'Little Man': How digital cut-and-paste made a mini-Marlon

Little Man: How digital cut-and-paste made a mini-Marlon

Over at rottentomatoes.com, it's racked up an average rating of only 3.5 out of 10—definitely the low end of the scale. But despite a critical savaging, the comedy Little Man has one thing going for it that deserves more huzzahs than harrumphs: The tricky digital effects that pasted 6-foot-2 comedian Marlon Wayans' head onto the body of a 2-foot-6, 9-year-old kid actor, so that Wayans could play a diminutive grown-up criminal. Every time I look at the trailer, I can't help gawking at the incredible-shrinking-Marlon sight gags, which look highly convincing most of the time. Whether they're finally funny or creepy I can't decide, but I know I keep staring and marveling even after repeat playbacks. And that's definitely Money Shot territory.

The sitcom-shtick premise that fuels the picture is that Calvin Sims, a just-sprung ex-convict who happens to be a little person, drops a stolen diamond into the possession of a mild-mannered couple (Shawn Wayans and Kerry Washington). Calvin then has to pretend to be an abandoned infant so he can get into the couple's house and steal back the gem. (Aptly enough, Calvin—or at least Calvin's head—is played by the Wayans who happens to be the baby of the 10-sibling clan.) If that premise sounds familiar, it should. It was the central idea of a 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon called "Baby Buggy Bunny," directed by Chuck Jones and written by Michael Maltese. Remember the burly, barrel-chested ex-con Finster, shaving and smoking a cigar while hiding out in Bugs' rabbit hole till Bugs got hip? Some online posters have cried plagiarism, but before you go yelling at Little Man director Keenen Ivory Wayans and his younger-brother cowriters Marlon and Shawn, remember, they freely cop to cribbing the idea. Plus, this concept was a golden oldie way before the Bugs Bunny version. It goes back at least to the 1925 Tod Browning silent movie The Unholy Three, wherein a children-hating little man poses as a baby to steal from the wealthy. (The film got remade in sound in 1930). The same conceit also shows up in a 1939 Little Rascals short called "Tiny Troubles," in which a cowlicked, squeaky-voiced Alfalfa trades in his crying little brother for another infant who turns out to be a little man up to no good.

All these live-action iterations relied on actual little people to play the masquerading baby. But Little Man involves what seems to be the world's first virtual little person, as overseen by Alex Bicknell (Space Jam, Troy), the visual effects supervisor. We caught up with Bicknell as he prepared to work on the Vince Vaughn comedy Fred Claus (it starts shooting in London in September), and got the skinny on what went into making a mini-Marlon.

TESTING, TESTING Once the Wayans trio of Keenen, Marlon, and Shawn committed to the movie's premise, it was up to Bicknell and a large team at London's Moving Picture Company to find a way to pull it off. (Cinesite and some L.A.-based FX houses pitched in too.) There was talk of combining various techniques—including building oversized sets for scale effects and using puppetry for some shots, where Marlon's head would poke through a dummy body—but very quickly, it was evident that the most convincing and economical trick was a digital cut-and-paste effect. (The picture eventually cost a reported $60 million, with about 20 percent of that going to effects.) "If you didn't know Marlon well," says Bicknell, "you might well believe, in the majority of shots, it's just a small actor."

In fact, it's only about three-fourths of a small actor. Despite worries about limited working hours, the filmmakers chose a 9-year-old kid named Linden Porco to be the body double for Marlon's character Calvin. Linden, a native of Winnipeg, Canada, had to be slathered in spray-paint body makeup so his skin tone matched Marlon's, especially for full-body shots like a visit to a doctor's office, a bathtub scene, and a wrestling match involving an unwelcome rectal thermometer. Unlike many adult little-people actors, Linden was less than 3 feet tall—the perfect height for Calvin. He also had broad shoulders that, once Marlon Wayans' head was shrunk about 20 percent in comparative scale, helped suggest Calvin's mean-guy persona. "Calvin needed to be the sort of tough chap you'd meet at a nightclub in New York," says Bicknell. "You needed to believe he was an adult before you could accept him disguised as a baby."

