42 filmmakers, cinematographers, and effects artists on making the impossible happen.
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The race to innovate hasnt stopped since, and it has always involved pushing the medium to its limits.
What we found out is that dragons arent like solid pieces of wood.
They move, and when they move, they flex, and their muscles move too.
So we had the dragon flying and the muscles moving but Danys legs didnt react to any of it.
So we had to replace her legs.
It was a nightmare.
Literally we had to deform the lower half of her body to make it fit.
That one little detail was probably half the labor that went into those shots.
Just getting her to sit down.
The first time we did it, we had no idea how hard it would be.
The second time, it didnt get any easier.
It was just as hard.
So we found an actor to play the character [Grand Moff Tarkin] on set.
I think we did really well with Guy Henry.
The one thing that he said up front was, Im not a mimic.
I cant do an impression.
But what I can do is play the character with the same dignified, crisp speaking tone.
Guy didnt really do that.
That was one of the big challenges, improving the likeness in little details like that.
Its not until youre about 98 or 99 percent done that it starts to look not-horrific.
The uncanny valley is definitely a pitfall.
Then back in L.A., we photographed actual people laying down in different positions.
All the other bodies are a matte painting that got added to it.
Computer effects are so much easier, no one bothers doing anything real anymore.
Its all just on a green screen and everything is made like in a video game.
It involved hundreds of artists, building that set.
Its soawesome-looking, though.
If they ever got nervous, they could just duck below the corn and gasp for air.
But it was an intense day.
But to this day its one of my favorite effects in the movie.
So Im the one standing there in a way-too-tight suit, making little roaring sounds for the actors.
Because its a car crash scene with A-list celebrities, we couldnt really do anything practical with them.
So their entire scene was shot on green screen, which is not unusual.
Whatwasunusual was the lengths we went to for the actual crash.
Basically we just crashed everything together.
And unfortunately, it all went wrong.
Some cameras failed, some got destroyed.
It … wasnt a good day.
Lets put it that way.
A lot of the crash cars we ended up having to create from nothing.
We ended up having to repurpose some of the practical crash stuff.
What that originally was was a live-action Jeep being dragged across the road by a big old clunky rig.
That whole thing failed miserably.
Which is kind of scary, because you have a whole piece thats physical with this one CG car.
The human eye is very good at spotting the difference between a CG object and a real one.
The background was spinning much faster.
Because it was moving quite slowly, it was this happy accident.
It felt much more cool and interesting with theincorrectspeed outside the window.
It speaks to, when youre in a very traumatic event, they say time slows down.
Usually, I do what is technically and physically correct.
But this one time, we thought, This is a good little mistake we made.
Watching the completed scene, I was relieved, because nothing went according to plan on that scene.
I feel like we salvaged it really well.
To make that feelrealand authentic and feel like you wereinit.
They knew that they were going to die together.
I was always moving the camera.
You could tell it was off.
That camera can get in and around the miniature rocket to capture what the scene will look like.
Not to mention, dangerous!
It almost got there!
That was something we looked at we looked at a big latex labia, and it just seemed silly!
It was the strangest shawl collar that you will ever see on the runway.
We didnt want to give the audience anything to giggle at, and that was part of the difficulty.
So, in a way, the best visual effect in that sequence was Yetide Badakis performance.
Whenever you bring in a sexual component, it becomes very amusing.
The prop department takes a real knife, casts it in rubber, and make a mold of it.
Those things are indistinguishable from the real thing.
And we dont want that.
Safety on set is the number one priority for everyone.
You cannot stab someone or slash their throat with a rubberized knife.
Instead, we make a handle, so the performer has something to grip on to.
And then we match-move them on a computer and put a knife in there digitally.
Ninety-five percent of the knives you see inJohn Wick 3are digital.
Its all mimed out and rehearsed meticulously.
They practice this stuff so the timing feels correct.
What theyll do is build up the set with cardboard boxes, and shoot rehearsals.
Hes an unbelievably insane dude who went to the absolute max.
The way we did it was like ballet.
Im really fussy about data capture.
In fact, Im a pain in everybodys ass about it.
If you want it to look real, you need real-world measurements.
You need lighting measurements.
you should probably do the work.
The hard part was all the preplanning.
And then we did a series of tests to yo everybody.
And then it had wooden panels and wooden beams.
It had a straw roof.
We knew these sort of things would burn really well once the effects were turned on.
It must have gone up about 80 feet.
It was a night shot, so it was spectacular.
I think you could probably have seen it from quite a few miles away.
One of the camera angles was a shot zooming in onto what would be Daenerys standing at the step.
It wasnt gonna hurt her.
We basically cheated the perspective.
