Which of the following are examples of mechanical special effects, and which are not?

Q: Which of the following is the measure of how sensitive a film stock is to light?

ISO (Film Speed) ISO is the measurement of a films speed, defined by its sensitivity to light. The lower the film speed, the less sensitive to light and the finer the grain in the resulting image. The higher the film speed, the more sensitive to light and the larger the visible grain in the final image.

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Inhaltsverzeichnis Show

What are the four primary components of mise en scène?
Which of the following types of shots involve camera movement?
Which of the following are not responsibilities of the cinematographer?
Which of the following is the measure of how sensitive a film stock is to light?

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BUILDING A POST-MODERN PARADISE FOR DON’T WORRY DARLING December 20,2022
By JOE FORDHAM
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) are the perfect couple in the mysterious thriller Don’t Worry Darling.
After the critical and commercial success of Olivia Wilde’s feature film directorial debut with the coming-of-age drama Booksmart, the filmmaker seized on a challenging assignment for her next project in Don’t Worry Darling. The Warner Bros. release, based on a screenplay by Carey and Shane Van Dyke retooled by Booksmart screenwriter Katie Silberman, was a high-concept science fiction thriller of gender identity and paranoia. The story focused on Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) who resides, with her sexy executive husband Jack (Harry Styles), in a 1950s post-Modern paradise known as The Victory Project. Production Designer Katie Byron and Cinematographer Matthew Libatique created Alice’s pristine yet threatening Stepford Wives-like community using a palette of pastel shades and space-age architecture shot largely on location in and around Palm Springs, California.
Alice and her neighbors see their husbands off to work in the 1950s post-Modern paradise of the Victory Project.

While preparing breakfast, Alice discovers evidence that her world is not what it seems, including hollow eggshells that contain no egg. (Photo: Merrick Morton)
Visual Effects Supervisor Dan Schrecker (The Fountain, Black Swan, Mother!) added to the surreal setup, enhancing details of the idealized world as Alice begins to question the nature of her all-too-perfect lifestyle and the motives of Victory Project CEO Frank (Chris Pine). “Early on,” says Schrecker, “it was all about problem-solving, figuring out where production couldn’t bridge the gap between what Olivia wanted and what was going to be feasible. I must give a big shout-out to the locations team because they found the best places to shoot. All the Victory town sites, the house where Jack and Alice live, and that cul-de-sac were all real, in Palm Springs.”
Alice’s neighbor, Bunny (Olivia Wilde), flirts with Victory Project patriarch Frank (Chris Pine) at the CEO’s home. The production set the majority of the film’s exteriors on location in Palm Springs, California.
Alice attempts an unauthorized visit to her husband’s workplace and experiences a sensory overload at the exterior of the futuristic building. The production filmed Victory HQ scenes at the Volcano House in Newberry, California.
Architect William Krisel’s 1962 Canyon View Estates served as the setting for the main protagonists’ home, whereas architect Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann home served as Frank’s California dream house. For the Victory headquarters, atop a mountain peak across the desert from Alice’s home, the production selected architect Harold James Bissner Jr.’s futuristic dome-roofed Volcano House in Newberry, California. “All those places exist,” Schrecker notes. “Katie Byron did a great job of building that reality. I’d worked with Matty Libatique before, so I knew he was going to make it look great. They created the look. We filled in the gaps.”
While cleaning her home, Alice experiences a disorienting hallucination as a corridor wall crushes her into a window. Special effects staged the moving wall as an in-camera mechanical effect.
Alice commandeers Jack’s Corvette and flees toward the Victory Headquarters. Raynault VFX provided digital matte painting effects to create a more desolate arid landscape surrounding the isolated desert community.
Raynault VFX provided the majority of visual effects, while Mavericks VFX joined the team toward the end of post-production. FX WRX and Break+Enter provided additional effects, and Schrecker and his Visual Effects Coordinator Preston Mohr handled in-house visual effects.
“We wanted to give the desert [landscape surrounding the Victory Project] a more consistent and barren feel. Raynault did a little cleanup around the mountains. There was not a lot of that. And we never altered the skies. Shooting in Palm Springs in January, when the sun set behind the mountains at around 3:30 p.m., the light was just fantastic.”
—Dan Schrecker, Visual Effects Supervisor
Raynault VFX’s work included subtle environment enhancements and digital cleanup of the desert landscape surrounding the Victory Project. “We wanted to give the desert a more consistent and barren feel,” Schrecker explains. “Raynault did a little cleanup around the mountains. There was not a lot of that. And we never altered the skies. Shooting in Palm Springs in January, when the sun set behind the mountains at around 3:30 p.m., the light was just fantastic.”
During a party at Frank’s house, Alice views a table-top diorama of the Victory Project depicting the town layout as radiating circles of cul-de-sacs and curving boulevards nested in the desert. The practical prop guided shot design with minimal digital assistance. “Raynault did a few enhancements to help continuity of locations,” Schrecker observes. “That included some aerial drone shots of Alice running up the mountain. But the locations didn’t require a ton of visual effects.”
Visual effects added environmental details and signage to Palm Springs production plates to subtly reinforce Production Designer Katie Byron’s stylized 1950s settings.

While attending dance class, Alice observes the image of her disturbed neighbor Margaret (KiKi Layne) replacing her reflection. Visual effects staged the reflection using a greenscreen element of Margaret’s mirror image.
Alice’s world begins to unravel when she witnesses a plane crash over the Victory headquarters. Raynault provided matte painting to integrate the mountaintop HQ into the Palm Springs locale, and generated the distant aircraft, subtly tying the event to another disturbed character, Margaret (KiKi Layne), whom Alice observes acting erratically in her social circle. “That was a CG plane based on the toy plane that Margaret’s son was holding,” Schrecker reveals. “Olivia wanted an underwater feel to the effect. Raynault came up with a distortion wave effect that went over the plane. The idea was that Alice was seeing a disruption in the Victory thought-matrix, seeing something is not how it is supposed to be. That was a recurring theme. When she’s in her kitchen, she cracks eggs and finds the shells are empty. And in her ballet lessons, Alice sees Margaret’s reflection looking back at her.”
For mirror hallucinations, and Alice’s reaction to smashing her aberrant dancehall reflection, the production shot element passes. “We shot Margaret separately against greenscreen,” Schrecker says. “Raynault created the matte to figure out the correct angle because we couldn’t shoot her as a reflection, we had to shoot her as a clean pass and put her into the mirror. As they mocked up that shot, Raynault came up with the idea of fragmenting Margaret’s reflection in the shards so that she was disjointed, and her eye almost became like a Picasso painting.” For a mirror hallucination in Alice’s bathtub, where Alice observes her reflection out of phase with her reality, Schrecker’s in-house team blended repeat performances using rotoscope and split screens.
“That [plane that crashed over the Victory headquarters] was a CG plane based on the toy plane that Margaret’s son was holding. Olivia [director Olivia Wilde] wanted an underwater feel to the effect. Raynault [VFX] came up with a distortion wave effect that went over the plane. The idea was that Alice was seeing a disruption in the Victory thought-matrix, seeing something is not how it is supposed to be. That was a recurring theme. When she’s in her kitchen, she cracks eggs and finds the shells are empty. And in her ballet lessons, Alice sees Margaret’s reflection looking back at her.”
—Dan Schrecker, Visual Effects Supervisor
Raynault VFX composited Margaret’s reflection into the dance hall mirror with a shattered glass effect resembling a Cubist painting.
Visual effects provided subtle enhancements to mechanical effects that Special Effects Supervisor Jeremy Hays created for seismic disruptions that interrupt Alice’s world, including a tremor that rattles a department store where Alice is on a shopping spree. Hays’ team also constructed a hydraulic rig for an in-camera effect where the wall of Alice’s home compresses her against a window as she is cleaning.
“[For mirror hallucinations and smashing the reflection] we shot Margaret separately against greenscreen. Raynault created the matte to figure out the correct angle because we couldn’t shoot her as a reflection, we had to shoot her as a clean pass and put her into the mirror. As they mocked up that shot, Raynault came up with the idea of fragmenting Margaret’s reflection in the shards so that she was disjointed, and her eye almost became like a Picasso painting.”
—Dan Schrecker, Visual Effects Supervisor
Staccato montage effects lead up to Alice’s nervous breakdown, combining macro-closeups of Alice’s eye and a strange recurring dream of a Busby Berkeley dance routine. The production created the kaleidoscopic dance number on a soundstage set with editorial effects and minimal digital cleanup. Visual effects provided a computer-generated eye to replicate Alice’s dilating pupil. FX WRX in Brooklyn staged practical fluid suspension elements, using colored ink in water for montage transitions, but the psychedelic elements went unused apart from an abstract effect in the end titles.
The paring back of visual concepts to refine storytelling beats was an essential part of defining Alice’s mental disintegration. “At the end of the film, after Alice attacks Jack,” Schrecker reveals, “we had planned to show cracks opening up in the wall and on the street. As Alice walked out into the cul-de-sac, she was going to see a crack in the middle of the street. And we shot it like that. We painted a crack on the ground so Florence knew where to could walk around it. In post-production, that idea got cut. So, we digitally painted out of the lines that we had painted on the ground. That was a normal part of the editing process. As they started cutting, and we did a couple of mock-ups, and they felt that they didn’t need it.”
“[The Victory virtual reality simulation] was a practical eyepiece on the actors. Raynault added laser effects over Alice’s and Jack’s eyes. That was one of our bigger volumes of shots. All told, it was about a year of work – we started prep in September 2020 and wrapped by Thanksgiving 2021. It was kudos to Matty [Cinematographer Matthew Libatique] and Katie [Production Designer Katie Byron], as we were building on the work they did to realize Olivia’s vision for this dystopian world.”
—Dan Schrecker, Visual Effects Supervisor

