by Norman Hollyn

Tim Squyres

In Hulk, Eric Bana plays Bruce Banner, a scientist who, after his experiment goes wrong, mutates into a creature with super-strength when he gets angry. In the scene that Tim and I screened, Banner is imprisoned in a water tank where he is mutating into the Hulk, while government scientist Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas) tries to extract genetic material from him. General Thaddeus Ross (Sam Elliott), though also part of the military that is holding Banner, is opposed to the tactics that Talbot is using.

The sequence is one of many in the film that use a number of picture-in-picture effects to tell the story. Small frames slide in or pop-up against the larger frame, sometimes the screen is split into three or four different sized images, special effects break the boundaries of the frame and spill over into neighboring frames —the film is a m élange of many different styles of special effects.

Norman Hollyn: How much were these effects scripted?

Tim Squyres: None of it was in the script. The only CG that was in script was Hulk. About 6 months before production, Ang gave me a call and said he had been thinking about doing some of the film with split screens to try and capture the feel of a comic book. We actually took some footage from our film Ride With The Devil and did tests.

What things did you play around with in that prep period?

Lots of rotoscoping things out of their backgrounds, weird ways of combining several images onscreen at the same time. We discovered pretty early on that split screens didn’t work very well in dialogue scenes, especially if the scene had emotional content. You’re watching the split screens and not the movie.

What about the 3D process creating the Hulk? Was that thoroughly planned out?

Well, less than you would think. A lot of the sequences were storyboarded, but Ang never really pays attention to storyboards. The visual style of his films usually develops on set.

At what point did you begin to incorporate some of these stylistic devices?

From the day I got the footage. I originally thought that I would keep two versions of the film — one with all the split screens and one without. Very quickly I realized that this was impractical because the split screens aren’t just a gimmick, they ’re actually a part of the storytelling.

You and Ang seem to work very much with characterization. Was this film different because of the special effects nature of it?

We ended up finding that there were really two stages in the process of creating the Hulk. The first is when we animate him, which is really about directing the performance. There are some individual shots where it took us 17 weeks just to get that part right. Then it has to go to the technical directors who do the compositing, and add the lighting and shading, the dust and the smoke and all of that kind of thing.

What did you cut with, then?

ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) provided me with a rotating 3D model of the Hulk that they had shot from a few different angles against a blue background. As I assembled the shots, I was able to key this into the plates on the Avid and move it around on screen to get the blocking right.

Did you have to develop new tools to work with mockups like that in your head — to determine pacing and character?

Oh yeah. One of the big things to consider is that when you’re temping out the shots with basically a stick figure of Hulk, there are all kinds of nuances of his performance that you’re not seeing yet. Once we started putting the animated Hulk into the shots, Ang wanted more nuances of character, and many of the shots turned out to be too short. I think that what makes an action scene work is continuing the audience’s investment in the characters who are involved in that action. On Crouching Tiger, it’s one thing watching two people run around and fight. But if you can get moments of emotional connection within those fights, it makes it all mean something. To try to get that out of Hulk is an extra complication because as I’m assembling the scene, of course, it’s not there. You have to imagine and hope.

[The opening shots in this sequence show Banner being forced to go through a series of traumatic childhood memories. These cause him to transform into the Hulk as Talbot watches.]

Now you introduce some of the first picture-in-picture shots in the scene?

This is a really straightforward case where we want to be seeing two things at once. On a normal film you’re forced to do a lot of fast cutting because there are too many things you want to see happening simultaneously. We could avoid that by showing several images at once. You can also use this device to put together images that aren’t terribly compelling and create a more interesting image.

I notice that sometimes you cut shots together within the insert and sometimes you have them as single shots.

I wish I could tell you that I have some manifesto about what the proper way to edit split screens is, but I don’t. It’s really a sequence-by-sequence, shot-by-shot decision about what stylistic choice would look good. Here I decided to do a split, then I thought, “Where am I going to put the boxes?” The shots of Banner are too tight to keep full frame while the others play on top — they’d obscure his face. So I had to slide him over left, which means I’ve got some open space on the right. Then I cropped his sides to make it fit better. Then I had the smaller box slide up in the frame. It’s partly just to give a little more visual interest and also to try to do something with that negative space, rather than just park this box there.