We had her at a safe distance so she wasnt actually touching the bowl.
She was a good foot and a half away.
We put the flame-bars around the floor, so when the bowl comes down, it ignites them.
We must have had about 150 flame-bars in the roof, along the walls.
You couldnt have high flames, cause everywhere youd feel it.
On action, they would make a great deal of fire for about a five-second burst.
But to put the fire behind him in the traditional way would have been an enormous amount of nonsense.
If I remember correctly, the camera goes past him and he looks down.
That makes it clear to the audience, Hey, this is real.
Were all up here on the top of this building.
Then when we started playing tricks later, the audience didnt notice it as much.
Then you cut to some things on sets!
And thats where he swings out and shoots the window.
I think he probably wouldve fallen about 15 feet had he actually gone out the window again.
The hardest shot is what we called in-house the pitchpole shot.
It was incredibly difficult, Id never done anything like it.
And then we drop with her into the cabin.
The first part of the shot is live-action with the actors shot against green screen on the boat.
We created the ocean around that.
We created a CG interior and blended between the stunt double and used a digi-double take over where needed.
[Director Baltasar Kormakur] had lots of footage based on storms, which we studied a lot.
The biggest selling point of our storm was the foam and the water breaks on some of the waves.
We built a procedural ocean using Houdini Engine that got passed to our animators for initial layout.
Its like the Pepsi challenge.
The industry is constantly shortening schedules and lowering budgets.
In the case ofScary Stories, we were really up against a release date.
So our goal is to make it work on that timeline.
Its the only way to get it made.
The Jangly Man was only possible as a hybrid.
Merging the practical with the VFX gives you a much higher level of quality and believability.
Its crucial, becauseaudiences these days are smart.
People watch Netflix in 4K; we have to get them to suspend disbelief.
First we shot him clean.
Hart comes up, pulls the trigger, its an empty revolver, and he falls to the ground.
It was pretty nasty.
It was just disgusting.
You see his gun go off and this guys head open up and he falls to the ground.
So that was pretty brutal.
Its designed to be maiming and killing people, and it goes off at the midsection of the body.
Then, we did a blood and guts explosion, and that included a dummy upper body.
We did the same thing with the car windows that explode behind him.
Working with [director] Alfonso [Cuaron] on that film, he had such tremendous imagination.
Its done in a pretty elegant way.
It sounds relatively trivial until you actually figure out how to do it.
Its a multi-element shot stitched together with digital technology, but mostly, it depends on old ideas.
We were brought on with a little less than three weeks before the theatrical release deadline.
All amazingly complex treatments within an incredibly short window of time.
But with the release date looming, production reached out to ask for our assistance.
And to capture that, we had off-road pursuit vehicles with cameras mounted onto crane arms.
Another task was finding a way of controlling the weather, essentially.
But in one beautiful moment, our director J.A.
Bayona said, Well, why dont we shoot it at a theme park?
Instead, we built a 50-foot-tall, magnetic, custom roller coaster in the back lot at Pinewood Studios.
What I didnt realize that Ron would want to do, is stage the entire Kessel Run end-to-end live.
We realizedthisStar Warsfilmwould have more taking place in the cramped space of a cockpit than wed ever shot before.
There are only so many ways to shoot such a compact space.
Better yet, you’re able to see the reflection of the stars in his eyeballs.
We got that shot in the moment in the cockpit thats just the rear projection being reflected back.
As a collaboration between VFX and camera department, it was really fun too.
We could make these changes on the fly that would normally happen in post.
It was pretty fun!
Felt more like putting on a live show than doing traditional visual effects.
So we would do a lot of shots of, like, diving into peoples bodies.
It becomes part of the story.
We had to find a way to do that because hes not supposed to have any arms or legs.
So, we had to come up with a super-complex, motion-controlled, motion-based setup to make that work.
Digital humans are a tricky thing and it can turn out really weird.
The camera moves backward to make it seem like hes moving up the stairs.
All of that has to be programmed and it has to be calculated.
On top of everything, we had to shoot it half-speed, and then speed it up in post.
Of course, this approach requires really long reset times, and its not always convenient.
Everything has to drip.
We refer to this creature internally as The Goop.
We started with the idea of thousands of rats screaming in pain in a very dark basement.
The Duffers wanted the rats to explode or to be more precise,implode.
That made it a little more interesting.
Youre not looking for guts and blood to splatter all over the place like a grenade effect.
You want the rats to sort of flip inside out, instantly.
It would splatter, but not separate into isolated chunks.
It had to be something that looked nasty, but on that thin line between spooky-cool and outright gory.
So we made a system using an animated rig rat asset and a recipe from the creature effect department.
