Digital tricks help breathe new life into art of the death-defying stunt

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/17/digital-effects-advances-mean-stunt-performers

Version 0 of 1.

When Ólafur Darri Ólafsson conquers his terror of heights and steps off the roof of a seven-storey building in an apparently suicidal leap into the void, cinema audiences could be forgiven for thinking the chilling sequence was filmed deploying the latest in computer-generated characters. They would be wrong.

The scene with the award-winning Icelandic-American actor, which features in A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson, was made possible because he was attached to a crane, harness and rigging, all of which were then erased from the footage.

The equipment had been repeatedly tested, first with heavy bags. Even so, few of us would be likely to attempt it ourselves.

Stunt performers are increasingly working with the industry’s visual effects wizards now that more spectacular actions can be performed with safety equipment that can later be blotted out for the audience.

Ólafsson’s stunt was organised by Mark Vanselow, a leading stuntman and coordinator, who has worked on 16 films with Neeson, the Oscar-nominated star of Schindler’s List, as well as on Hollywood blockbusters such as Pirates of the Caribbean.

Vanselow said that it is now possible to stage stunts that were previously regarded as impossible, and actors can increasingly perform their own stunts, which makes the action seem more realistic.

Only a few years ago, he said, stunt specialists had grimly resigned themselves “to start looking for another job” because they feared that computer effects were becoming so sophisticated. They could not have been more wrong: “It actually helps us,” said Vanselow. “The computer is breathing new life into the profession.”

Ólafsson plays a cemetery groundskeeper alongside Neeson’s character, a private investigator hired by a drug-trafficker to find out who murdered his wife.

“I’m afraid of heights,” he said. “That was a challenge to overcome.” He credited Vanselow and his team with helping him to face it: “They tested it again and again. Mark was very careful to make sure I wasn’t being pushed.”

Everything went into slow motion, he remembers. Just watching that scene is “scary”. Even with the safety equipment, a passerby screamed as he jumped – and can be heard in the film.

“That’s a great example of how the special effects help us,” said Vanselow. “The audience gets to see the actual character doing the stunt – and the actor gets to go home at night. It’s not an easy thing to just jump off a building … You put a lot of trust in us.”

Vanselow began his career as a water-skier, performing “circus on water” shows worldwide. Being a stuntman means doing “things that are fun”, he said, “like hanging under a helicopter”.

In another Neeson film, Seraphim Falls, Vanselow went over a 34-metre waterfall, dropped from underneath a helicopter. “That was one of the biggest stunts I’ve done. They dropped me over the edge on a bungee rope and I disappeared into the water and popped back up.

“I was able to do it that way because they could [blot out] the line that was holding me, whereas 20 years ago I would have had to go over without a line. They may not have been able to do that stunt at all.”

It does, however, remain a dangerous profession. “About 99% of the time, you’re overpaid,” said Vanselow. “But then that 1% … There’s not enough money in the world. If you’re jumping off a building and something goes desperately wrong, you’re the person at the end of the wire.”

Tim Webber, the British visual effects specialist who won an Oscar for Gravity, the space disaster film starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, said of Vanselow: “He’s absolutely right, judging from the amount of work we do these days that involves stuntmen, and how much I work with [them to design stunts], I’ve worked closely with stuntmen a lot more, recently.”

Basing special effects on real action also makes a film more believable, he said. “Once you create computer-generated characters that can do absolutely anything, it loses any ‘wow factor’.”

Vanselow said the technology is now so sophisticated that where a stunt performer has to be used they can superimpose an actor’s face over the stunt specialist’s, allowing full close-up shots.

Andrew Lane, author of Movie Stunts & Special Effects, said: “But a performer is always needed to form the basis of visual creations in a computer.”

A Walk Among the Tombstones is released on Blu-ray and DVD on 19 January