the sensuous
temptations on display, finding their passions rekindled by the delightful
catalyst of Vianne's confections.
Adapted from a novel by Joanne
Harris, Lasse Hallström's "Chocolat"
is a celebration of sensual pleasures -- the frisson of a sip of hot
chocolate spiced with chili powder, the decadence of an elaborate banquet
sauced in chocolate -- that uses the atmosphere of a fairy tale to address
issues of prejudice and intolerance. The film's visual style -- hazy,
diffused -- and color palette -- soft, pastel -- are key to establishing a
sense of a heightened, almost magical state that is nonetheless firmly
grounded in the rituals of everyday life. Likewise, the film makes use of
a number of transparent digital effects, created by Mill Film, to enhance reality
with a little bit of magic.
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"Town Before" | In all,
Mill Film supplied "Chocolat" with nearly 60 effects shots ranging from
simple fades and dissolves to sky replacements and season changes, and
also produced the opening and closing credits for the film. Mill Film used
a Quantel Domino Complete
scanner and workstation for its compositing work on "Chocolat," with 3ds
max used for 3D animation and SceneGenie for 3D
tracking; some additional paint work was done in Matador
and additional compositing in Media
Illusion. According to digital manager Dan Pettipher, the film's
opening sequences required the most complex work. "The initial and the
main thing they were after was the opening shot," Pettipher said. "More
shots followed, but that shot was their initial focus." "Chocolat" was
filmed on location in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, France during the first half
of May, with additional exteriors shot in the West Country of England in
late May and early June, and interiors filmed at Shepperton Studios in
London from mid-June to mid-July. While the lush greens of the spring
Flavigny countryside were appropriate to the film's second half, digital
enhancement was required to create a suitably desolate winter landscape
for the film's first shot, an aerial view that sweeps down from the
clouds, moves across the valleys surrounding Flavigny and closes in on the
town's central square.
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"Town After" | Mill Film
began by stabilizing the aerial shot, then applied color correction to
strip the landscape of its color and painted a dusting of snow over the
fields. "We first had to smooth out and stabilize the shot," Pettipher
said. "It was a helicopter shot, so obviously it wasn't perfectly steady.
We then color corrected the landscape so it would have a cool, wintry
feel. We were lucky that the weather was semi-overcast when they shot the
footage -- there were no strong areas of shadow, which made it easier to
create a gray, early-morning feel. We also tracked in individual patches
of snow on the trees in the foreground and the road. We didn't have to
create any falling snow for that shot, although we did for the shots that
followed."
Pettipher noted that the complex camera movement in the
opening shot made it more challenging to track. "The opening shot was
difficult to track because it was moving in all directions," Pettipher
said. "It wasn't a simple crane -- it cranes up and sort of slowly moves
forward, so there were a few parallax issues we had to lock down, and we
were slightly limited as far as how much snow we could add. Luckily, the
production team didn't want the 'blanket of snow' look, because that would
have meant tracking in between individual roofs and houses and buildings.
Once we stabilized the shot, that helped simplify the move, but there was
a lot of tracking involved to get all the little bits working together.
The Domino has a good tracker on it, though, so we were able to achieve
that effect."
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"River Bank Before" | Mill
Film also applied titles, designed by Nina Saxon at New Wave
Entertainment, to the first shot of the film, which opens with a white
backdrop of clouds through which the camera moves to look down on the
town. "There were about 1,000 frames worth of clouds that dissolved into
the main shot, which was another 900 frames, followed by an interior
sequence in the town church. The interior sequences also had title cards,
however -- there were about 30 cards in the whole sequence, which was
4,000 frames total. The longest section was the transition from the clouds
to the main shot, which was a seamless shot lasting nearly 2,000 frames.
The file sizes for the sequence were fairly large, given that each frame
was 18 MB. The Domino's resolution is 3K by 2K and the files are stored on
D16, which is very fast. The reason we kept everything on Domino was
because we needed to quickly and easily archive these long shots."
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"River Bank After" | The
river that girds Lansquenet-sous-Tannes plays an important part in the
storyline of "Chocolat," serving as the route of entry for several
important characters -- Vianne, and a community of riverboat travelers
including Roux (Johnny Depp) -- and also as the site of significant action
-- the developing romance between Vianne and Roux and the fiery
destruction of the travelers' boats. However, unlike
Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the real-life town of Flavigny is not surrounded
by a river, so an additional facet of Mill Film's work on the opening shot
was the creation of a river to match the one seen later in the film. "We
had to create a CG river and track that into the plate as well," Pettipher
said. "When you see the difference between the original footage and what
we ended up with, it's a fairly radical change."
The river was
created by Mill Film artist Evan Davies. Mill Film sent drafts back and
forth to Hallström and the film's editing team to get approval on the
final look of the river. "We went through early mock-up stages -- we would
paint something really rough and then e-mail it to the editor and the
director for them to look at it," Pettipher said. "They would either
e-mail us back or give us direction over the phone. They wanted a nice,
wide, flowing river. It wasn't supposed to be frozen -- we had to put some
movement in to show that it was flowing. We went through a couple of
versions to lock down the position of the river and its size in the frame,
and then it was just up to us to lock it and track it to the moving plate.
The river was the main geographical change we made to the opening shot,
other than removing the odd tree or two for aesthetic reasons. We were
mainly adding to the shot rather than removing things."
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