Its so different from what they were doing before, so its a lot of discussions.
But theyre all worth it.
It was very difficult from a conceptual point of view, because it was an open thing.
We just kept looking everywhere.
Every step of the way, there was a challenge.
Its either too much or too little, or just doesnt work at all.
To this day, he never got the blood out of the box spring.
We tried to make it as practical and in-camera as possible, and use visual effects sparingly.
Some of it worked out better than others.
I think we shot it all in one day, which is crazy.
No, Im kidding.
It was fucking hard, though.
Primarily the challenge was, we were not allowed to use CG.
Well, I mean we were allowed, but we had to create this effect for real.
At one point we were shooting four whirlpools and we had four animators all focusing on their whirlpool.
It takes a long time to do stop-motion.
You dont do it for quick results.
Because, lets see, when was that?
There were two versions of Goro.
So there were a lot of moving parts that had not been tried out.
We were also set with a very, very strict, tight budget.
And it happened so many years ago, Im over the pain and the problems of it.
The camera move was extremely hard to achieve.
We had to start with a plate of Ellen Page that was shot on set.
Shes dancing in the foyer of the house.
We had to combine several different shots, but we didnt want any strange camera distortions.
Each was shot with different cameras, from different perspectives, on different lenses.
A lot of compositing work went into just making them look like they were the same shot.
Which involved 28 cameras shooting, and it involved putting Herbie on the actual NASCAR track.
And it involved bringing Lindsay Lohan to be in front of the crowd.
shot of the movie.
So we shot the background of the shot first.
It was something like a minute and 12 seconds, but there wasnt any roaring crowd.
So much preparation has gone into this one thing.
And there was nothing to do.
So she was such a rock star, and such a trooper.
So, she got herself in there, and I went, Action!
And she manifested pure joy, while this robot arm went bzzzzz around.
And then I yelled, Cut!
And then, she was still upset, so the emotions overtake her.
I sent her back to hair and makeup.
She came back, I was like, Lets do it again.
We need to invent something new.
We shot a test of Steve Carell using that method and it looked terrifying.
It just looked like somebody in a really fancy Halloween costume.
So then we tried to doing a motion-capture version of it.
So we used pieces of his eyes and his mouth from actualfilmedfootage on a digital doll.
Cause doing it as a one-off is easy.
Doing it for 46 minutes of a movie is a whole different ball game.
So I was not there when we shot this episode the first time.
We had met with some live wolves, which for safety reasons are actually wolf-shepherd hybrids.
And then when we got the cut, it was such a joke.
He and his company had worked with Wes Craven for years.
[Plec was once Wes Cravens assistant.]
We called on him and said, just come over and help us out.
So he came in and directed for a couple days.
So that we could then drop that into a woods shot.
He shot all of our plates for us out in the woods.
Basically a stuffed animal.
And just shaking it really hard in her face.
And then and keep in mind this is 2010, right?
And so that was not an option, or so we thought.
So we were trying to do as much of this, practically, as we could.
Because when the dog turned, or ran, it needed to look cool.
So we were like, All right, well just ramp it up.
Make it look as cool as you’re free to.
So we broke all our own rules of what a werewolf really could have technically been capable of.
Were like, Whatever looks cool, fuck it.
We dont want to use flashy tools as a gimmick.
So were not going to use the latest and greatest facial capture just because its out there.
Its, Does the character need it?
If yes, then well use it and perfect it.
Its important to understand it as a partnership, not just a stunt.
Puppeteers operated the legs and a puppeteer also operated the neck.
And all this for, like, I think it was $40-45,000.
Hes glued to it; he cant get up and go to the bathroom.
The monster sculpture, when it was being sculpted, was probably 2,000 pounds.
You cant pick that up and take it and show it.
So much was riding [on] Dave Kindlons mechanics.
And he did it all himself.
I said, Dave what do you need?
and he said, Well, we need a mill.
I said, Whats a mill?
We need a big drill press.
And Im like, One you get at Sears?
He goes, No, like a big fucking drill press.
And I need a lathe.
And Im like, how much are all these things gonna cost?
A mill is only $2,000 and a lathe is $3,000 and Im like, Ka-ching, ka-ching.
So, it was all worth it, it made everybody happy.
Thats literally all this cat had to do.
It took us four hours to get anything.
We have the cat handler back there, door opens, cat doesnt come out.
Were like, Okay, fuck, do it again.
You cant see it, its not moving.
It had its emergence.
Theres nothing you might fucking do.
Its a fucking cat.
Good luck trying to find him.
He changes his phone number every week.
Hes kind of a mysterious Lothario, but hes one of the greatest at special makeup effects.