The film’s finale plays out with Alice fleeing a nightclub celebration. COVID-19 precautions required the production to film the nightclub scene with minimal performer and crowd interactions. Visual effects provided a solution by shooting angles of the crowd as tiled plates. Schrecker and Mohr then digitally reassembled the scene to add revelers around principal performers.
Alice ventures into a forbidden zone in the desert after she observes a plane crash out behind her husband’s workplace. Raynault VFX modified the environment to situate Victory Headquarters in closer proximity to the town.
Director/producer Olivia Wilde sets up a bluescreen shot with Florence Pugh on location in the Californian desert. (Photo: Merrick Morton) Visual effects later added location plates of a car crash pinwheeling behind the performer.
Alice’s escape, using Jack’s Corvette to lead a chase across the desert as she seeks Victory headquarters, featured practical stunts and mechanical effects on location. Mavericks VFX digitally erased tire tracks, distant structures and trains, creating the illusion of a pristine desert, and generated digital face replacements to add Florence Pugh’s likeness to a stunt driver. A bluescreen composite staged on location allowed Mavericks to layer a car explosion behind Pugh at the wheel of her speeding vehicle.
Wilde confers with Harry Styles in the set of the Chambers home. Visual effects placed bluescreen material in the front doorway of the Los Angeles soundstage set to allow digital composites of Palm Spring exteriors. (Photo: Merrick Morton)
Wilde orchestrates a dance number with Harry Styles and Chris Pine in a nightclub setting. Visual effects used digital effects to integrate crowd members into the scene assisting COVID-19 safety protocols. (Photo: Merrick Morton)
Raynault VFX provided visual effects for the final reveal of Alice, back in her contemporary real-life existence, where her possessive boyfriend (Harry Styles) has hooked her up to the Victory virtual reality simulation. “That was a practical eyepiece on the actors,” says Schrecker. “Raynault added laser effects over Alice’s and Jack’s eyes. That was one of our bigger volumes of shots. All told, it was about a year of work – we started prep in September 2020 and wrapped by Thanksgiving 2021. It was kudos to Matty and Katie, as we were building on the work they did to realize Olivia’s vision for this dystopian world.”
HOW BRAINSTORM DIGITAL RECREATED 1980s NEW YORK FOR ARMAGEDDON TIME December 13,2022
Michael Banks Repeta as Paul Graff and Anthony Hopkins as Grandpa Aaron Rabinowitz in James Gray’s Armageddon Time. (Photo: Anne Joyce. Courtesy of Focus Features)
Set in 1980s Queens, New York, James Gray’s autobiographical tale, Armageddon Time, follows Paul Graff as he navigates his way through school. Dreaming of a career as an artist, Paul witnesses first-hand the harsh realities of the American dream and the prejudiced schooling system. Visual Effects Supervisor Glenn Allen and his team at Brainstorm Digital worked to recreate 1980s New York. “This is the fourth movie we have done with James,”Allen explains. “We did some work on Ad Astra, but we weren’t the only vendor on that one, as it had space and things we don’t normally do. We normally do invisible effects and a lot of period work. Of course, for Armageddon Time we had to do a lot of period fixes.”
Paul Graff and Johnny Crocker (Jaylin Webb) playing hooky in the Central Park scene. (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
“[Director James Gray] lived it, and so he was very clear about how he wanted it to feel. He said it’s not a coming-of-age story, it’s moments in time. I remember on his monitor on set he had words written down: loss, love and memories. He had that as a reminder, and I saw that every day. I carried that as I was instructing artists and I always had that in mind.”
—Glenn Allen, Visual Effects Supervisor, Brainstorm Digital
In terms of creative references, Allen looked at photographs from the time period. “It was just random shots off the internet, whatever we could find from those locations,” he notes. “There wasn’t a lot of video. For things such as the park in Queens, where the grandfather sets the rocket off with the grandson, there is a tower back there where the World’s Fair took place back in the ’60s, and it was painted a certain way at the time. James was very specific about that. Just the memories. He lived it, and so he was very clear about how he wanted it to feel. He said it’s not a coming-of-age story, it’s moments in time. I remember on his monitor on set he had words written down: loss, love and memories. He had that as a reminder, and I saw that every day. I carried that as I was instructing artists, and I always had that in mind.”
Anne Hathaway is Paul’s mother, Esther Graff, in director James Gray’s autobiographical tale. (Photo: Anne Joyce. Courtesy of Focus Features)
“James was very particular about it being authentic,” Allen adds. “We had to prove to him that it was 1980, and he’d sometimes say things like, ‘no, that was 1982.’ He cared a lot about that, and we had to do our homework. James knows what he wants, which is great, and that helps us a lot. The first time we deliver something, we have a better idea of what he is looking for because we know him so well. There are some directors that don’t really know what they want until they see a version of it, which makes it harder because then we can send a version which might be way off. With James we know his sensibilities. My partner, Richard Friedlander, and I don’t come from a technical background, we come from a filmmaking background. I think that helps a lot because we picture the edit instead of giving something that might be technically correct. We try to deliver something that we know will fit into the edit.”
“There are some directors that don’t really know what they want until they see a version of it, which makes it harder because then we can send a version which might be way off. With James we know his sensibilities. My partner, Richard Friedlander, and I don’t come from a technical background, we come from a filmmaking background. I think that helps a lot because we picture the edit instead of giving something that might be technically correct. We try to deliver something that we know will fit into the edit.”
—Glenn Allen, Visual Effects Supervisor, Brainstorm Digital
The pinball sequence was shot on a greenscreen stage. Visual Effects Supervisor Glenn Allen and his team relied on matte painting to create 1980s Times Square as the scene’s backdrop. (Images courtesy of Brainstorm Digital)
Brainstorm Digital created around 200 visual effects shots for the film. “Thirty or 40% of the shots in Armageddon Time are things that they didn’t plan on doing,” says Allen says. “There might be a car in the shot that they didn’t like, or there might be a great performance, but there might be an airplane in the sky and they want to get rid of it. We usually prioritize the hardest shots, which for us would be the CG rocket shooting up into the sky, and that goes to our CG team. We have matte painters. For the bulk of our work, it was painting out satellite dishes which they didn’t have in 1980. For every location, we had to look for things and paint them out. Some of the work went to CG, but the bulk of the work was matte painting. We had a number of shots where we duplicated the school children in the classroom. That’s always a bit of a challenge on set. We did what we call crowd tiling, so we jumble up the kids and move them around. I think we did five or six plates of the kids to make it look like a full gym of schoolkids. When we shot it, it was pretty easy because the seats were in rows. It was very easy to move all the kids. I said. let’s fill up one row, one section so we have enough, and then we move those kids into each section. It went very smoothly.”

Brainstorm Digital used a ‘crowd tiling’ effect to duplicate the number of school children throughout the classroom scenes. Having the seats in rows proved an efficient way of achieving the ‘crowd tiling’ effect. (Images courtesy of Brainstorm Digital)
Flushing Meadows Park has changed since the 1980s and proved to be challenging to recreate. Scaffolding surrounding the structure was digitally removed in post-production. (Images courtesy of Brainstorm Digital)
“Thirty or 40% of the shots in Armageddon Time are things that they didn’t plan on doing. There might be a car in the shot that they didn’t like, or there might be a great performance, but there might be an airplane in the sky and they want to get rid of it. We usually prioritize the hardest shots, which for us would be the CG rocket shooting up into the sky, and that goes to our CG team. … For the bulk of our work, it was painting out satellite dishes which they didn’t have in 1980. For every location, we had to look for things and paint them out. Some of the work went to CG, but the bulk of the work was matte painting.”
—Glenn Allen, Visual Effects Supervisor, Brainstorm Digital
The World’s Fair park proved to be particularly challenging to complete. “It is quite different now compared to how it used to be,” Allen explains. “We changed the color of it. They had scaffolding and we had to get rid of that. That one stands out because we spent a lot of time getting that just right. There was some reference, but James remembered it a certain way.” A number of modern buildings also had to painted out in wide shots, and a few visual effects shots were required for the scenes in Central Park. “There weren’t a whole lot of visual effects shots in this movie,” Allen remarks. “There was a challenging shot, when the kids are playing pinball at Times Square, and they shot that on a greenscreen stage. We did matte painting for the background, which was supposed to be in Times Square, and we had CG cars and a CG bus going by. We also had people walking past the window. We created a store front window behind that. That was probably the most challenging scene. We also had a bit of trouble with the snot bubble scene. That was when the father chokes on his coffee during the family dinner scene. I came on set one day and I had a hollowed-out light bulb that I put up to my nose. James cracked up. That was a full-on CGI snot bubble. It had to be a certain way that he wanted, as it was something else he remembered.”

