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Q&A with Les Misérables’ Compositing Supervisor Greg Spencer

Monday, January 14, 2013

Whether you have already seen it or are yet to enjoy the eight times Academy Award nominated musical marvel of Les Misérables, you can't have avoided hearing the effect the film is having on everyone who steps through the cinema doors, mostly involving tears. Lots of tears! I caught up with Mill Film's Greg Spencer who was the Compositing Supervisor, on his involvement in the film including ghost effects, style frames and creating such impactful skies that they became another character in the film.

When did you start working on Les Misérables?
We did some previsualisation down in Pinewood at the start of shooting in February, this then led onto us being involved with the VFX which we started in May.

Can you talk me through Mill Film's role?
There was a lot of 2D work on Les Misérables. Seeing as most of the revolution scenes were shot on a set down at Pinewood, our job was to add in extra buildings in the background and various skies for different times of day. The director told us at the start that the skies were to be like another character in the film, so we did various style frames until the director settled on something he liked and then went from there.

There were a few occasions where we had to do some crowd replacements or pad out crowd scenes as well. We had our own little shoot for that out at a studio, so if you look carefully in the film you can probably spot a few compositors. You can tell who they are because they look like they have had no sleep!

We also did the "ghost effect" for Anne Hathaway's character, and removed plenty of ear pieces, which the actors were wearing so they could hear a piano to sing along to.

And your specific involvement?
I was the Compositing Supervisor on Les Misérables. This involved dealing with all the 2D artists, as well as communicating with our VFX Supervisor, Sara Bennett. We would also run internal "dailies" sessions every day in which myself and Sara would look at all the shots together and talk about what we thought would make them better before giving feedback to artists.

How did you approach the project?
Well, we needed to get a solid idea of what each sky looked like before we started. We knew there would be a lot of roto involved so while that was getting done, myself and the VFX Supervisor began taking single frames from what we considered "hero" shots and began throwing as many skies into them as possible. That way we could see what did and didn't work. It was a quick way of getting a strong visual idea of how things would look. When we had narrowed it down to two or three skies, we chose a few key shots from each of the scenes and did rough versions to see if they would work on the move. We also did a couple of matte paintings of the city.

What were the challenges involved?
The whole thing was shot with multiple cameras running at once and usually songs would be done in one long take, so there was very little time for them to put up green screens. This meant a lot of roto, which was especially difficult with hair running across in front of set lights etc. and we had to clean up a lot of light flares from the set.

Also, as the set only went back about two or three buildings deep, there was a lot of work involved in adding buildings back in behind the set. We had our 3D team make up geo of buildings and placed them in. We had a LIDAR scan of the set, and we would look at that in 3D to see the position of the buildings within the location, just to make sure we were placing the right buildings in the same places each time. Sometimes it was quite hard to tell which way the camera was facing because of the loose style of a lot of the shots. With the matte paintings, the director wanted to make sure they matched up exactly with the live action. In one case this meant we actually took his live action plate of the barricade and made it fit into our matte painting. It took some pretty creative comp'ing but having it in there made it look so much better in the end.

There were also quite a few errant cameramen that needed to be removed! Most of it was also shot in a very handheld style which meant a load of tracking to get skies to sit right.

Did you use any new techniques or technologies?
Most of the techniques we used were pretty tried and tested ones actually. Although, I haven't really seen compers all sitting around with LIDAR data open trying to work out positions of building geo before.

What was your favourite moment whilst working on Les Misérables?
Probably meeting some new and very talented compositors on the job. We ended up spending a fair amount of time together in the end!

Have you ever seen it at the West End?
Unfortunately I have not, but I have always been meaning to!

(All Images c/o Mill Film/Universal Pictures.)