Step back in time to the campaign in Egypt with Ridley Scott‘s epic film Napoleon, featuring stunning visual effects by Outpost VFX. Prepare to be transported to the heart of battle as ancient armies clash amidst the sands of the desert:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Outpost VFX: Dedicated page about Napoleon on Outpost VFX website. Richard Clegg: Here is my interview of Richard Clegg, Head of VFX / VFX Supervisor at Outpost VFX. Charley Henley: Here’s my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Charley Henley.
Prepare to embark on an epic journey across the stars with Rebel Moon – Part One – A Child of Fire, Zack Snyder’s latest space opera featuring the visual effects by Framestore. Get a tantalizing taste of the VFX wizardry that awaits in this sneak peek before the full breakdown is unveiled:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Framestore: Dedicated page about Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire website. Netflix: You can watch Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire on Netflix now.
Journey behind the scenes of True Detective: Night Country and discover the VFX work made by Cinesite in bringing the show’s Arctic setting to life. From crafting realistic polar bears and caribou to creating immersive snowy landscapes, this making-of feature offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of visual effects storytelling:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Cinesite: Dedicated page about True Detective: Night Country on Cinesite website. Barney Curnow: Here’s my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Barney Curnow.
Embark on an adventure of mythical proportions with the Apple TV+ series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, where Framestore‘s Montreal and Vancouver teams unleash their creative magic to breathe life into the Frost Vark and the Brambleboar:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Framestore: Dedicated page about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Framestore website. Sean Konrad: Here’s my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Sean Konrad.
Barney Curnow‘s visual effects journey began in 1993 in New Zealand. He then worked at MPC and Atomic Arts. With years of experience under his belt, he took on the role of Production VFX Supervisor for Britannia in 2018. His diverse body of work spans projects such as Outlander, Altered Carbon, and Avenue 5.
Can you provide insights into your background and experience in the field of visual effects?
I worked as a photographer in the late 90s before getting into the film industry, and that was my route into VFX. I photographed matte paintings done on board, and took stills for digi doubles in New Zealand for US shows like Xena: Warrior Princess. From there, I learned Photoshop and moved on to working as a matte painter and compositor. I moved to London in 2001 working on documentaries for a couple of years, before getting back into drama on VFX-heavy shows as a VFX Supervisor and shoot supervisor working at The Mill. For the last 10+ years I’ve been working as a production VFX Supervisor, in recent years for HBO.
How did the collaboration with Director / writer/ EP Issa López influence your approach to the visual effects in the series?
My approach to the VFX on True Detective: Night Country was to have a light touch, respecting the feel and tone of the cinematography and production design. I didn’t want anyone to be talking about the visual effects afterwards, because that would mean they had been brought out of the world we were trying to create. A lot of the work was world-building, because the story takes place in this particular environment of Ennis, Alaska, a fictional town. It’s almost its own character, and we were piecing together this environment using disparate locations and set builds, and using VFX as the glue to bring it all together, and to expand that world.
For the bigger sequences, like the creature animation, I tried to get as much in front of Issa for feedback as early as possible, starting with animatics, timing out the storyboards and then previz before we shot anything. This worked well for the Polar Bear sequences, which ended up on screen pretty much as we prevized them. The opening sequence with the Caribou however went on more of a journey. The boards and the previz weren’t getting across the emotion and story that Issa wanted. The location we had chosen to shoot the plates, near Ólafsfjörður in Northern Iceland, gave us a beautiful wide valley, but the weather was very overcast, and the snow was so pristine and flat that very little detail registered. We shot plates from a drone and Skidoos and took lots of photos, but at the editorial stage we didn’t have much that we could cut with from that. We ended up putting together a sequence using real footage of caribou and reindeer, cut together with one of our editors, Brenna Rangott. That brought the immediacy and connection to the sequence that allowed Issa to really engage with it. After further polishing by editor Matt Chesse we went back into previz and techviz to set camera positions and lenses, and that was what was given to Cinesite to take over and work their magic.
What were Director Issa López’s expectations and approach regarding the visual effects in the serie?
I think Issa’s expectation was that the visual effects be completely in service to the story and the look of the show, and to be of high enough quality to do it so it is not noticeable. Issa had some experience using visual effects, but I think this was more involved than what she had done before, and so it was important to her to see the work as complete as possible as early as possible. Issa was very much involved in the major decisions on the look of the VFX work and how it worked editorially, continuing right through to the colour grade. It was important to her that she be able to cut with shots as close as possible to the end result, so almost all of the shots were concepted and temped in detail, either by me or our in-house team.