The ‘snot bubble’ was created using CGI and was based on a memory from director James Gray’s childhood. (Images courtesy of Brainstorm Digital)
“There was a challenging shot, when the kids are playing pinball at Times Square, and they shot that on a greenscreen stage. We did matte painting for the background, which was supposed to be in Times Square, and we had CG cars and a CG bus going by. We also had people walking past the window. We created a store front window behind that. That was probably the most challenging scene.”
—Glenn Allen, Visual Effects Supervisor, Brainstorm Digital
Director James Gray, known for his depictions of family dynamics, blocking the classroom sequence. (Photo: Anne Joyce. Courtesy of Focus Features)
The visual effects were completed over the course of three-to-four months. “I love working with James because he is such a cinema historian and he cares so deeply about his work,” Allen observes. “I haven’t worked with a director quite like him. Armageddon Time is so intimate and autobiographical. I loved the script. Production Designer Happy Massee did a great job. A lot of times he’d dress pieces of the set and we would extend it. A lot of the work we do is extending what they build on the set. If someone notices where the virtual effects are, then we aren’t doing our job. I think it turned out really well.”
BEAUTY BECOMES TRANSFORMED IN SHE-HULK BY DIGITAL DOMAIN December 6,2022
By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Digital Domain.
The offices were essentially glass boxes that were constantly influenced by the weather, which made it hard to get the green tone of She-Hulk to behave correctly.
As much as there was an irreverent attitude displayed by She-Hulk in the Disney+ series named after her, the female cousin of the original gamma ray-infused green monster was treated with the utmost respect by Digital Domain VFX Supervisor/Head of Animation Jan Philip Cramer. “Especially with me being a guy, we weren’t initially aware how challenging this would become,” Cramer admits. “She-Hulk is a female character who is bubbly, positive, happy, uses makeup, and wears high heals and a lot of different outfits. Makeup has such a huge affect on your appearance. There were lots of things to learn. There are certain colors that don’t go well together with the green. One of the problems for us was how much subsurface you would see coming through, which would be sometimes covered up with makeup. Similarly with rouge, we would put some lightly on She-Hulk because we had to be so careful that her overall skin tone would stay untouched. If the skin appeared to be too smooth because of the additional layer of foundation on top of it, that would not help us because she would look CG. We would remove that and try to find a balance.”
Unlike Hulk, bodybuilders were not referenced for She-Hulk, as the character is not meant to be a muscular person.
“Early on we were going for a more muscular appearance [for She-Hulk], but it was locked into a specific time range in the comic books. She is not meant to be a muscular person. The whole story is about Jennifer Walters struggling with the fact that she becomes pretty when transforming into She-Hulk and everybody wants the prettier version of her. There’s this great scene in the beginning from Wētā FX where Jennifer transforms, and can do it just like that, while Hulk took years to figure out how to maintain himself.”
—Jan Philip Cramer, VFX Supervisor/Head of Animation, Digital Domain
Interaction with other characters was achieved by Tatiana Maslany wearing specially designed outfits on set to give her the proper proportions.
Making a cameo from the MCU is Wong, portrayed by Benedict Wong, who is defended by She-Hulk.

It was important to avoid the makeup causing the skin to look too smooth, otherwise She-Hulk would literally look like a CG character.
Unlike her male counterpart, She-Hulk was not modeled on a bodybuilder physique. “Early on we were going for a more muscular appearance, but it was locked into a specific time range in the comic books,” Cramer reveals. “She is not meant to be a muscular person. The whole story is about Jennifer Walters struggling with the fact that she becomes pretty when transforming into She-Hulk and everybody wants the prettier version of her. There’s this great scene in the beginning from Wētā FX where Jennifer transforms, and can do it just like that, while Hulk took years to figure out how to maintain himself.” Then there was the extensive wardrobe which influenced the physique of She-Hulk. “We had 12 different outfits,” Cramer notes. “She needed to be wearing different bras. For us, this is something we don’t talk about so much. We had to develop a shape-wear system, because we realized that when you wear a pyjama or tight-fitting legging or ball gown, the body is a completely different shape because of the outside forces. We were running a muscle system that we needed to maintain. It was a huge problem for us because we had a 1,000 shots that needed to get approved in animation, so we had to develop a pre-simulated look so we would know, ‘This is how all of these different areas of her body would behave once it was simulated.’”
As the series progresses, Jennifer Walters has custom-made outfits that incorporate spandex to accommodate her transformations into She-Hulk.
“We had 12 different outfits. She needed to be wearing different bras. For us, this is something we don’t talk about so much. We had to develop a shape-wear system, because we realized that when you wear a pyjama or tight-fitting legging or ball gown, the body is a completely different shape because of the outside forces. We were running a muscle system that we needed to maintain. It was a huge problem for us because we had a 1,000 shots that needed to get approved in animation, so we had to develop a pre-simulated look so we would know, ‘This is how all of these different areas of her body would behave once it was simulated.’”
—Jan Philip Cramer, VFX Supervisor/Head of Animation, Digital Domain
Risers were placed on set to give Tatiana Maslany the proper height, and two head-mounted cameras provided the necessary facial capture footage.
Everything was about beauty. “The hair had to move nicely, behave beautifully and look realistic,” Cramer states. “We spent six months on hairstyles early on because we wanted this big hair from those comic books from the 1970s range. It was a big simulation challenge. We were meant to have a shimmering coral look. She had lowlights that go into bright tips. Her hair was so dense. We had different ponytails and long hair.” Tatiana Maslany, who portrays She-Hulk, is 5’4” while her superhero persona is 6’7”. “Tatiana would walk on risers on set, and we would use that motion on She-Hulk to start with. When she sits down, it’s one to one.” For interaction, different busts were made for Maslany to wear. She could have a football player outfit on, so she needed to have the correct proportions when people hug her. For fights, we would have a 6’5” stand-in, Maliah Arrayah. For any given shot we would do a grey ball pass, a bust pass, which is a beautiful maquette of her, and then we would have a pass of Maliah, who was almost the size in a muscle suit. At times. she would be fully painted green. It was helpful to understand the dimensions.”
To maintain the proper eyeline for cast members, a cut-out of the face of She-Hulk was placed at the right height on the motion capture suit worn by Tatiana Maslany.
Digital Domain had to produce 42 minutes of character animation of She-Hulk.

