Dr. Jekyll’s Eye

“Jekyll” is a 2007 BBC series starring James Nesbitt and Michelle Ryan, which updates the well known tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by adding modern technology and a conspiracy theory. The DVD authouring was handled by London company ‘Cheerful Scout’ who gave me the job of designing the DVD menus. The main menu of the DVD features a close-up of Hyde’s eye which was created in After Effects – and this post will demonstrate how it was done.

One thing I liked about the series was the low-key approach to visual effects. It must have been tempting for the Director to utilise a full arsenal of CGI technicians to depict the transformation between Jekyll and Hyde, but instead it was done in a much more refined manner – a simple close-up of the main character’s eye. The ‘Jekyll’ character – renamed ‘Dr. Jackman’ for the series – has perfectly normal, clear green eyes. The ‘Hyde’ character’s eye is brown and murky with disturbing bloodshot discolourations around the pupil. When the character transforms in the series we cut to a quick close-up of the eye as it opens and we can tell by the colouring what has just happened.

I decided that a suitable loop for the main menu would be a close-up of the eye as it blinks and transforms between the two different states. A selection of video clips from the show, along with the text for menu options, would appear as reflections in the eye.

Although I thought this was a fine concept I had to overcome several problems. If you watch the series you will never actually see the eye blink and transform as it does in the DVD menu. The show only ever features one eye at a time – and fairly quickly too. So I had two clips of an eye opening, one for Jekyll and one for Hyde, but they were separate shots and were never used together in the series. Each shot was less than a second long – about 20 frames – but using the main theme music as the sound bed for the menu meant I had to stretch these shots out for 40 seconds.

The next thing I realised was that the two eye shots didn’t line up. When the shots are edited next to each other the two eye’s position, size, shape and even skin tones are different. Because the series never showed the eye blink and transform from one to the other they didn’t have to line up perfectly, and if you consider how they would have been filmed (possibly even on different days with different actors) then you can’t really expect them to.

I wanted the menu options to be reflected in the eye but because of the way that DVDs work the text can’t move around. This meant I would need to adjust the size and position of the two eye shots so they matched – that way when the eyes blink and transform from one to the other the DVD menu text can stay in the same position.

Although we never saw the eye during the actual transformation in the series, I was clear on the type of effect I was after. I wanted the murky, discoloured patches of the eye to swirl around and flood into the white areas. In order to create this animation in a way that I could align it with the existing footage of the clear green eye, I would have to re-create the entire eye as a graphic element.

I started by building the swirly effect for the discoloured eye. Any time I’m trying to create an organic pattern or texture I think of fractal noise. I was confident that by using fractal noise, and other plug-ins that use the same underlying principles as fractal noise, I could create a realistic and effective eyeball entirely within After Effects.

The first step was to create a swirling matte which I would use to create an organic and flowing border for my fractal noise texture.

This was done with nothing more than a simple ramp, followed by the turbulent displace effect. The turbulent displace effect was set to loop seamlessly.

Then I created a strip of fractal noise, also set to loop seamlessly, using this turbulent ramp as the matte.

In order to wrap this texture into a circle I would be using the Polar Coordinates filter, but the source layer needs to be a square in order for the result to be circular. So the animating strip of fractal texture is dropped into a large square composition.

The fractal strip is used twice, with a copy of the layer flipped upside down so we get a swirling border on both sides. I also used the offset filter and the CC wire-removal plug-in to make the texture tileable, so there is no visible seam. You can find more information on this technique over at the Creative Cow.

At this stage I’m working with a really big composition because I know that wrapping the layer into a circle will shrink it quite a bit and also crunch out a lot of the fine detail. My initial fractal strips were 3000 pixels wide, so this square precomposition is 3000 pixels square. Even though I was doing this at the start of 2007 I was using an old G4 Mac with AE v6.5 and the render times were pretty long!

Now that I had my texture set up in a square composition I could use the Polar Coordinates filter to wrap the texture into a circle. By animating the position of the fractal strip within the square composition I could make the texture move closer or further away from the centre. This way I could make the texture look as though it was swirling into the eyeball from nowhere, or out of nothing. Again- the Creative Cow article gives more details on this technique.

This circular texture will be used as the murky and discoloured elements of Hyde’s eye. I had already set up the fractal noise to loop seamlessly and next I rendered out 3 different versions using different random seeds for the fractal plug-ins, so I would have some variations and flexibility at the compositing stage.

So onto the next bit…

I said earlier that any time I think of organic textures, I think of fractal noise. So in order to create the appearance of loads of tiny blood vessels and capillaries on the eyeball I immediately thought of lightning. There are two lightning effects in AE, both of which use the principles of fractal noise (Perlin Noise) to generate effects which look like lightning. And lightning – being organic and fractal – looks a lot like blood capillaries, which are also organic and fractal.

