As soon as the filmmakers began developing JUMPER, they also began thinking about the Jumping effects. Having carefully developed the rules of Jumping, they wanted the effects to reflect them with credible realism; yet, at the same time, be original enough to give audiences a fresh experience. That's why they brought in visual effects supervisor Joel Hynek, who won an Oscar for the eye-popping What Dreams May Come and was integral in developing the cutting-edge effects seen in The Matrix, and visual effects producer Kevin Elam (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) to create the visual essence of Jumping as well as the film's other visual effects shots. Stunt coordinator Simon Crane, who previously worked with Liman on Mr. and Mrs. Smith and whose additional credits include such films as X-Men: The Last Stand and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, also entered the mix, training and choreographing a whole team of stunt-doubles in the tricky art of Jumping on screen.
For Liman, part of the challenge was mixing up cutting-edge effects with his signature in-your-face, hand-held photographic realism. "I'm not interested in effects per se," notes Liman. "But with this film, I wanted to push the envelope in this arena and to try things that hadn't been done before."
This was exhilarating territory for Joel Hynek, who has a longstanding reputation for creative and technical innovation. "Just the idea of coming up with an effect we hadn't seen before but was so integral to the storytelling was very exciting to me," he says.
Hynek familiarized himself with the many different screen manifestations of teleporting seen in movies from the past, then determined that JUMPER would offer a new view. "Teleporting has almost always been seen from an objective view -- in others words, you're in a place and you suddenly see somebody arrive or depart. But we've created true POV jumps so that you get a sense of what it looks and feels like from the Jumper's perspective to move from one place to another on the other side of the earth or the other side of a wall. In other words, this time the audience gets to go along for the ride."
Hynek wanted the Jumping effect to be a dynamic, ever-changing event and never exactly the same twice. "We didn't want to see the same thing over and over throughout the movie," he explains. "So there are four things that effect how a teleporting Jump occurs: 1) the Jumper's skill level; 2) his intention -- whether he's trying to be stealthy or destructive or just having fun; 3) his emotions at the time; and 4) the overall difficulty of that particular teleportation. A Jumper who is panicked is going to create a different effect than a Jumper who is feeling calm. The more upset the Jumper is, the more big effects you'll see. This was a lot of fun to play with."
The highly variable Jumping effects do, however, have certain elements in common. "There's always a blur factor involved, which is basically a time exposed motion blur generated by the Jumper's evaporation into space. There's what we're calling a vacuum condensation flow, which is the vacuum and the rapid suction of air the Jumper leaves behind when he suddenly departs. And then there are the "Jump Scars," or which is the window, or more accurately the discontinuity in space, the Jumper creates to travel from one place to another. You would expect large forces, such as gravity, to be pretty intense at the juncture points that rupture space so objects come flying towards the scar to varying degrees, depending on the intensity of the jump."
Hynek mixed and matched all kinds of technology to create this ever-changing array of effects. "What I love about working with Doug is that he's like a student of cinema, willing to try any trick so long as it might accomplish something interesting," he explains. "The biggest challenge was in blending Doug's free-handed shooting with our wild effects without ever killing the energy and the creativity. We had to find ways to let Doug do his thing with the dynamics of the shot and solve the digital problems later."
Updating a page from his work on The Matrix, Hynek utilized multiple, variable-shutter still cameras firing in sequence to create assorted blurring and stretching effects. He also relied on complex, carefully choreographed motion-control. But, even more intriguingly, he relied on a more Old School method that was surprisingly effective. This became known simply as the "freeze and action method."
Explains Hynek: "It's a very simple method. If you want the Jumper in a scene to go away, the director says `freeze.' All the actors stop moving, the Jumper leaves the frame, the camera backs up just a little bit, and then the director says `unfreeze' and the action resumes from where they left off. This works because with all the great digital tools that are now available, you can later morph together separate frames that are slightly off from each other and make it seamless."
Stunt coordinator Simon Crane worked with large numbers of stunt-doubles to help pull off some of the more complex Jumping sequences. This meant that, at times, there might be five or six Davids and Griffins roaming the set. "It was like coordinating a dance routine," says Crane. "We'd have each of the doubles doing the same action but in different places all around the set. This way, later, we could digitally rub four of them out. You only ever see one in a shot, but there might have been five of them there!" Digital tools were also used to replace the stunt doubles' faces with those of Hayden Christensen and Jamie Bell, creating a kind of family of clones.
In addition to the Jumping effects, Crane spent months inventing and rehearsing the highly unconventional battles between the Jumpers and the Paladins -- which take place in multiple locales simultaneously. "Choreographing fight scenes with Jumpers required a whole new approach, an entirely different way of looking at things," notes Crane. "The important thing was that it not be silly or over-the-top. Even though they are teleporting in the middle of their fight, these are very real, very gritty battles that simply use very different physical rules."
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