“For interaction, different busts were made for [Tatiana Maslany, who portrays She-Hulk] to wear. She could have a football player outfit on, so she needed to have the correct proportions when people hug her. For fights, we would have a 6’5” stand-in, Maliah Arrayah. For any given shot we would do a grey ball pass, a bust pass, which is a beautiful maquette of her, and then we would have a pass of Maliah, who was almost the size in a muscle suit. At times, she would be fully painted green. It was helpful to understand the dimensions.”
—Jan Philip Cramer, VFX Supervisor/Head of Animation, Digital Domain
No matter the lighting conditions, the green skin tone of She-Hulk needed to remain consistent.
Everything was about beauty when it came to the character of She-Hulk.
A bunch of walk cycles for She-Hulk were captured in September 2020. “We had picked all of the props that we had seen that She-Hulk has in those comic book covers,” Cramer describes. “The mocap stage had all of the props, and we said, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ I just wanted to try it to see what Tatiana would do and give her some time to play with the character. She-Hulk gets drunk and would do all of these different fun things. I edited a short piece out of that like a music video of She-Hulk, and we did that as an initial test. There is one shot in the room of feelings that is two and a half minutes of She-Hulk talking on her cellphone and starting to cry. We had captured a test version early on during that capture session. That was the second test – a 30-second dialogue bit talking about something serious. Those were our big tests. It helps a lot to have something to show everybody, as it defines the character even if it’s not the final version. The actor can see this and go, ‘Okay,’ before going on set.”
For the sitting shots, the performance of She-Hulk is one-to-one with Tatiana Maslany.
A special shape-wear program was created to deal with how the different pieces of clothing impact the physique of She-Hulk.
“To make a character for [Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios], we weren’t too sure it would stick. The robot is a little bit older and rattles. Two years ago, we started the character tests for K.E.V.I.N., and the funny bit is that we never got big changes or pushback. I believe it was constantly shown to Kevin Feige because everybody was nervous that if somebody would say ‘no,’ it might be him. He was cool with everything. If you listen to the dialogue in that section, it’s constantly making fun of Marvel Studios and storylines and Marvel Studios movies.”
—Jan Philip Cramer, VFX Supervisor/Head of Animation, Digital Domain
Forty-two minutes of CG character animation had to be produced by Digital Domain. “On this we used heavily Masquerade 2.0,” Cramer explains. “With Thanos, we would get from Medusa a minute of training material of super dense geometry of different dialogue sections, and that was our training material. We did the same at the beginning with She-Hulk, but we have a way with Masquerade 2.0 to generate our own training material based on the 2D material that we’re getting from the helmet cameras, and that is equal or better than Medusa for us. One thing that you need to understand is that Thanos is angry most of the time; he’s not this bubbly, joking-around personality that Tatiana was. This was a massive problem for us. Besides She-Hulk being 10% larger, green and all of the makeup, I was talking about when you see the side-by-side of our performance, it is one-to-one with Tatiana.” The fourth wall gets broken with She-Hulk speaking directly to the viewer. “It was incredibly hard,” Cramer confirms. “The eyelines were horrible. We needed to lock an eyeline so that everybody thinks that she is looking at them in the camera. Those are beautiful performances.” The performance transfer program Charlatan assisted with the She-Hulk transformations. Comments Cramer, “We shoot the actor under numerous lighting conditions and use machine learning to regenerate her face a la deepfake, and use that as a transition element. To get from plate to She-Hulk, you would run Charlatan in between so that you have a continuous photoreal look.”
Unlike Thanos, She-Hulk had to convey a vast array of facial expressions.
Appearing as a guest on the show is a robotic version of Kevin Feige, who is President of Marvel Studios.
Making a surprise appearance in the streaming series is the robotic version of Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios, who is credited for orchestrating the blockbuster success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “To make a character for him, we weren’t too sure it would stick,” Cramer remarks. “The robot is a little bit older and rattles. Two years ago, we started the character tests for K.E.V.I.N., and the funny bit is that we never got big changes or pushback. I believe it was constantly shown to Kevin Feige because everybody was nervous that if somebody would say ‘no,’ it might be him. He was cool with everything. If you listen to the dialogue in that section, it’s constantly making fun of Marvel Studios and storylines and Marvel Studios movies.” Reality intersecting with the MCU was an enjoyable aspect of the show. “Going meta for me was so fun,” Cramer offers. “There is a moment in the last episode when She-Hulk goes into the writers’ room and goes through the Marvel Studios lobby. These are all of the real areas that you would go into to talk to people there. It’s so bizarre having been there and having the character sign into the iPad where I signed in. That was so great!”
WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY GETS HEADY ABOUT DEEPFAKES November 29,2022
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of VFX Los Angeles
Daniel Radcliffe’s face was inserted into the actual “Eat It” music video performance footage of Yankovic with a deepfake face replacement of Radcliffe onto the real body of Weird Al. VFX LA provided the effects.
Getting some serious visual effects work from VFX LA and Wolverine VFX is the irreverent biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, directed by Eric Appel and starring Daniel Radcliffe as the real-life accordionist who became famous in the 1980s for his song parodies that include “Like a Surgeon,” “Eat It” and “My Bologna.” The team at VFX LA consisted of a trio of visual effects supervisors – Charles H. Joslain, Izzy Traub and Joseph Sperber – who were responsible of 45 shots, with most challenging being concert scenes where there was no actual stadium and doing a deepfake face replacement of Radcliffe onto the real body of Yankovic for another sequence.
Daniel Radcliffe stars as the real-life accordionist who became famous in the 1980s for his hit parodies “Like a Surgeon,” “Eat It” and “My Bologna.” Rainn Wilson, right, plays Dr. Demento.
Post-production lasted two months starting in June 2022, and the world premiere occurred in September 2022 as part of the 47th Toronto International Film Festival. “We had about 15 people on our team, and there were certain aspects that we thought were going to be easier and they weren’t,” Traub states. “We had to ask for a week extension, and they had built in some time contingencies into their own schedule so were able to give it to us.” Visual effects have become a more affordable tool for independent productions. “What can be done now could not been done five years ago, especially when you take into account of having the majority of everything cloud-based. Since the pandemic, an entire [stretch of] time has gone offline, which in turn has enabled us to offer our services at a much better price than we normally could, simply because you’re not paying the overhead that goes along with having a big studio.”
“That was part of the comedy of [the ‘Eat It’ music video]. They wanted the face to be manipulated and for the body itself be straight-up Weird Al. We trained our model of Daniel [Radcliffe’s] face on the footage of Weird Al and rotoscoped, cleaned everything up, did a bunch of other compositing stuff to it, and added the glasses back in.”
—Izzy Traub, Visual Effects Supervisor
Pre-trained footage of the Daniel Radcliffe face.
Radcliffe’s face inserted onto the original 16 celluloid footage with 3D glasses added afterwards.
Numerous references were provided by the director. “The name of the game was to get first drafts in front of Eric as quickly as possible,” Traub notes. “The best examples of look development were the CG stadium and crowd simulations we did. The first draft was, ‘Here’s the framing, layout and camera position, then get that signed off, and from there develop the look further with colors, lighting, textures and animation. Eric was thorough with what he wanted, so we had a good idea of the placement of everything, His feedback was extremely concise. We used one of the shots for look development and went through four different revisions, which is not a lot at all. From there, we replicated that look across the other shots and might have gone through one or two revisions.” The aesthetic was determined by the footage rather than studying previous projects by Appel. “We watched the film beforehand, looked at the lighting, and they had a LUT that was given to us.”
“We had access to Daniel [Radcliffe], had him look into a camera for 20 minutes and do facial expressions, but we had to create the [AI] training set ourselves from the footage in the film. Things were relatively straightforward until we composited it and saw that Daniel’s glasses aren’t working well because he’s turning his head and there’s parallax between the glasses and his actual face. We brought any tracking we could into Maya, lined up the glasses, and then manually hand-tracked those glasses to Daniel’s face. We added additional reflections to the glasses to cover up some of the cleanup work there.”
—Izzy Traub, Visual Effects Supervisor
Special attention had to be paid to the hair of the CG crowd because of concert lighting.
No body alterations were done in CG for the deepfake shots, which saw Radcliffe’s face inserted into the actual “Eat It” music video performance footage of Yankovic. “That was part of the comedy of it,” Traub remarks. “They wanted the face to be manipulated and for the body itself be straight-up Weird Al. We trained our model of Daniel’s face on the footage of Weird Al and rotoscoped, cleaned everything up, did a bunch of other compositing stuff to it, and added the glasses back in.” A data set had to be created to train the AI. Comments Traub, “Normally, we would have had access to Daniel, and had him look into a camera for 20 minutes and do facial expressions, but we had to create the training set ourselves from the footage in the film. Things were relatively straightforward until we composited it and saw that Daniel’s glasses aren’t working well because he’s turning his head and there’s parallax between the glasses and his actual face. We brought any tracking we could into Maya, lined up the glasses, and then manually hand-tracked those glasses to Daniel’s face. We added additional reflections to the glasses to cover up some of the cleanup work there.”
“You can see in the deepfake, it struggles with realistic eyes… Depending on the footage, movement, lighting and training data, the neuro network will respond differently. You’re doing trial and error. In this particular case, the eyes looked quite big and difficult to truly clean up. The 3D lenses [on the glasses] helped to integrate the face with our shot.”
—Izzy Traub, Visual Effects Supervisor
Side-by-side comparisons of the original 16mm celluloids and the final deepfake versions.
The visual aesthetic was determined by the footage of the movie rather than studying previous projects by director Eric Appel.
One thing that deepfakes do not do well are eyeballs. “You can see in the deepfake, it struggles with realistic eyes, and this is our third deepfake project in 2022,” Traub observes. “Depending on the footage, movement, lighting and training data, the neuro network will respond differently. You’re doing trial and error. In this particular case, the eyes looked quite big and difficult to truly clean up. The 3D lenses [on the glasses] helped to integrate the face with our shot.” VFX LA has its own custom neuro network for deepfakes. Explains Traub, “We were using DeepFaceLab on other projects, which is a main tool. Then we built our own Neural Network. However, a talented artist on this was responsible for using his own tech that he had constructed over the last couple of years. From there, the model output a face layer that then goes into After Effects for all of the compositing and clean up. Sometimes when Weird Al would turn his head, we weren’t actually able to use the deepfake. We were able to grab frames of Daniel [Radcliffe’s] face and paint them onto Weird Al’s face so that when he turned, we could mask that portion of Daniel’s face away to avoid any sort of weird morphing with the deepfake.”
The trickiest shots to achieve were the CG crowd shots for the concert.
“We were using DeepFaceLab on other projects, which is a main tool. Then we built our own Neural Network. However, a talented artist on this was responsible for using his own tech that he had constructed over the last couple of years. From there, the model output a face layer that then goes into After Effects for all of the compositing and clean up. Sometimes when Weird Al would turn his head, we weren’t actually able to use the deepfake. We were able to grab frames of Daniel’s face and paint them onto Weird Al’s face so that when he turned, we could mask that portion of Daniel’s face away to avoid any sort of weird morphing with the deepfake.”
—Izzy Traub, Visual Effects Supervisor
Only one panel was physically constructed for the awards ceremony set, with the remainder constructed in Photoshop.
Initially, it was thought that the deepfake would be trickiest to achieve, but in fact that distinction belonged to the CG crowd shots. “One of our artists recorded themselves dancing in a mocap suit for roughly an hour,” Traub remarks. “We took that animation, spliced it up, applied it to a bunch of different characters that we had in Maya and replicated it.” Variants were built into the CG characters such as different hair movements. “We were able to get away with 2K and 4K textures rather than 8K on our characters,” Traub adds. “The hair had to look decent and took more time than we were expecting, simply because we have lights moving across them from time to time, so you do see some of the detail in the hair.” More audience members were added in the background for the awards ceremony. “They had shot a lot of those plates on set, so we were able to use that for the modeling,” Traub states. “We took the plates, combined them and put those people in the back. Only one panel was built, so we had to extend the set. We took what they had for the back plate for the set, made our own in Photoshop, and that was it!”
ANIMATING TO THE RHYTHM OF ENTERGALACTIC November 15,2022
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Netflix.
For the cosmic scenes, an abstract rather then realistic approach was adopted.
Drugs, love and murderous artwork are all part of the world of Entergalactic, an animated feature created by American rapper Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi and producer Kenya Barris and directed by Fletcher Moules for Netflix.
The creative directive for DNEG Animation was to produce a painterly aesthetic. “When I first saw the artwork, I almost fell off my chair,” laughs Archie Donato, Visual Effects Supervisor at DNEG Animation. “I spent 17 years at DreamWorks, and while I loved working there, there was very little experimentation with the push look. I was genuinely craving not only the artistic freedom, but also the challenge of, ‘How the heck are we going to do this?’” Communication was a big factor, especially with everyone working remotely because of the pandemic. “How do we create this world that is made in CG that looks 2D and a 2.5D somewhere in the middle?” states Chrissy Metge, Digital Producer at DNEG Animation. “The anticipation was it would be hard to communicate how we’re achieving this within the time frame that we had available, and it was hard to communicate between ourselves and client, the client back with Netflix and vice versa. At the end of the day, it came down to trusting all of us, trying things out and creating a safe space.”
Reds and greens were prominent colors for the Chinatown environment.
“The energy of Entergalactic was special. The music played a big part in it… It’s important that the acting and the emotional response from the characters hit with the music. … We made sure that the animation was working nicely, but when I saw the score, it definitely made the shot a hundred times better. There were a few sequences where we didn’t know where the beat hit. Fletch would say, ‘If you hit exactly that frame, you’ll be on the beat.’ It was really hard.”
—Chrissy Metge, Digital Producer, DNEG Animation
One of the motion tests involved three characters sitting at a table together.
The red in the hoodie was kept to ground Jabari in the Nightmare sequence.
“The director said to me on the first meeting, ‘I want you to take the audience into the painting,’ My response was, ‘No worries. We’ll do that.’” A test was done to turn a concept painting of Chinatown into a 3D set. “I wanted to make it so when you’re looking at the painting it came alive. We used Mari for all our paint work along with Nuke for compositing. The painting was broken down into individual Photoshop layers and those were used as a reference to paint our 3D versions. We painted the missing parts that you don’t see in a 2D painting so [the virtual camera could move freely in the environment].”
—Archie Donato, Visual Effects Supervisor, DNEG Animation
The love interest in Entergalactic is the neighborly photographer Meadow.
It was important to make viewers forget that they are watching animated characters.
Inspiration for animation style did not come from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. “The big difference is that Entergalactic is intimate while Spider-Verse is more dynamic,” notes Kapil Sharma, Animation Director at DNEG Animation. “I Lost My Body was one of the things that inspired us.” Establishing the visual guidelines were the paintings of Art Director Michal Sawtyruk. “The director said to me on the first meeting, ‘I want you to take the audience into the painting,’” recalls Donato, who at the time did not fully realize the extent of the request being made by Fletcher Moules. “My response was, ‘No worries. We’ll do that.’” A test was done to turn a concept painting of Chinatown into a 3D set. “I wanted to make it so when you’re looking at the painting it came alive,” Donato notes. “We used Mari for all our paint work along with Nuke for compositing. The painting was broken down into individual Photoshop layers, and those were used as a reference to paint our 3D versions. We painted the missing parts that you don’t see in a 2D painting so [the virtual camera could move freely in the environment].”
The clothing down to the t-shirts were carefully considered for each shot.
Jabari takes a selfie with Meadow.
Google Maps was consulted to construct New York City in a realistic manner.
The faces of characters were designed to resemble their voice actor counterparts.
A new pipeline had to be completely reconfigured with shaders being rewritten. “It was a mixed bag,” Donato explains. “For some effects we used Houdini, but the difficulty of it was that they wanted to make the 3D animated effects look 2D. Some of it was truly hand-drawn animation. We would scan line art and mix and match the 3D effects with the 2D effects together. Nuke was a huge part in putting the drawings back into the film because they needed to be recolored or made smokier for transparency reasons. It was reinventing the wheel from scratch in a lot of ways.” Simulations were not straightforward. “Kapil was animating on variable steps so we were not just locked to 2s,” Donato adds. “We were doing 2s, 3s and 4s. At times we had shots that were 8s, which I have literally rarely ever seen. That made our effects life absolute misery because effects cannot simulate steps. They had to come up with the tools to simulate normally and then basically start to skip around and do variable rates with the simulations. It was a major challenge.”
It was important for animators to go for gestures that were genuine rather than over the top.
Various facial expressions developed for Meadow.
Over-the-top physical gestures and facial expressions that are a trademark of animation were to be avoided. “We wanted the face to be organic,” Sharma notes. “Most of the heavy lifting was done with [the protagonist] Jabari. We spent quite a few weeks posing him. Once we knew how to deal with the character design and the art style of these faces, then it was a matter of doing different things with each character and showing them to Fletch. We wanted to make sure that the characters come close to the real actors. You’re trying to copy exactly the same but have its own look.” Most of the time restraint was shown for the BMX riding sequences. “It was something that Fletch was quite keen about,” Sharma remarks. “Right away, I was proposing, ‘Lets go crazy with the stunts, but we had to rethink because Jabari rides mostly under the influence, so it’s in a very chilled manner. Fletch has friends with BMXs. so he had a good knowledge about that as well. With the BMX, we were pushing the limits [at times], but we didn’t want to do that with the actual performance [of the characters]. We wanted to make sure that we got a genuine performance [so audiences forget that they are watching animated characters].”
“We wanted the face to be organic. Most of the heavy lifting was done with [the protagonist] Jabari. We spent quite a few weeks posing him. Once we knew how to deal with the character design and the art style of these faces, then it was a matter of doing different things with each character and showing them to Fletch [director Fletcher Moules]. We wanted to make sure that the characters come close to the real actors. You’re trying to copy [them] exactly the same but have [the character have] its own look.”
—Kapil Sharma, Animation Director, DNEG Animation