Hes the guy who did all the stuff inThe ThingandTotal RecallandThe Howling.
He spent two and a half hours on the phone explaining, step-by-step, how to do it.
Thats the way I learned how to make an animatronic creature, and that turned out to be Fluffy.
It wasnt really advice.
It was a lesson, a step-by-step lesson, on how to make a cast of the actor.
I put rubbers, prophylactics in his cheeks to make his cheeks expand and contract like he was breathing.
That was the main creature, and his teeth would cut you.
The real sharp teeth were in the main creature.
He was the one that popped out of the crate and for scary close-ups.
Sculpting his face took about a month and a half.
His body was mostly built by the costume department.
Instead of waiting for an actor, he and I did all the effects inCreepshow.
We cast his body, and the costume was built on a plaster cast of his body.
All he could do was move the head and bring up the jaw.
It was pretty complicated.
It took four or five people to make Fluffy look alive.
We had this giant wave that was coming to hit NYC.
And it was so difficult we couldnt render things.
And this was the first time that we were doing all these things.
And finally the water starts to recede.
They shot in L.A. they were on top of the ridge, looking across the valley.
And we were trying to put all this water receding, and see the damage thats left.
You see water effects in everything now.
But that was beforeThe Perfect Storm.
RememberThe Perfect Storm?Where there was a giant wave?
I worked on that when it was being developed.
So that one benefited greatly from what we had done inDeep Impact.
It had all these tentacles.
What made it extra challenging is that we had some very complex on-set lighting.
These dots here above his eyebrows thats where his eyes are.
Sometimes you get thatValley of the Dollslook, you know?
You look into the characters eyes and you dont see a soul.
But the minute he starts to realize something is wrong, you see the tentacles stiffen.
All of a sudden, Jonah [Nolan] was like, We have a problem.
So it was a confusing visual.
Hes like, So we need to make it a robotic bull in three shots.
Im looking at the calendar.
Im like, Dude, its Friday night and this airs a week from Sunday.
But the team at DNEG was just amazing.
We had a design within 36 hours.
We kept joking, Guys, this is a horrible precedent were setting, right now.
The fact that we were able to do this is really not good in the long run.
Its great, but its not great.
In the final film, it looks flawless.
We tried so many times, we had people saying, Why dont we just shoot the real rabbit?
I was like No, were not going to shoot the rabbit.
It was a crazy, stupid difficult effect in a film full of crazy effects.
The rabbit, that was hard.
But when youre watching the movie, you would really believe that were blowing up a bunny rabbit.
It gets a laugh now because it looks so realistic.
I didnt want to get a laugh because it looks stupid.
I didnt want it to look like a rabbit fromMonty Python and the Holy Grail.
But unfortunately, it wasnt.
We had to build a whole refugee camp and make it look as if it was on the border.
It meant replanning and redesigning the whole thing, which I did.
Theres debris raining everywhere.
The car, had it gone ten more feet, it would have exploded.
And that huge explosion, we were working with our German special effects team for the first time.
It wasquitea bit bigger than what we had talked about.
We were all like, Whoa!
Maybe a little too dramatic.
So we ended up doing the explosion twice, and using parts of both explosions.
It was all very challenging, but ultimately a powerful sequence.
That was a bunch of fluid simulations, which we used to drive a whole lot of cloth simulation.
So you had simulation on top of simulation on top of simulation to create the overall effect.
We had to create lots of small parts of the simulation that all work together.
So it was like chaining together lots of different effects over a large area.
They wanted it to move and evolve and travel with the character.
We had to create software that would allow us to get in and get that out properly.
Some bespoke tool sets were created to allow us to do that.
They basically have to swim and not look, and they did it.
Sandra Bullock was literally blindfolded the entire time and the kids were sort of semi-blindfolded.
So they were thrown into the tank, but they were also taken out very quickly.
The whole point of that sequence is it needs to be real.
This is not a sequence where you go, Ooh, they did crazy effects.
There are some clipsin the trailerof it.
Were outsidethis big bullring, right on the border of Mexico in Tijuana.
Gina Rodriguez is trying to escape from the cartel.
Shes running, and the only way they could figure out how to escape was to blast through.
They shoot a grenade launcher at these cop cars that are blocking the entrance.
The art is going down.
Im like, Oh my God.
You know, this is a historic building.
But anyway, that went off great, okay.
We have these really cool physical explosions that you see in the movie.
So we were like, Oh my God.
How can we kill this guy so that his story arc ends there?
Itll be better for the movie.
And we didnt kill him in the scene.
How do you do it in post, in CGI?
And we found out that we could have him near one of the buildings thats in this bullring.
So it was very fun to figure out how to kill a person that you didnt kill.