Fair enough- if you apply the Advanced Lightning effect to a black solid you do get something that looks a lot more like lightning than an eyeball, but the trick is to keep at it. It made sense to me.

Once I found the basic parameters which I thought worked well, I duplicated the effect and moved the position parameters around. Eventually I had 18 copies of the Advanced Lightning effect on one layer, radiating out from the centre of the solid – which is where the pupil will be. Then I duplicated the solid and flipped it, to double the total number of veins.

Having looked closely at a few eyes for reference (I recommend Google because people think you’re a bit weird if you stare into their eyes) I saw that I needed a mixture of dark blue and red blood veins, so once I had finished creating the blue composition I started again but changed the colour of the effect to red.

The actual eyeball would simply be created by using the CC Sphere effect which expects layers to have a ratio a 2:1. So these two blood vessel compositions (red and blue) were created at a resolution of 3000×1500, to give me flexibility and spare resolution later on. These veins don’t animate.

Now that I had created my manky fractal texture and my red and blue blood vessels, the next step was to create the basic eyeball itself. Fractal noise was again used, along with CC toner, to create a gently mottled yellow texture that would form the base layer of the eye. Again this composition was created with a 2:1 ratio for the CC Sphere effect. The colours for the CC toner effect were just eye-droppered from the video footage of the eyes from the show.

The next thing I realised by looking closely at real-life eyes is that they’re not perfectly smooth like glass marbles- they have a watery texture that varies in thickness. So I once again used fractal noise to create a separate texture to use as a bump-map for the eye, to try and make it look less flat and fake.

Once I had the basic parameters set up for the CC Sphere plug-in I copied and pasted the effect to the other layers which would also use the CC Sphere effect – the red and blue blood vessels and the fractal texture I was using as a bump-map. All of these compositions had been created at the same size (3000×1500) so the CC Sphere effect could be cut and pasted. The manky circular texture was tinted and layered on top as well.

Building up the finished eye was a process of adding the layers, duplicating them if necessary, and then adjusting transfer-modes and colours to taste. I had my basic eyeball texture – the yellow/white base colour – and over that I had my red blood veins, my blue blood veins, and the three different variations of turbulent fractal noise that I began with, which were tinted various shades of red, brown and yellow. At the top I had an adjustment layer with the CC Glass effect, using the fractal bump-map texture as the source to create an impression of depth.

To help the textures blend into the pupil I masked out two brown solids with a raggard circle and experimented with feathers and transfer modes- these layers were flat and didn’t use the CC Sphere effect.

Although I was happy with the progress I was making at this stage I realised that I wouldn’t be able to generate a completely realistic pupil using only fractal noise. Fractal noise is great but it has limits… so I grabbed the company’s digital SLR and took a quick macro-photograph of the closest person’s eye. I imported the photo of the eye, roughly masked out the iris, and just used the extract filter to get the iris texture on a transparent background. I positioned the iris in a 2:1 composition so the CC Sphere effect could be applied and the iris would be in the correct position for the composite. I also added a rectangular specular reflection which adds depth and realism.

Now that I had all my bits together it was just a matter of tweaking colours and transfer modes to get the desired effect. I ended up with this:

At this stage the fractal noise textures animate but in a slow and linear fashion. Using time-remapping and some keyframe-easing the circular fractal texture was adjusted to make it look like it was flooding into the eye.  I also adjusted the lighting and used a masked-solid to vignette the outer parts of the eyeball.

A sequence of shots from the series was edited together, imported and positioned in a 2:1 composition for the CC Sphere effect.

The video footage was scaled, masked and feathered and then composited onto the eye to give the impression of a specular reflection.

The next step was to look at the two source clips I had of the eyes opening. These were both stabilised using AE’s motion tracker and time-remapped to stretch out the shots to several seconds long each- the original clips were less than 25 frames duration. Because the source footage only showed the eyes opening it was  necessary to use time-remapping to ‘ping-pong’ each shot so that it looked like the eye was opening and then closing again. Because the clips were stretched out so much they were de-grained using the ‘remove grain’ filter to stop the slow down being so obvious. Then the eyeball in the Hyde shot was masked out and the two shots were aligned, scaled and sequenced so they ‘blinked’ in a loop for the same duration as the theme music.

The animating eyeball could now be composited underneath, with levels adjustments and some shadows to help the overall effect.

The DVD menu options were created and given the flickering glow look used in the opening title sequence. Although they needed to be mostly flat and legible a small amount of curvature was applied by using the optics compensation effect.

As the video footage had been de-grained and stabilised, the last step was to add a small amount of camera movement and to re-apply grain to the overall sequence. The menu was then rendered out and delivered to the DVD authours.

Here is a section of the finished menu:

When one of my co-workers described the end result as ‘mingin’ I took it as a compliment…