Jabari is talented in maneuvering his BMX through the streets of New York City. Most of the time he rides in chilled manner because he is under the influence.
Driving the narrative is the eighth studio album by Kid Cudi, which shares the same name as the animated feature. “The energy of Entergalactic was special,” Metge observes. “The music played a big part in it, and for us it was difficult because we didn’t have the music because of security.”A beat sheet was provided instead. “It’s important that the acting and the emotional response from the characters hit with the music,” Metge states. “We had to spend more time in the edit and come back to the crew at DNEG Animation, then get back into edit and then show it to Kid Cudi, and doing that loop again.” For the animation team, it was a guessing game. “We made sure that the animation was working nicely,” Metge adds, “but when I saw the score, it definitely made the shot a hundred times better. There were a few sequences where we didn’t know where the beat hit. Fletch would say, ‘If you hit exactly that frame, you’ll be on the beat.’ It was really hard.”
Paintings by Art Director Michal Sawtyruk established the overall visual aesthetic.
Along with the grounded real-life moments, there are the cosmic and nightmare sequences. “It was like several movies within a movie when you think about it in terms of styles,” Donato observes. “The Nightmare has a completely different feel and style to the movie all together. Jabari is being chased by his own artwork that wants to kill him. It’s a tricky idea. The rest of the movie had static, locked-off cameras, so we didn’t go into Spider-Verse territory where you’re flying off of the buildings. The Nightmare was the exact opposite. We wanted crazy cameras. It’s in black and white, with the only color being the red hoodie worn by Jabari.” The drug-induced travels through the galaxy were treated as music video and not the usual representation of what has been captured by NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. Explains Donato, “The director said, ‘I want it to look like somebody painted it and we’re flying through the actual painting.’ I was sitting with my team and telling them, ‘This cloud will go on this layer, and [in that layer] we need the meteors flying by fast.’ Everything was broken into three dimensions.”
Shaders were written to make the 3D-animated effects look flatter and in-camera.
The Nightmare sequence has an entirely different camera language and color palette than the rest of the movie.
“The Nightmare has a completely different feel and style to the movie all together. Jabari is being chased by his own artwork that wants to kill him. It’s a tricky idea. The rest of the movie had static, locked-off cameras, so we didn’t go into Spider-Verse territory where you’re flying off of the buildings. The Nightmare was the exact opposite. We wanted crazy cameras. It’s in black and white, with the only color being the red hoodie worn by Jabari. … The director said, ‘I want it to look like somebody painted it and we’re flying through the actual painting.’ I was sitting with my team and telling them, ‘This cloud will go on this layer, and [in that layer] we need the meteors flying by fast.’”
—Archie Donato, Visual Effects Supervisor, DNEG Animation

Top: 3D buildings found in Chinatown. Bottom: Textured models of buildings in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City.
There were negatives and positives being a pandemic production with everyone working remotely. “I’m a mum,” Metge states. “I started on the show when [son] Hunter was four and he’s seven now. From that standpoint, it was nice to be around for him, but the human nature of it was interesting because we are more in each others’ lives. Everybody knew when he had his bath time or dinner! You got to meet everyone’s dogs and cats, loved ones and in between. We were suddenly thrust into each other’s worlds in way that I don’t think we’ve ever been part of before. Because of that and all of the different time zones, the show is successful, because it brought all of us close together. We were in each other’s lives whether we wanted to be or not! We bonded as a fabulous team should bond. We all went out to make sure it was an amazing experience, even if it was virtual.”
GOOD, BAD OR IN-BETWEEN IS A QUESTION OF LUCK November 8,2022
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Apple Inc. and Skydance Animation.
A major effects challenge was making sure the jacket worn by Babe fit properly on her massive body.
One can honestly say that Luck prevailed despite the pandemic. The Skydance Animation and AppleTV+ movie deals with Sam Greenfield, who constantly has to overcome misfortunes and accidentally discovers a realm that manufactures and randomly distributes good and bad luck to the human world.
Bob and Sam take a ride on one of the many mechanical platforms that enable inhabitants to travel around the Land of Luck.
“For me, I needed to be reviewing the assets on the big screen before we were going into a lighting process, so I went back to the office myself in 2020, with some of the crew eventually joining me,” recounts Visual Effects Supervisor Javier Romero (Wonder Park), who was part of the Madrid team while other crew members were situated in Connecticut and Los Angeles. “That was the biggest thing. The second, animation is a collaborative effort and people behaved amazingly working from home; however, sometimes I think you work faster when you have everybody in the same room. It was hard.”
The real world had a more muted and desaturated color palette.
Special attention was paid to the eyes of Bob to make the direction he was looking at more readable.
Fred Warter imagined the Land of Luck as being like a coin with two cities that mirror each other on either side.
The hiring of John Lasseter as the Head of Animation at Skydance meant that the workflow had to be altered. “The way that John works is amazing,” Romero notes. “It’s always about getting the best note for the shot or movie. Sometimes you don’t know when that note is going to come. We had to do a lot of changes to the pipeline to accommodate this workflow. We also wanted to review the input from every department at the same time, whatever the sequence. Maya was programmed to accommodate procedural workflows favored by the other departments, such as Solaris and Katana.” Brought on to be the director was Peggy Holmes. “Peggy had an amazing team of storyboard artists working internally in Los Angeles,” Romero adds.
“The [good and bad luck] crystals go into the randomizer and are broken into dust. There is a stylization in terms of how you make that final effect for this randomizer image. Sometimes we need to be modifying the timing because this is animation. We apply weight, overlapping and silhouettes to those effects. It gets complex, but you have to keep it serving the story rather than getting yourself in the rabbit hole because it can be distracting. Creating hyper-realistic physics, in the case of light or how light travels and reflects, is important but can be expensive.
—Javier Romero, Visual Effects Supervisor
Concept art of the randomizer by Ernie Rinard examining the various shapes it creates out of the good and bad luck crystals.