Would you play around with different size boxes and the like?

Yes, and the border size and color. The border around this inset is the same blue as the color of his mask so that they just blend in. Border width and colors are something we played with a lot .

[We see a wide shot of Banner changing into Hulk as hethrashes in the water tank.]

This is a big important hero moment and you don’t want to dilute it. You wouldn ’t want to play it on a split screen.

I was on set on the day they shot this and a visitor to the set asked me, “Why is he in a water tank?” And I said because if he breaks out of a water tank and water goes everywhere, it looks cool. That’s what people come for — to see something cool. Now we have a split screen in which the water that spills out actually goes across the frame borders and into another shot. This is an effect that we mocked up using Avid’s Picture-in-Picture function, but it wasn’t until ILM got to it that we saw its full effect.

[As Hulk bursts out of the tank, he stamps his feet and looks around menacingly.]

After he looks around he has a big sneeze. It’s a pure character moment and it’s also the moment that we remind the audience that they can have fun now. There were some versions of this animation where he got really goofy, so we asked them to back off a little bit.

[Hulk’s foot smashes the glass into the hallway.]

They broke the glass on set and then they had to digitally remove the wires and a lot of debris on the ground. One problem that came up was that debris fell right where he had to walk. So sometimes they painted it out and sometimes they covered it with smoke. Also, in this case I decided to put an insert box moving along the bottom, which helped to cover up some foot animation problems.

I put it there first. Then the animators asked me to make sure not to get rid of it! We need to hear Talbot say his lines here — they’re important to the storytelling. We also have a fairly languid Hulk shot, but we’re able to keep the energy up by having Talbot screaming and by moving the insert across the screen.

[The insert box stops on the lower left part of the screen and grows, taking over the screen. Immediately it then slides over and becomes the image in the right-hand part of a split screen.]

Since this split screen move reveals General Ross, it’s a way of saying, “Okay, now we’re going somewhere else.” Then we had to make some choices. Do we want Talbot’s box to reveal Ross or do we want Ross’ box to push in? Who overlaps whom? So now, the operator here says, “Sir,” to get Ross’ attention. As he whips around, Talbot’s box goes off and we ’re seeing the General’s scene.

[A technician pushes some buttons to put what she had been viewing on her video monitor onto the room’s big screen. At the same time, a picture-in-picture insert box containing a shot looking over the General’s shoulder whips in behind the main shot of the General.]

Now we’re looking at the General from two different angles at the same time.

In this case, the point is to avoid breaking this main shot up — we can see his reaction and his point of view all in one. Fortunately, this is the kind of movie where I can get away with that.

It comes in pretty fast. How did you determine the speed at which these effects came and went on screen?

The speed at which you bring new frames in seems to be the equivalent of the editing pacing you’d have if you were putting shots one right after the other. It’s no different in that way from linear storytelling.

[Trapped in a hallway, the Hulk is sprayed with a thick restraining foam.]

Early on in the process we were a little worried about how understandable and believable this foam would be, so it seemed like a good idea to give the audience something else to watch at the same time. Here’s another case where we had the foam overlap into another frame, right over the General. The first foam spurt goes behind him. And then the second one goes in front of him, just for fun. That idea came from Mark Casey, the ILM artist supervising these composites.

[Talbot turns a corner and approaches the Hulk, who is all tangled up in the restraining foam.]

Talbot walked too slowly and Ang wanted to get him over to the Hulk faster. We had to speed him up in just one part of the walk.

It looks like a weird sort of varispeed.

It’s not just a varispeed. At first I did that and it looked pretty stupid. So I had to choose each individual frame that I was going to use and the frames to skip.

[Talbot shoots at the Hulk and we watch as the bullet bounces off of him and lands in the wall behind Talbot, which causes an explosion that kills Talbot.]