How did you coordinate and organize your work with the VFX Producer?
Jan Guilfoyle and I have worked together before and know each other well. I brought him on board later than when I joined, so I did the initial breakdown and budget. Jan took over responsibility for the budget when he arrived, and started working out the details of the schedule. As early as we could, we held meetings with potential vendors, evenbefore filming began. We settled on a broad understanding of which bodies of work were going to which vendors, and Jan set the initial awards. Once the shoot got underway, I spent my time overseeing the on-set team and liaising with the other HODs and Issa, while Jan and VFX Production Manager Bebhinn Naughton looked after the day-to-day organisation, liasing with other departments and looking ahead to post production. There was no break between filming and post so we had to hit the ground running once we got back to London.
Where were the various sequences of the movie filmed, and how did the locations influence your visual effects work?
Most of the locations were in and around Reykjavik and Keflavik in southern Iceland, but also around the small town of Dalvik in the northern part of the country. We had a small unit in Alaska also, shooting plates and b-roll. Any time you see a wide of Ennis, our fictional town, it is based on plates of either Dalvik or one of the small towns in Alaska we used, like Kotzebue or Nome. There were two major outdoor street sets, one in Keflavik, where we first see the polar bear, and another in Dalvik where the police station exterior is. There were outdoor scenes like the frozen ocean or the crime scene which were either filmed on a frozen lake or another area away from the city lights. We also filmed a few scenes in the studio in a black box with snow dressing, which we extended and added blowing snow with VFX. The scene of Danvers and Navarro out in the storm in episode 6 was all filmed like this in the studio.
What criteria guided your selection of vendors, and how was the workload distributed among them?
Because we had a tight schedule, we wanted to make sure that the work was distributed amongst several vendors, for speed’s sake. We ended up with nine vendors, four of which were selected in pre production, with the knowledge that we would need additional vendors once we got into post. There were some obvious categories of work that we could use to help make those decisions, even at script stage, such as creature work, environments, FX, etc. VFX Producer Jan Guilfoyle and I met with vendors during prep and selected those initial 4 based largely on their relative strengths. Cinesite we knew had a strong creature pipeline, and with the combination of the very experienced VFX Supervisor Simon Stanley Clamp and animation lead Simon Wottge we felt comfortable handing them the Caribou and Polar Bear animation sequences. We also gave them the task of building the wide views of Ennis and establishing the town in its environment. Goodbye Kansas Studios came on board to handle other CG work, like removing Lund’s limbs and Blair’s fingers, as well as FX work. BlueBolt were selected to work mostly on environments, like the Silver Sky Mine, and the Frozen Ship. Rumble VFX were given Tsalal Station, which from the outside is all CG. All of the vendors were going to have to do snow work on their own scenes as well, so we kept that in mind as well. Once we got into post we brought on the other vendors, either for volume work, like adding falling snow (there was a lot of that!) or standalone CG tasks.
Could you elaborate on the crucial role of visual effects in crafting fictional environments, especially in the Arctic setting? How does your team tackle the challenge of visually recreating an authentic Arctic landscape?
One thing we knew from early on was that while Iceland offered a lot of benefits in matching to Alaska, it also has notoriously changeable weather. We knew we would be dealing with a lot of snow, FX snow sims, DMP snowy landscapes, comped SFX elements, we were going to need it all. As it happened we were pretty lucky with the weather. It was a particularly cold winter for Iceland, some nights well into the -20s on location, so we had a lot of snow on the ground especiallyoutside of the city. Falling snow was another issue. All the snow you see falling or blowing around is either SFX or VFX. And with the wind changing direction all the time, that meant mostly VFX. The weather progressively gets worse as a storm moves in from episode 5, reaching its worst in episode 6. For fine control of the progression across the edit that meant a lot of FX sims of stormy blustery snow.
For the look of Ennis and its surrounds we had a lot of great references from Dan Taylor’s Art Dept look book, as well as the photography and drone work from Alaska itself. Dan had a map of the whole town of Ennis, which we used as the basis for the really wide DMPs, and we also took that map and built it out into a wider environment.