A lighting key by Dominique Luis that conveys the Bad Luck World as being a mysterious and scary industrial environment.
Production Designer Fred Warter envisioned the Land of Luck having two sides that mirror each other. “We started research as to how good luck fits into the world in different cultures,” Romero states. “One side is governed by bad luck, so everything breaks and the inhabitants adapt to it, but on the other side, the good luck inhabitants have never had bad luck, so they didn’t have to worry about it.” Even stylized worlds have to be grounded in something tangible. “If you have a character walking, you need to have the cloth moving properly because we have gravity in that particular world. There are some problems we don’t want to overcome. For example, there is a gravity shift when Sam and Bob go into Bad Luck that is not realistic, but the movie needs it. We discussed whether it should be physically correct or we should add some humor to it. The reverse gravity was directed by the animation, but then we started seeing different behaviors or results of the CFX that we wanted to foster. It took a while.”
A color key of the area in the Land of Luck known as In-Between, with a scale reference of Sam.
Despite the good and bad luck crystals being stylized, the particles had to have weight. “The crystals go into the randomizer and are broken into dust,” Romero remarks. “There is a stylization in terms of how you make that final effect for this randomizer image. Sometimes we need to be modifying the timing because this is animation. We apply weight, overlapping and silhouettes to those effects. It gets complex, but you have to keep it serving the story rather than getting yourself in the rabbit hole because it can be distracting. Creating hyper-realistic physics, in the case of light or how light travels and reflects, is important but can be expensive. We were applying internal elements to some shots to be able to fake refractions, or even sometimes we were toning down the refractions because it was getting distracting.”
Animals that represent good luck from different cultures populate the Land of Luck.
Exploring different lighting scenarios for Babe’s office by Dominique Louis
“There are some problems we don’t want to overcome. For example, there is a gravity shift when Sam and Bob go into Bad Luck that is not realistic, but the movie needs it. We discussed whether it should be physically correct or we should add some humor to it. The reverse gravity was directed by the animation, but then we started seeing different behaviors or results of the CFX that we wanted to foster. It took awhile.”
—Javier Romero, Visual Effects Supervisor
Babe the Dragon and Jeff the Unicorn were special challenges. “The biggest two questions we posed about the dragon were, number one, do we need to have complex dynamics on it or is it going to be realistic?” Romero explains. “Number two was, how are we going to make this jacket work through the movie because it is massive? I wouldn’t want that to be distracting us. In terms of deformations, we decided to rely on the animation team. We spent a lot of time to make the volume preservation work properly. Jeff is a complex character. How many wrinkles do you want on the hair? We did a hybrid approach with Jeff, in terms of animation, and had some controls to modify the silhouette of the long hair that he has, and CFX had an extra subtle layer, which was not distracting, on top of it.”
An original dragon concept art by Lutgardo Fernandez.

Max Narciso reconceptualizes Babe from scratch with the help of Production Designer Fred Warter.
“Instead of [Bob’s feline eyes] being concave, we wanted to see convex [eyes] because eye direction reads better that way. The other question was how much reflection do we want in those eyes? Do we want them to look real or not? Finding the spot in the reflections was something we spent a lot of time working on. The last was making sure that the direction the eyes were pointing was respected.”
—Javier Romero, Visual Effects Supervisor
A storyboard demonstrating how Bob is able to defy gravity in the real world because of being a creature from the Land of Luck.
Demonstration of the shot development process from storyboard, layout, animation and lighting.

Sam’s long hair was difficult. “There was a lot of hair that it was affecting the silhouette of her hair,” Romero states. “We developed tools that were given to the animation team to give silhouette guidance to the CFX group, such as how much hair was covering the face.” Attention was paid to the feline eyes of Bob. “Instead of being concave,” Romero observes, “we wanted to see convex [eyes] because eye direction reads better that way. The other question was how much reflection do we want in those eyes? Do we want them to look real or not? Finding the spot in the reflections was something we spent a lot of time working on. The last was making sure that the direction the eyes were pointing was respected.”
Custom tools were written to minimize the impact of Sam’s long hair on her silhouette.
“The challenge with that [city] sequence [where Sam lives and chases Bob] was the shot planning, How do we build the city and where you want to spend the money to build the actual city? You can go crazy and say that I’m going to build a super city and then you don’t shoot there. We spent a lot of time in previs and layout to define the action with editorial because they would be cutting that scenery to work. Sam and Bob are running around different places in the city. There are a lot of cheats there. There were continuous storyboards.”
—Javier Romero, Visual Effects Supervisor
Size and scale was a major concern in particular maintaining the silhouette of Babe when she is talking to characters significantly smaller then herself, like Sam.
Jeff the Unicorn used a rig similar for the human characters, as he was treated as a bipedal.
Good and bad luck are being projected from the randomizer situated in the Land of Luck to the human world.
Boston was a primary reference for the city where Sam lives and subsequently gives chase to Bob. “The challenge with that sequence was the shot planning,” Romero notes. “How do we build the city and where you want to spend the money to build the actual city? You can go crazy and say that I’m going to build a super city and then you don’t shoot there. We spent a lot of time in previs and layout to define the action with editorial because they would be cutting that scenery to work. Sam and Bob are running around different places in the city. There are a lot of cheats there. There were continuous storyboards.” Vegetation had to be set dressed. “We started by deciding how much vegetation we had to build and instanced a number of different trees. When we went to the Land of Luck, the trees that were close were more stylized, while for some of the faraway elements we used trees from the city. We always try to find a best approach for a challenge because sometimes it can be overkill.”
THE ORVILLE GETS SERIOUS ABOUT CINEMATIC VFX AND NO-JOKE ACTION November 1,2022
By CHRIS McGOWAN
Images courtesy of FuseFX and Hulu.
Commander Kelly Grayson (Adrianne Palicki) and Charly Burke (Anne Winters) in their flying suits for a crucial mission during the battle on Draconis 427.
For its third season, The Orville got a little more serious and a lot more expansive. In 2017, the sci-fi comedy series started out as something of a Star Trek homage/parody with a lot of broad humor. During Season 2 it evolved into a bolder sci-fi adventure with its own singular personality, and that transformation has continued into the third season, The Orville: New Horizons. There is still abundant humor aboard the USS Orville, but much of it now is more understated, and the show has long action sequences with no jokes at all. Along the way, the series tackles serious topics such as ostracism, gender identity and xenophobia, in a sci-fi setting. Accompanying the evolving narrative tone is a significant boost in the production values of the show, especially in its complex visual effects.

In The Orville Season 3, Captain Ed Mercer (Seth MacFarlane), Charly Burke (Anne Winters) and three Planetary Union officials fly to the Krill city.
“The entire season eclipsed all other seasons by far when it came to budgets, scope and complexity of shots. Every shot felt three times bigger than in past seasons,” says Tommy Tran, Visual Effects Supervisor for FuseFX, which was the leading VFX studio for Season 3 of The Orville. “Not only were the space battles grander, but also many new environments were introduced.”
“The entire season eclipsed all other seasons by far when it came to budgets, scope and complexity of shots. Every shot felt three times bigger than in past seasons, Not only were the space battles grander, but also many new environments were introduced.”
—Tommy Tran, Visual Effects Supervisor, FuseFX
Looking through the viewport at the Krill city. Its layout started as previs from Brandon Fayette, the production side VFX Supervisor.

