postPerspective Update

Oscar-Nominated VFX Supervisor:
All Quiet on the Western Front

By Iain Blair

It’s been over 90 years since the classic anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front was published. When the book was adapted for the big screen in 1930, it won the Oscar for Best Picture. Now, the new German film of the same name, directed by Edward Berger and streaming on Netflix, has been nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Visual Effects.

I spoke with VFX supervisor Frank Petzold, a Tippett Studios alumnus (The Legend of Tarzan, The Ring, Armageddon, The Golden Compass), about the challenges of creating the visual effects. The VFX team was also recently celebrated at the European Film Awards — Petzold, UPP visual effects supervisor Viktor Muller and Cine Chromatix visual effects supervisor Markus Frank were recognized.

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What were the big challenges of creating the visual effects for this?
I’d worked with Edward Berger before, so I sort of knew how he wanted to approach the visual effects and the technology. But for me, the biggest challenge was taking on this iconic book and the responsibility of doing it right. It wasn’t like any other war movie, where every department does their thing and then you make the VFX louder, brighter and bigger. With this film, every department understood immediately that we had to tell the story in the most authentic way possible, and it had to be absolutely photoreal.

How did that work?
We shot at this airport outside Prague in winter. The set was so huge that we were able to set up an outdoor greenscreen stage and set off real explosions — all the effects guys were at the end of a runway while they were shooting dialogue. That was a huge help. We were able to create hours of explosions and then drop them in as needed later.

With a war movie like this, you typically need a deep background of running soldiers, so you usually create CG doubles. But I had the outdoor greenscreen stage, so I used a couple of customized treadmills that were painted green, and when the stunt guys weren’t working, I’d get them to come over. We had six Red cameras set up at different speeds, and we’d shoot running soldiers — some charging and some throwing themselves off the treadmills as if they’d been hit. That gave us another big database of elements we could insert into the shots, mostly in the battle scenes.