Back in 2012 I was Compositing-Sequence-Lead on the "Total Recall" remake at Prime Focus World in London.
We where working on several sequences, but I was mainly involved in the sequence when the trans-earth elevator passes through the core of the earth and the zero-gravity sequences starts. We where responsible for all the interior shots up until to the point when the main characters escape from the police. This included creating the Synths (Police Robots), floating bullet-shells + other random objects, set extensions, bullet-holes, wire removals, and many many other things.
Here I found a video that shows you the zero-gravity sequence on Total Recall:
It was a great project and we had a great team back then and I think the work we have done was pretty good.
We had different tasks on this show, and every task had certain problems that needed to be solved, and we needed to be fast because there was not much time left.
One of those problems was, that we needed to create a floating pony tail for Melina (played by Jessica Biel) during the zero-gravity sequence. We had to choose if we would go full CGI for the pony tail or if we would try to shoot some live-action elements. We decided to shoot elements because it would save us R&D time and they would just look real out of the box.
Since this was the sequence I was working on, I had the pleasure to go on set with our VFX aupervisor Aleksandar Pejic to shoot some pony tails. So how do you shoot zero gravity hair?
Well, you pin it to a stick and move it around in a big water tank! And that is exactly what we did at Shepperton Studios - Pinewood in London.
We had 2 studio operators helping us. One operating the RED camera, and the other one was trying to follow our instructions on how to move the hair in the water. We loaded all the shots that would need a pony tail onto my iPad, and based on that we where planning out the movement of the hair for every single shot. We had to come up with a few variations for each shot just to make sure that we would have enough material to work with. Also we had 2 variations of the hair. One where the pony tail was fixed onto a stick, and one where the hair was fixed onto a sphere that was attached to a stick. The idea was that the sphere would mimic the head volume, so when we would move the hair back and forth quickly it would move and interact along the shape of the sphere.
We where also shooting at 48-frames per second, to make the hair look even more floaty and light.
The water tank was evenly lit, and had a green screen behind it so that we could extract the hair from the footage.
We also had an external monitor so that we could judge if the current take was usable or not.
It was pretty interesting for me too see how the work and atmosphere on set is different from my usual office work-environment. It was pretty fun and I would not mind to go more often on set. We where sharing the elements shoot with Double Negative (who was the main VFX-House on Total Recall) who was also shooting water/rain/bullet hits and some other elements that where needed for the movie.
If I remember correctly I was a total of 2-3 days on set to get all the takes we needed. After we where done with our elements shoots I spend 2 days to look through the whole material and trim it down to the main parts we would need. In the end in 90% of the shots we used the green-scree elements we created, about 8% was a mix between CG hair + green screen elements and the rest was full CGI.
Here some shots I did while working on this sequence:
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