The series ran on Fox for its first two seasons, then switched to Hulu for Season 3 (it now streams on both Hulu and Disney+). The show follows the adventures of a Planetary Union ship in the 25th century, with a cast that includes creator and co-writer Seth MacFarlane (Capt. Ed Mercer), Adrianne Palicki (Commander Kelly Grayson), Penny Jerald (Doctor Claire Finn), Peter Macon (Lt. Commander Bortus) and Scott Grimes (Lt. Gordon Malloy).
A political rally takes place in the Krill city marketplace, which combined a practical set with CGI buildings, bridges, billboards and aerial vehicles.
Besides FuseFX, more than a dozen VFX studios helped with 7,000+ VFX shots spread over 10 episodes. Ingenuity Studios, Crafty Apes, Barnstorm Studios, Pixomondo and Tippett Studio also contributed some key work. Tran comments, “Brooke Noska [production side VFX Producer/Co-VFX Supervisor] deserves all the credit for finding the multitude of other vendors to finish the season on time. I don’t know how she did it because, as some of us know, post-COVID, the flood of VFX work had pretty much saturated all facilities with projects around the globe. So, to get a new vendor on board, acclimate them to a three-seasons-old pipeline and give them very complex sequences was no easy task. To me, her new job title should be ‘miracle worker.’”
The Krill city on planet Krill. Patrick Horne, a CG Supervisor, populated it with innumerable buildings, city centers, roadways, aqueducts and holographic billboards.
FuseFX went from a smaller role in Season 1 to becoming one of the major vendors in Season 2. Tran and Nosca (as Visual Effects Producer) were part of the team nominated for the 2019 Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for the episode “Identity Part II.” For Season 3, FuseFX alone worked on 2,100 shots that covered multiple space battles, the new Pterodon Union fighter, a USS Orville upgrade and various alien planets.
“Imagine [the Orville] flying into Jupiter’s storm eye. It was a massive undertaking by our 3D and FX departments led by Christian Gonzalez and Tyler Britton, respectively. Tons of CG hurricane-like vortexes surrounded by FX smoke sims accompanied by lightning and interactive lights made the Jovian sequence one of the most beautiful sequences of the season, in my mind.”
—Tommy Tran, Visual Effects Supervisor, FuseFX

FuseFX utilized deep learning to de-age country music legend Dolly Parton for a scene where her hologram talks to her fan, Heveena (Rena Owen), and performs the song “Try.”
The new environments were the biggest challenges for FuseFX. This included creating the Jovian planet, the Krill planet and the Science Outpost in Episode 9, according to Tran. For these achievements, “I have to give credit to Samantha Hernandez, our VFX Producer, and J.V. [Joseph Vincent] Pike and David Rey, two of our VFX/DFX Supervisors, for bearing so much of the workload.” Tran notes, “There were not only the artistic challenges of creating new worlds, but also something that few outside our industry understand, which is the sheer amount of data to manage and get rendered within the time constraints. Our environments were so massive that getting any given frame to render would sometimes take days, in the beginning anyway. This was something very worrisome to us towards the end of the season as the shots became more numerous and complex. Towards the end, through optimizing and pipeline adjustments, we managed to get render times down to a point where we were able to deliver on time.”
The Moclan Research Outpost on Draconis 427 was a major visual effects challenge for the FuseFX team.
Tran adds, “We often overlook the importance of pipelines and infrastructure when talking about visual effects. It’s so often just about the creatives and visuals, but without the support of FuseFx’s technical and resourcing departments, I don’t know if Season 3 could have been accomplished [with] the degree of success that it had.”
Lt. Gordon Malloy (Scott Grimes) pilots a Pterodon fighter, which was created for Season 3.
For Episode 1, the Orville encounters a Jovian (Jupiter-like) planet, which is an intriguing example of VFX planet-building and a treat for astronomy and space buffs. The Orville dives into the turbulent upper atmosphere of a gas giant in order to escape a pursuing vessel. “This was a fun one for us,” Tran says. The concept was “imagine flying into Jupiter’s storm eye.”
“[Concept for the Krill planet depicted] a vast, dark and dreary metropolis harkening to Blade Runner 2049 city sequences. The city layout came to us as previs from Brandon Fayette, the production side VFX Supervisor. It was a blueprint for the scale magnitude of the city. Then it was up to Patrick Horne, one of our CG Supervisors, to populate it with hundreds if not thousands of buildings, city centers, roadways, aqueducts and holographic billboards, using Clarisse to manage to build it all.”
—Tommy Tran, Visual Effects Supervisor, FuseFX
“It was a massive undertaking by our 3D and FX departments led by Christian Gonzalez and Tyler Britton, respectively,” Tran explains. “Tons of CG hurricane-like vortexes surrounded by FX smoke sims accompanied by lightning and interactive lights made the Jovian sequence one of the most beautiful sequences of the season, in my mind.”
Exterior views into the deck of the fully-crewed USS Orville set, finally enhanced with CG and dramatic lighting.
The dazzling visuals of the Krill planet began with a concept depicting “a vast, dark and dreary metropolis harkening to Blade Runner 2049 city sequences,” Tran recalls. “The city layout came to us as previs from Brandon Fayette, the production side VFX Supervisor [and part of the crew nominated for the 2019 Emmy]. It was a blueprint for the scale magnitude of the city. Then it was up to Patrick Horne, one of our CG Supervisors, to populate it with hundreds if not thousands of buildings, city centers, roadways, aqueducts and holographic billboards, using Clarisse to manage to build it all.”
Continues Tran, “Along with creating the city exterior, we made an all-CG Market Place set seamlessly integrated into the practical set built on stage. We took inspiration from the architectural language of the single-story set and built it to be an expansive multi-story city center, encompassing towering CG buildings, sky bridges, dozens of animated holographic billboards and aerial vehicles.”
An advanced alien on planet Narran 1 conjures up near-death fears for the crew, including Lt. Gordon Malloy (Scott Grimes), while held by this beast.
The surface of Gendal 3, another new planetary environment in the series, is seen in the holographic simulator on the ship in Episode 10. Lysella, a native of Sargus 4, wants to smuggle some advanced Orville tech to her home world, and Grayson shows her the danger of giving advanced technology to a civilization that’s not culturally ready for it. They see a thriving Gendal 3 and then the same planet five years later, ruined and desolate, after the inhabitants had used Union tech to seek power over each other.”
“The Dolly [Parton] sequence was something new for the team. We were very accustomed to doing all things space-related, so when we got news of this, we had to take a step back to see what routes were available to us. One was to do the traditional full CG method, which would involve head scans, 3D match moving, modeling, rigging, look development and, trickiest of all, animation. This method would have been costly and time-consuming, and we didn’t have time on our side. So, in the end, we pitched to Seth a much faster, less expensive and somewhat unconventional method: deep learning. He agreed to a test and was over the moon when he saw the initial results. The rest is history.”
—Tommy Tran, Visual Effects Supervisor, FuseFX
The USS Orville had an entire makeover for Season 3, adding thousands of panel lines into its surface and textural detail to hold up to close-up shots.
The planet Draconis 427 and the Moclan Research Outpost featured a sequence that was by far the biggest and most challenging of the season, according to Tran. “Not only were all the environment build-outs gigantic, but we were running out of daylight to get the shots delivered,” he says. “We had to break up into separate teams to accomplish this within the given time frame. The sky and ground battle had to be developed in tandem, which took months of work just to get out of the development stage. By far, the base and the massive trench that ran through it took the most time and effort. Rendering such massive amounts of data made for some very long days and nights. We had to be certain that it had to be technically correct when anything hit the farm, knowing we had only so many chances to get all the shots sent to and back from the render farm. Even with all the optimizing of scripts, a massive internal farm and utilizing the Cloud, rendering it all [was] a close call.”
The USS Orville, ready to dock in Season 3. The series had bigger VFX budgets and complexity of shots compared to previous seasons.
Episode 8 (“Midnight Blue”) had a different type of VFX to deal with, that of de-aging Dolly Parton to present a 1990s version of the country music legend. Her hologram meets with the Moclan revolutionary author Heveena (Rena Owen), a huge fan of the singer. A convincingly younger Parton gives out some sage advice and performs the song “Try.” Tran comments, “The Dolly sequence was something new for the team. We were very accustomed to doing all things space-related, so when we got news of this, we had to take a step back to see what routes were available to us. One was to do the traditional full CG method, which would involve head scans, 3D match moving, modeling, rigging, look development and, trickiest of all, animation. This method would have been costly and time-consuming, and we didn’t have time on our side. So, in the end, we pitched to Seth a much faster, less expensive and somewhat unconventional method: deep learning. He agreed to a test and was over the moon when he saw the initial results. The rest is history.”
A fleet of Planetary Union ships, freshly designed for Season 3.
The ships also required a lot of intense care. “Pre-pandemic, we knew that the entire fleet would get a facelift for Season 3. I think that Seth wanted a whole new look and feel to the episodes and wanted the third season to be epic and memorable. We were concerned about how to do this development task alongside shot work. Tragically enough, the pandemic shutdown of production shooting enabled us to use this time to do the upgrades,” Tran says.
The VFX included a battle simulation with Kaylon vessels. Besides FuseFX, more than a dozen VFX studios helped with 7,000+ VFX shots spread over 10 episodes.
Continues Tran, “Since the pandemic happened early in the season, we did not have sequences to work on when production stopped shooting. So instead of working on VFX shots, we used the ‘downtime’ to retrofit the entire ship library since we did not need production footage for this. Our CG team led by John Rouse spent the good part of five months re-working the ship assets to bring them up to Season 3 expectations. The Orville and space station were the two more complex upgrades, which took the most time to do.”
The revamped USS Orville and space station were among the VFX highlights of Season 3.
The Orville’s exterior received an entire makeover. “We cut thousands of panel lines into its surface,” Tran explains. “We added textural detail to it to hold up to close-up ‘paint scraper’ shots. Its shader network was also revised to give its lighting a more cinematic feel than in past seasons. Also, we introduced an entirely new shuttle and Pterodon Fighter in this time frame.”
Planetary Union ships converge on debris of destroyed ships and a science station above planet Sabik 3.
Concludes Tran, “The highlight of Season 3 would have to have been the sense of accomplishment after all was said and done. I have to admit that it was not easy. The team and I spent the better part of three years on the project together, safe to say, the biggest of any of our careers. Not a week went by without a new challenge to overcome, whether it was creative, technical or time related. Although everyone on the team was wholeheartedly committed to the project, there comes a point in time when the soul is strong, but the flesh becomes weak. But at no time did we as a team surrender to the challenges. We kept pushing each other along and motivated each other when we sensed someone needed a breather. Together, we managed to deliver something to be proud of, something visually stunning and something seemingly unachievable by some. Only those involved will know how much effort, sacrifice and camaraderie was involved, which turned a group of colleagues into a family. I still have our daily meetings and reviews on my calendar as a reminder of my team, my family and the unforgettable journey we shared. I miss those days.”
LIVING WITH THE WALKING DEAD WITH THE MOMI AND GREG NICOTERO October 25,2022
The Walking Dead has played a major role in reviving the use of prosthetic makeup in television productions. (Image courtesy of AMC)
Getting up close and personal with zombies is never recommended unless you want to visit the Museum of the Moving Image’s exhibition Living With The Walking Dead, which can be viewed in Astoria, Queens, New York until January 22, 2023. In the section of the exhibition called ‘Making Up the Dead,’ the contributions of KNB EFX and Greg Nicotero, who serves as the Special Effects Makeup Supervisor, Executive Producer and Director for the series, are on display, in particular, busts for T-Dog (IronE Singleton) and Noah (Tyler James Williams), Negan Smith’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) baseball bat ‘Lucille,’ a life mask of Steven Yeun and an animatronic head for character Hershel Greene (Scott Wilson).
The television format has allowed for the exploration of zombies at different stages of decomposition and exposed to various types of environmental conditions. (Image courtesy of AMC)
“I came up with a bunch of ways to create silkscreen zombie masks that were designs that we did, printed them on silk, cut them out and made pullover masks. Then we would put wigs on them and put them way in the background. All of a sudden, we were able to populate a scene with a hundred zombies by using 60 or 70 of these background silk masks, and then the hero makeup would be up front. Even things as simple as that did a tremendous amount to allow us to fine-tune the process…”
—Greg Nicotero, Special Effects Makeup Supervisor/Executive Producer/Director
Michonne (Danai Gurira) fends off zombies in a shot taken from the AMC production of The Walking Dead. (Image courtesy of AMC)