Are there specific real references that guided the creation of visual effects in the Arctic environment, particularly for the research station?
Tsalal Station was such a key location for the story, where everything starts and ends. Dan Taylor did a lot of research on this, referencing real world scientific research stations in Antarctica especially, so the layout and even the materials used in construction were authentic and well thought out. His team even had a basic 3D model made, matching the dimensions and layout of the interior set build, so Rumble had a really good starting point. We took a Lidar scan of the interior set, and Rumble placed that inside their exterior model so that looking inside from out everything matched. Alongside the main station building there is an older half-round concrete silo structure, which was based on scans of the exterior of one of the studio spaces we shot in at RKV Studios, a converted recycling centre dating back to WWII (I believe). The idea was that with the influx of funding from Silver Sky Mines they had built a shiny new facility alongside an old rundown one, which is now used as storage and parking. This is where we first meet Danvers ealy in episode 1, and where Navarro and Danvers have that powerful scene around the fire in episode 6.
The layout of the station exterior went through some changes over time. We had a location picked out, with a flat area that it could sit on, but it had to work logically within that space, and also to work visually, not be too crowded or busy. At the location I had a couple of days filming plates with a drone, filming through the end of the day to get different exposure levels.
What are the key elements you consider when modelling and animating a bear to make it both realistic and convincing?
The most important thing for me is the animation – CG creature work lives and dies by the quality of the animation in my opinion. The Polar Bear went through a process to figure out her size, how well-fed she was, the quality of her fur, how we were going to show the missing eye, and how she moved. Each stage was carefully considered and we consulted a lot of reference footage and photos to reach the final look. The bear doesn’t have to do anything dramatic, but these are quite intense moments when she appears, and your attention is fully on this bear. So there was a subtlety and a sensitivity that was required from the animation to really bring her to life. I think the animation team at Cinesite did a great job with this aspect of the show.
How does your team approach the creation of natural caribou movements to make them believable?
Like the Polar Bear we looked at a ton of reference for the caribou, building in variations to make a herd of about 40 animals. Because the concept for the scene had been built from real world footage, most of the shots referenced footage of real caribou, including how they moved as a group. We couldn’t find any reference of caribou leaping off a cliff to their death though. For the final shots of the sequence, we didn’t really have any reference, but the animation from Cinesite captured a sense of panic, including some stumbling and falling, and the last animal’s desperate leap, which leaves you kind of going « what have I just watched? ».
What were the main challenges with the animals, particularly their animation and fur?
Animation, as I’ve said, is vital to get right for realism, but the fur was very important with these animals as well. We had some very closeup shots, so you are really seeing every hair. Polar Bear fur is interesting looking because their skin is actually black, which gives the white fur a particular look. The caribou have different types and lengths of fur depending on the season, having quite a bit of variation in patterning, and often have a big tuft on their chest. And very hairy legs!
Can you share anecdotes about some of the unique challenges you’ve faced when creating visual effects for arctic environments?
We really had to get into detail about different kinds of ice and snow – from frozen ocean and icy tundra to underground ice tunnels, from gentle Christmassy snow to raging blizzards. We had a very busy SFX department during the shoot, snowing up large areas with different kinds of practical effects, as well as moving around truck loads of real snow. But inevitably we had to step in to tidy up and extend the ground cover and smooth out the continuity of falling snow. Apart from one shot of the Police Station I think, one night when the weather turned on us, all of the shots of heavy snow and blizzard are FX simulated snow and wind.
The ice tunnels were a particular challenge as well. From the moment Navarro breaks through until they reach the Bone Chamber (the underground lab), almost every shot needed work to make the ice more realistic. The set build was ingenious, being made of layers of clear plastic and translucent sheeting, with indirect lighting placed strategically within the walls, and it looked great on the tests. But there were always moments where you missed the sense of density and depth that real ice has. Several vendors worked on these shots, notably NVIZ who did some great CG ice work. Other notable ice work came from 1920 VFX who made the ceiling of the Bone Chamber, with all the fossils embedded in the ice, which was all CG, and the underwater sequence when Danvers falls through the ice into the water, which needed a lot of sensitive comp work.
Most of the sequences happens during the night. How does that affects your work?