This is one of the few things we mocked up in Adobe After Effects. We had to get rid of Talbot but there was no way to say that this character dies without doing something really ugly. So what we decided to do is turn this into a graphic design. We freeze his last moment and then we pull away from the whole frame.

There are several other moments in the film where we transition between scenes by panning across them as if we’re looking from one panel on a comic book page to another. In this case, we wanted to up the ante a little bit and so we had Talbot’s frozen image engulfed by a moving fireball. Then we pulled out and revealed this comic book page of important moments we’ve recently seen. All are still frames except for the one moving frame that becomes the frame of the split screen that we ’re going into

Right, and this next area is another example of that. It’s a montage showing the base being locked down, which has no real emotional content. So we thought that it might as well be a big split screen extravaganza. Gary Levy, our effects editor, did this one.

What’s great about being in split screens is that the moment when you go back to normal photography can become more powerful. And you choose to do that at a moment where something big is going on.

[As the troops move to secure the base they fire at the Hulk.]

We wanted to imply that this action goes on for a while, so we spilt the screen. We can see the General from three different angles that are not in sync with each other.

The 1.85 screen ratio is very restricting and forces you into certain configurations, especially with footage that wasn’t shot with split screen in mind. In this instance we had a big close up of Ross that played well vertically, which led us to this three-screen setup. Now, here again we have a three-frame composite, only this time the dominant shot is a horizontal composition. We tried having the muzzle flashes overlap the frame borders, the way we did with the restraining foam, but it looked distracting and gimmicky. The line between cool and gimmicky is a very fine one. Different people are going to have different opinions about which side of that line we’re on in some of these shots.

In this split, I notice that there are cuts within several of the frames.

There’s a simultaneous cut right there in the two lower panels. In one case, later on in the film, we have four panels, and two of them are cutting simultaneously and the other two are cutting independently. I don ’t know why, but I think it looks good.

[Hulk, in a full screen shot, picks up a huge metal cover and prepares to toss it through the observation windows into the control room.]

Originally Hulk had a bunch of action here that we took out for pacing and budgetary reasons. So we took some of that and put it on the control room’s video monitors. We’ve been watching the General looking at the monitors and his POV. And he senses what’s going to happen, he yells, and everyone responds. Because we’re still in split screen we don ’t have to cut back and forth.

I used split screens from my first cut of this sequence. With-out them, I would have had to cut these shots much shorter. A lot of the material is pretty impressive and plays well long, so it’s nice to have the luxury of doing an action sequence where you let shots play long.

[Finally, the Hulk bursts out to the exterior of the desert base, jumping through the back of a drive-in movie screen.]

You’ve overlapped the action here.

Yes, he actually bursts through the movie screen twice. But the second time he does it, he’s also bursting through the first shot — the one with him already in it. We mocked this up in After Effects because it’s a difficult concept to understand. I kept saying, “It’s as if he breaks through the movie screen. ”

Doing all of this effects compositing must have added endless amounts of time to your editing process.

Imagine that you have a section where the elements are moving around and you want to tighten it up a little bit. Normally, you could do that in ten minutes. But you can’t do that with these effects because the Avid changes the position of the keyframes you use to create those effects. It becomes a real chore to even just switch a take. And these picture-in-picture effects were among the simpler Avid effects that we used in the film. Of course, these kinds of stylistic things in most movies would be appalling. But our hope on this film is that we’ve created a context in which these things are not only acceptable,

Tim Squyres and Director Ang Lee working on The Wedding Banquet in New York in 1992.

but fun, and actually help advance the storytelling. In every film I’ve done — whether it’s a small character study or big action film — you try to tell the story in the most effective way possible. I’m still using the same thought processes that I ’ve used in my other films — it’s just that in Hulk, because of the stylistic choices we’ve made, I’m able to use a broader set of tools and devices to make them effective. I know the Avid effects palette better than I ever did, but nothing has changed about what ’s important to us — the storytelling and the characters who inhabit that story. That was the key to making this movie, like any movie, really work.