THE ERASERS In the F/X biz, they call the trick "head replacement." It started out as merely "face replacement," a way to paste an actor's puss onto a stuntman's head for a few brief, blurry seconds during dangerous action set pieces. (It was used dramatically in the finale of Jurassic Park and in some shots for Titanic). But full-blown "head replacement," according to Bicknell, has never before been used so extensively as in Little Man, where the trick is used for a main character with tons of screen time and lots of long, lingering close-ups. That's where Bicknell and company really became trailblazers.

To create each scene with Calvin, Linden Porco shot his actions normally on sets with the rest of the cast, often wearing a stocking over his head with so-called "tracking markers" on it. Computers crunched all kinds of data out of these initial shots, deducing the position of Linden's head and body in each frame. Months after that principal photography, Marlon Wayans then got on a green-screen soundstage, sitting in a chair, and replicated the basic positions of Linden's actions, be it a profile shot, a full close-up, or the back of the head.

But how to combine the two images, and how to plop Marlon's head on Linden when Linden was running or jumping or thrashing around? First, F/X artists had to "roto" out Linden's head from the original footage. Since Linden's own face was bigger than the scale used for Marlon's, simply pasting Marlon over Linden wouldn't work—there'd be bits of Linden showing at the edges. So, Linden's entire head in the original shots had be painstakingly filled in with CG. "We'd shoot what we call 'clean plates,"' says Bicknell — empty reference images that let artists cut and paste background elements from the "clean" plate into the Linden plate, thereby erasing him. But other details, like collars on shirts, were much harder to doctor. They had to be hand-tweaked and often hand-animated to move properly, because Linden's face had partly obscured them. "You couldn't just lop off Linden's head on-set to get a look at, say, his far shoulder, which would show behind Marlon," jokes Bicknell. "There was a scene involving a stripey jumper that had the Cinesite crew on the phone every day in tears." Once the laborious cleanup was done, you had shots that basically looked like a headless body wandering around—and only then, finally, could Marlon's head be pasted into the waiting space.

Thanks to amazing improvements in so-called "2-D tracking" software, Marlon Wayans barely had to move his body around on the green-screen stage, even for scenes of Calvin running, jumping, and attacking his surrogate dad. (How'd Wayans do that tiny-headed close-up kiss to Brittany Daniel's face, a big laugh-getter in the trailer? By slobbering all over a soccer ball covered in green tape, with the image of Daniel later swapped in via CG.) Computer calculations helped position Marlon's head in the right spots, adding simulated "motion blur" to keep it from looking too strobey or stilted as it whipped around. Animators then hand-massaged the blend areas, mixing Linden's neck with Marlon's, sometimes pixel by pixel.

At first, Bicknell was panicked that only shots with Linden barely moving would look convincing. But the opposite proved true. The more Linden bounced around, the better the blending worked. During principal photography, the scene where little Calvin tries to evade having his tushy-temperature taken nearly gave Bicknell heart failure. "I was sitting on the set with my head in my hands, going, 'No, no, no,"' says the F/X maestro. He was so worried about matching Porco's movements, he had the F/X team create a 3-D CG head of Marlon Wayans, expecting he'd have to paste it onto Linden's body frame by extremely expensive frame. But no—the "2-D" tracking tools worked just fine. Says Bicknell, with typical Brit modesty: "Motion blur covers a multitude of sins."

DOUBLE TROUBLE Because the Wayanses like shooting in a very free-form way, estimating F/X shot counts up front was a very inexact process. In the end, Bicknell and his team wound up completing nearly 1,200 effects setups, after initially budgeting for only about 600—a number guesstimated based on how many shots Marlon appeared in for White Chicks. "This is really a small comedy," says Bicknell. "Not the kind of film you expect so many effects in usually."

Of those 1,200 or so shots, about 200 landed on the cutting-room floor to get the picture to a 90-minute running time. Among the discards: Calvin shaving in the bathroom as his adoptive grandpop spies on him, Calvin having an epic bout of urination into a potty, and Calvin getting bounced all around a car when he's not strapped into his baby seat properly. "They'll probably show up on the DVD," says Bicknell. "Very funny stuff."

Do you agree, Money Shot readers? Is Little Man good comedy, or were the effects more special than the script? Did Bugs Bunny do it better? And is it really amusing to watch a dog pee in a person's mouth—something we get treated to in a full-screen closeup? (Don't worry, it was only water, tinted yellow by CG.) Keep your baby-powder dry about all this, but do send us some feedback.