Some things were easier. I have a dislike of big chromakey stages because I feel like they are never big enough and the lighting is always compromised. Because we were filming for night and mostly adding more snow, it made more sense to shoot against black when in the studio. It means more roto, but on the whole I think the colour and the edges are easier to deal with, and we could get a lot of the closer shots in camera. The scene in episode 6 with the women taking the scientists off the truck and out into the night is a good example. A lot of the location scenes worked on a similar principle, with roto used to layer up the added snow, and it meant the scenes matched in their look. The downside is that you don’t see much, of course. If we needed a night establisher, like Rose’s house for example, that needs VFX work, we had to shoot the plates before the light went entirely and do a treatment in comp or the grade. All the Tsalal drone shots were filmed with some light in the sky as well, otherwise we’d have nothing to track. It’s very hard to do a day-for-night treatment and have it match in to a scene shot at night, but hopefully they don’t stand out too much.
Did you want to reveal any other invisible visual effects?
Hopefully it will come as a surprise to most that the scene where Navarro and Danvers find Clark frozen outside the station is entirely CG apart from the actors and a bit of the stairs. It was a very challenging piece of work accomplished by Rumble VFX. We realised after we filmed it that in the reveal of Clark, a pull-back crane shot, the wind machine that we had on set made the dummy of Clark wobble around unrealistically, so he had to be rebuilt in 3D and all the snow blowing around removed and replaced, as well as having the background added.
A big thanks for your time.
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Cinesite: Dedicated page about True Detective: Night Country on Cinesite website. 1920 VFX: Dedicated page about True Detective: Night Country on 1920 VFX website. Rumble VFX: Dedicated page about True Detective: Night Country on Rumble VFX website.
Embark on a thrilling journey through The Creator‘s futuristic world, brought to life by the visual effects work of Toronto studio MARZ from immersive environments to lifelike robots:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Gareth Edwards and the ILM team: Here’s my interview of Gareth Edwards (Director), Jay Cooper (Production VFX Supervisor), Andrew Roberts (ILM On Set Visual Effects Supervisor), Ian Comley & Charmaine Chan (ILM VFX Supervisors). Disney+: You can watch The Creator on Disney+ now.
Step into the world of visual effects with Rodeo FX‘s VFX Breakdown about their work on Foundation Season 2 and delve into the intricate process of creating Trantor and its giant orbiting rings and much more:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Rodeo FX: Dedicated page about Foundation – Season 2 on Rodeo FX website. Chris MacLean: Here’s my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Chris MacLean.
Dive into the visual effects world of The Marvels with VFX Supervisor Tara DeMarco as she unveils the intricate process behind bringing the adorable Flerkittens to life (made by ILM and Trixter):
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Tara DeMarco: Here’s my interview of Production VFX Supervisor Tara DeMarco. Dominik Zimmerle & Ernest Dios: Here is my interview of Dominik Zimmerle & Ernest Dios, VFX Supervisors at Trixter. ILM: Dedicated page about The Marvels on ILM website. Trixter: Dedicated page about The Marvels on Trixter website. Disney+: You can watch now The Marvels on Disney+.
Dive into the world of Io capitano, a contemporary Odyssey from Dakar to Europe, with this VFX Breakdown showing the invisible visual effects crafted by the teams of MPC:
WANT TO KNOW MORE? MPC: Dedicated page about Io capitano on MPC website.
Ian Comley // our close collaboration with Gareth on The Creator is something to call out and celebrate. We were considered a core member of the filmmaking team throughout; entering this indie approach to filming, lightweight data collection and downstream shot briefing with eyes wide open. We were fully sold on Gareth’s vision, and our partnership ultimately allowed us to get the most ‘visual value’ out of each VFX shot.
Charmaine Chan // It was established from the start that Gareth, James Clyne (Production Designer), and the ILM team would be working closely on a daily basis. We all first flew out to San Francisco to meet with Gareth and see the first cut of the film. From there we set up a pretty strict plan of action tackling our visual effects shots. On the ILM side we had the San Francisco, London, and Sydney offices working together under our Head of Department, Jay Cooper. Between myself, Ian Comley, and Jay Cooper, we presented our work to Gareth and James daily with very open dialogue and discussions. Because we were so integrated in with Gareth, we turned things around fast and efficiently.
Jay Cooper // It was pretty much as you would expect. Daily calls, and frequent meetings before, during, and after our shoot. We hosted Gareth at our San Francisco campus for a virtual camera session, as well as met him in virtual reality when we were designing the biosphere and NOMAD. One thing I really enjoy about Gareth’s process is that he wants to engage with the artists as directly as he can. As an artist himself, he enjoys the visual effects process and I think it’s a little bit of a vacation from some of the other pressures of filmmaking to engage so personally with the visual effects team.
Andrew Roberts // During our pre-production calls Gareth was deeply invested in every department, and how we would complement each other for key action scenes. This mindset continued during principal photography with constant communication, with everyone embracing Gareth’s indie approach.
Gareth Edwards, how did you use your experience in visual effects to your advantage for The Creator?
Gareth Edwards // One of the main jobs of the director on a big sci-fi film is to help decide what things you actually film, and what things you do with visual effects artists in post. I think having a background in visual effects means you make better choices about that divide. Some things are really not worth the expense of creating on set, as it’s so much easier and more flexible to do in post, whereas other things might sound like a good idea, but are a complete nightmare to do with CGI and will cause a world of pain later.
Also, I think it helped give ILM a comfort level to show VFX shots early in their evolution, whilst it was still just wet clay on the table. So they would show shots when they still looked rudimentary, as you’d know what to ignore and what to give feedback on. I think sometimes VFX companies can be afraid to do this with some filmmakers as it can cause a freakout when things don’t look ‘good’ yet. So I think that also helped.
I guess the last thing would be feedback. Being able to take images into Photoshop and play around with them rather than giving pages and pages of notes. A picture speaks a thousand words, it’s way faster to do a paint-over with James Clyne or myself one night than it is to try and explain how to make something look more how it is in your head.
Can you elaborate about the shooting and how you integrated the visual effects?
Ian Comley // Andrew Roberts was a one-man-VFX-unit on location which, combined with the lightweight shoot methodology, made it a significant challenge to come away with a full complement of standard lidar, hdri, green screens and clean plates. What we did get from the shoot was ‘gold’. We leveraged every piece of set information and practical element, but everything else required rather ‘old skool’ detective work; finding integration cues/clues directly from plate. Thankfully, with such strong photography and amazing artistry from the team, we were able to reconstruct a detailed CG lighting environment for each bespoke moment, including additional sources and bounce in close proximity to the simulant headgear, robot heads and arms, and array of props, vehicles, sets and digi-doubles.
Charmaine Chan // Oren Soffer shot a good majority of the plates in Asia with such a distinct style and look. And because Gareth comes from a VFX background, when he was shooting these with Oren, he knew what was going to be VFX pieces: whether that be a giant monolith behind the hills or a robot running away from camera; he composed his shots in a way that allowed us in VFX to layer it in pretty easily but still ground it to reality because we have things already in the shot to match to.
Jay Cooper // This was a very unconventional shoot. For a show of this scale, we had an extremely small vfx footprint. Andrew was thrown into the deep end,with the following mandate: Help Gareth Edwards make wise decisions with respect to VFX shooting methodology and get as much data as you can without slowing him down. Gareth wanted to shoot each location with complete camera freedom. This required a extremely small guerrilla crew on set. This approach had its strengths and challenges. Gareth was able to have more time with his actors, and more improvisational freedom with camera choices. For us in VFX, it meant less understanding of what the final shots would look like and less supporting reference materials. Ultimately, it made the movie stronger visually as the high shooting ratio gave Gareth more options in the edit. We were also careful to shy away from ‘walls of bluescreen’ whenever possible. Even in cases, where the environment would be significantly altered, we always wanted to start with a real location. The trick for us was how to lean into the idiosyncrasies of our phenomenal plate photography and extend our futuristic world. I think its a bit of a magic trick. If you keep just enough of the original plate it becomes more difficult to detect where the seems are located.
Andrew Roberts // Gareth shot in rolling takes, having the actors reset and repeat their performances while he hunted for the perfect angle. He would shoot for up to 45 minutes, adjusting from low-angle close-ups to profile, to over-the-shoulder views. As Jay pointed out, this resulted in unique, memorable footage which gives the film Gareth’s signature look. It also meant I needed to cover larger areas for background reconstruction and set measurements. Whenever possible I would capture the set’s lighting conditions with an HDRI, grab reference of practical light positions with a 14mm lens, or fire off a few 360° images with a Ricoh Theta camera. I carried a small drone on set with me, which was great for capturing the overall geometry of sets like the floating village, checkpoint, and mountaintop temple. There was never enough time for me to capture everything I wanted, so I tried to focus on the one or two items that seemed most important and relied on our amazing team at ILM to take us home.
What were your main sources of inspiration when creating the visual effects for this film?
Charmaine Chan // Gareth pulled a lot of films from the past as reference, from Baraka to Aliens to Apocalypse Now. A lot of our artists had already seen it or watched them for research to ensure the feeling of those films lived through in our assets and environments. There was also a lot of references to tech from the 80s such as the Sony walkman or the original Nintendo. We used a lot of shades of gray with accent pop colors such as reds and oranges throughout our environments, props, to even our giant nomad ship.
Jay Cooper // Charmaine nailed it. Gareth would say, “Imagine the design had evolved from 1980s Japanese product design, what would that look like?” For us that was a lot of plastics and metals that slot into each other in a designed way. You see that in Alphie and our robots. Alphie is made up of a number of different plastics and metals. It’s futuristic but also you can understand that their is a blueprint in how all the bits go together. It’s not a singular milled piece of alloy.
I think we also wanted to live in a dirty and ‘lived-in’ world. Star Wars obviously does this so well. As far as our buildings and interiors, James Clyne, our production designer did an amazing job of defining the world of the creator. He established a design aesthetic that had soft curves and paired large forms with smaller detail elements for scale. There is a bit of Syd Mead’s futuristic aesthetic, but with a less angular forms and more of the ‘product design’ look that Gareth wanted.
Were there any specific technological innovations that you adopted during the shoot and the post?
Andrew Roberts // During the shoot, I worked closely with Oren to integrate dynamic lighting onto our actors. This often involved me creating animated content, blending multiple motion graphics elements together, and running that imagery through projectors. We used this technique while Joshua scans for life forms at Ground Zero, when he’s watching the holographic reenactment of his betrayal, and on the holograms themselves. In the third act, we see Joshua clinging to the exterior of a missile, being dragged at high speed toward the launch chute. Our mission was to project animated shadows onto John David, who was harnessed to a 30ft tall practical missile set at Pinewood. I extracted architectural elements from ILM’s real-time NOMAD asset and animated them to match key story points of Joshua’s journey on the missile carousel. The resulting animated gobo was streamed through a 12K Christie projector onto our actor & set, and in post extended onto the digital NOMAD asset.
Charmaine Chan // During post, we knew we would be tackling a high number of shots that needed robots to be inserted in. Our plan was to always matchanim and render our hero foreground robots, but any robots in the mid to background position would actually be tracked and rendered out via Nuke by only our compositors. This saved us a lot of time and made turnaround for approval of even quicker.
What techniques did you use to make the visual effects as realistic as possible while supporting the film’s story?
Jay Cooper // I think the techniques that we’re using are pretty traditional at this point. ILM has, of course, a robust pipeline for creating hard surface assets, and emulating natural phenomena. The best technique employed for realism was starting with a real location whenever possible.
When we couldn’t find a real location, we used ILM StageCraft to build two environments on the LED volume at Pinewood Studios.
How did you manage coordination between the visual effects teams and the other departments?
Jay Cooper // ILM has a fantastic production team that supports the visual effects supervisors. There are many moving parts to a movie of this size.
Can you tell us about the importance of lighting and texture in creating the visual effects for this film?
Charmaine Chan // As mentioned before, we always referenced whatever was shot in the plate photography. To achieve the most realistic robots and simulants, we matched the metals and plastics to things like the beige backpack the farmer was wearing, or the old school analog tv that was on the set. But anytime we didn’t have any HDRI’s we relied on the clothing the actors were wearing to create the reflections and color tone of our robot/simulant gear.
What were the main challenges with the robots on set and in post?
Ian Comley // Gareth shot the movie without telling any supporting cast or extras who was going to be a Robot. It was a brilliant move to secure very natural, anthropomorphic performances— and offered great flexibility during the edit—but did present us with the challenge of producing unassisted match animation and clean plates! Luckily, our Layout and Paint teams are top-tier and unflappable, so as the edit evolved and we started locking (and changing!) which characters in a shot would catch the eye and therefore be ideal candidates to become Robots, they kept delivering perfect head/body tracks and reconstructed plates with amazing positivity. For background characters, we were also able to leverage real-time rendering of Robot heads and arms. This handy tool allowed Nuke compositors to position, 2D-track and light pieces from our hero Robot asset kit, when camera and performer were (relatively) still; bypassing large sections of the pipeline, and increasing the overall ‘robot count’.
The movie offers a blend of visual effects and natural landscapes. How did you work to balance these visual elements?
Charmaine Chan // When it came to our environments process, what usually happened was once the plate was shot, James Clyne would take a still of that shot and do a quick paintover of the additional environmental elements we’d be adding in VFX. He’d pass those concepts over to us, and for environments used in a whole sequence or beat we’d build out that set, or for the bespoke one off environments we’d go the quicker DMP method. These environment pieces tended to be extensions of buildings that already existed (such as the checkpoint). Or pieces that organically flowed with the layout of the location (such as the pipes running down the hills to the river).
The NOMAD station is a visually impressive element of the film. Can you tell us more about its design and digital creation?
Ian Comley // Gareth and James Clyne refined the striking silhouette and key features of the NOMAD through early concept and previz. It’s a menacing presence throughout the film, looking through clouds to the looming 4.4km-wide wingspan or seeing the targeting lasers cross the ground. We knew it would be ‘up-close and personal’ in the final Act, so fleshed it out into a highly detailed, 1.3TB asset, allowing for fully-CG 360 degree exterior shots at all distances, with further interior sections built to augment plate/StageCraft -based VFX shots. Early NOMAD concepts positioned it very much in space against the stars, but to justify more complex lighting and to align the scale and readability for both ground and aerial shots, we brought it to a lower orbit, where the laser fangs could catch the tops of clouds. My concern with fully-CG NOMAD shots was replicating the style of the beautifully-gritty, naturalistic location footage, but we conducted many tests recreating the grain, vignetting, astigmatisms, flares and contamination. We also worked with Gareth to ensure that CG camera moves gave the presence of a human operator; e.g. a camera operator discovering and framing for the unfolding action, while hanging out the door of a fast plane more likely to travel in straight lines or gentle curves.
Charmaine Chan // As Ian mentioned, we used StageCraft for the interiors of the NOMAD. This included the airlock beat with the utility robot and escape pods, and then again for the biosphere for our final moment of Joshua reuniting with Maya again. We decided to use StageCraft as we couldn’t actually shoot up in space, and it gave us the ability to emphasize the scale of the NOMAD from the inside perspective. The airlock was designed to be a round rotating utility base that housed the escape pods. A gantry connected the two ends and appearing to be floating in the middle of this rotating room. Using StageCraft we were able to show the rotating rings for almost 270 degrees, the obvious replacement needed was the floor as the rings had to extend down to complete the round room. We then added the utility bot in post which was quite large in size and once again helped us tell how vastly large the NOMAD was to have a single room of this scale. The biosphere was designed like a giant greenhouse, big windows everywhere looking out to the ends of the NOMAD, with lots of garden greenery on the inside. On set we had a limited amount of practical trees brought in, we then used StageCraft to extend the endless rows of trees and establish the frame/structure of the inside of the NOMAD. We also needed this moment to show all the explosions happening outside. There was a crescendo of explosions we created in post which tied in perfectly with Joshua and Maya running towards each other.
What aspect of the visual effects in The Creator are you most proud of?
Charmaine Chan // The fact the first question was about collaboration is what makes The Creator such a unique experience for visual effects. It’s not often we, in VFX, find ourselves working hand in hand with the director and production designer everyday til the very last shot delivered. It’s this relationship and trust in creative suggestions that allowed us to deliver such impactful shots. You could almost freeze frame anywhere in the film and each shot can stand beautifully on its own. And while it was obvious what components were not real, the VFX never stole the attention away from the story, it became part of the story.
Were there any sequences where the visual effects had to be significantly modified or adjusted during the post-production process?
Jay Cooper // Nope! But I will say we iterated on design on many fronts during the production. Alphie’s design of course was critical to get right, so we took a few passes at finding the design for that. Ultimately, we did an interactive sessions with Gareth and our Model Supervisor,
Bruce Holcomb, to refine the silhouette of Alphie’s mechanical cutouts. We would make a change, spin our model around, then another, etc. We got deep into the weeds tweaking every curve to make the best of it from all angles.
A big thanks for your time!
WANT TO KNOW MORE? ILM: Dedicated page about The Creator on ILM website. Disney+: You can watch The Creator on Disney+ now.
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