“I have been doing this for a long time,” Nicotero states. “Even in my house, I have two rooms filled with memorabilia and props that I have saved or collected from movies. I have one of the ears from Reservoir Dogs and the crate from Creepshow. I have a lot of cool stuff that I have held onto because they have sentimental value to me.”
Greg Nicotero with one of his zombie creations. (Image courtesy of AMC)
Considering The Walking Dead deals with a virus that causes a pandemic, having to live through the global mayhem caused by COVID-19 was a surreal experience for Nicotero. “We spent years talking about how people would react and what would they do,” he recalls. “And when we found ourselves in the middle of toilet paper shortages, we all went, ‘Huh, never thought about that.’” The process had to be modified because of on-set protocols. Explains Nicotero, “The pandemic did alter certain ways of how we look at prosthetic makeup because there was a big concern about having people too close to each other for long periods of time. Also, putting contact lenses into performers was something they were not interested in doing. We worked quickly on our feet. I came up with a bunch of ways to create silkscreen zombie masks that were designs that we did, printed them on silk, cut them out and made pullover masks. Then we would put wigs on them and put them way in the background. All of a sudden, we were able to populate a scene with a hundred zombies by using 60 or 70 of these background silk masks, and then the hero makeup would be up front. Even things as simple as that did a tremendous amount to allow us to fine-tune the process, and get the makeup time down to a hour and 15 minutes versus two and a half hours.”
Nicotero serves as an Executive Producer, Special Effects Makeup Supervisor and Director on The Walking Dead. (Image courtesy of AMC)
Nine mannequins costumed as key characters in the show, including Rick, Morgan, Negan, Carol, Daryl, Maggie, Michonne, Father Gabriel and Jadis. (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)
“[W]hen we first premiered, I feel like it had a big hand in reintroducing prosthetic makeup to this generation of viewers. When I got into the industry in the late 1970s early 1980s, that’s what it was all about. It was Tom Savini, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin and Stan Winston, and you had The Thing, American Werewolf in London, Dawn of the Dead and The Howling, which were low budget and didn’t have big casts. The special effects were the star.”
—Greg Nicotero, Special Effects Makeup Supervisor/Executive Producer/Director
When pitching the original series, Executive Producers Frank Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd took four zombie busts made by Nicotero’s company KNB EFX to their meetings. “Frank and Gale did that because the big question mark over everybody’s heads was, ‘How are we going to do this?’” Nicotero recalls. “In Season 1, we put everything into doing as much practically as possible, including the blood rigs. We made little rigs that would clip onto the backs of the actors, that went to a tube with a bellow, and you would stomp on the bellows and the blood would spray out. There were a lot of practical head hits in the first season.” The process was changed for subsequent seasons. “We had to adapt a lot of what we do to be able to move fast. Plus, if you do a gag where there is a lot of blood everywhere, the amount of time it takes to clean up and do take two is not necessarily beneficial on a television schedule. A lot of the head hits and bullet entry and exit wounds ended up being done digitally because it was more production friendly and allowed more flexibility in the shoot because we didn’t have to cut and hide anything.”
Entrance and title wall of the Living With The Walking Dead exhibition at Museum of the Moving Image, located in Astoria, New York. (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)
Old practical techniques were revived. “One of the things that I’m grateful for with The Walking Dead is when we first premiered, I feel like it had a big hand in reintroducing prosthetic makeup to this generation of viewers,” Nicotero notes. “When I got into the industry in the late 1970s early 1980s, that’s what it was all about. It was Tom Savini, Rick Baker, Rob Bottin and Stan Winston, and you had The Thing, American Werewolf in London, Dawn of the Dead and The Howling, which were low budget and didn’t have big casts. The special effects were the star. I do believe that The Walking Dead, with the advent of digital effects and CGI, stopped everybody and said, ‘Wait minute. This art form is not only long forgotten but is still tremendously relevant and can play a big part in the production of a TV show.’ The Walking Dead celebrated that art form in way that people haven’t done in a long time because most people do it digitally or will fix it later. I thought the exhibit was a great opportunity not only to showcase the props but the steps that are taken to get from A to Z.”
Shown are various masks for Whisperers (left), the costume and mask worn by Samantha Morton as Alpha (center), and animatronic heads for Henry, Tara and Enid (right). (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)
“The Walking Dead celebrated that art form in way that people haven’t done in a long time because most people do it digitally or will fix it later. I thought the exhibit was a great opportunity not only to showcase the props but the steps that are taken to get from A to Z.”
—Greg Nicotero, Special Effects Makeup Supervisor/Executive Producer/Director
Combining digital and practical elements led to the best results, with one case being the Hershel animatronic head. “That’s how you fool the audience; you use the best tools in your arsenal,” Nicotero remarks. “We did a life cast of Scott Wilson and made an animatronic head that had four-way jaw movement so that the head can move around a little bit. We ended up digitally augmenting the eyes. We shot somebody wearing zombie contact lenses, and then composited real eyes over the puppet head because that’s probably the most challenging aspect of doing any type of animatronic, getting the eyes to have life in them. Ironically, when we shot that scene, a fly landed on the animatronic head during the take, and we had it so that the eyes looked at the fly when it landed. It was a simple execution, but was something that forever remains etched in The Walking Dead chronicles.”

Living With The Walking Dead exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image features original costumes, props, scripts and special effects makeup. (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)
The makeup process for ‘bicycle girl’ is on display as part of Museum of the Moving Image’s Living With The Walking Dead exhibition. (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)
The execution of Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) had to convey the proper gravitas for the character. “We used the horrific elements of the comic book as a guide, which to me was the senseless murder of Glenn,” Nicotero reflects. “It happened so quickly and abruptly in the comic book that we didn’t have time to process what exactly had happened. That to me was the shocking element. When we got to the TV show, we had shot 83 episodes, so the difficulty was that people loved that character. There were a lot of us who didn’t want to see Glenn go because the character provided a grounded heart to the show, which I still believe to this day. I would have done it differently, but that was the script. Those were all practical elements. We had various stages of makeup on Steven, then we had a puppet head, and dummy bodies for impact. It was all to service the introduction of this absolutely despicable character. There weren’t a lot of visual effects involved in that.”
“We did a life cast of Scott Wilson and made an animatronic head that had four-way jaw movement so that the head can move around a little bit. We ended up digitally augmenting the eyes. We shot somebody wearing zombie contact lenses, and then composited real eyes over the puppet head because that’s probably the most challenging aspect of doing any type of animatronic, getting the eyes to have life in them. Ironically, when we shot that scene, a fly landed on the animatronic head during the take, and we had it so that the eyes looked at the fly when it landed. It was a simple execution, but was something that forever remains etched in The Walking Dead chronicles.”

—Greg Nicotero, Special Effects Makeup Supervisor/Executive Producer/Director
A close-up of an animatronic Scott Walker (Hershel Greene). (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)

A close-up of an action figure of Hershel Greene. (Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou/Museum of the Moving Image)
Nicotero has also collaborated with the founder of the zombie genre, George Romero. “Up until The Night of the Living Dead, zombies were considered voodoo lore. It was never a creature that was a reanimated corpse that feasted on the flesh of the living. I 100% believe that the reintroduction of the zombie genre into society is solely based on two items. As soon as you add a plastic gun and create a first-person-shooter video game where you’re responsible for shooting zombies and saving yourself, that opened the zombie genre to an entirely new generation of people playing House of the Dead and Resident Evil. Then we had 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Resident Evil [the movie] and the Dawn of the Dead remake. The advantage that you have in a television series, where there had never been one before this, was that you have the ability to say, ‘This person just died, so they’re freshly dead, but now there’s a corpse over here that has been lying in the sun for six weeks, so it looks like a pumpkin two months after Halloween.’ A zombie trapped inside of a building isn’t exposed to the sun, so it would be better preserved than ones that have been outside. We would take into consideration weapons and how the zombie died. Eighty percent of the time it was up to us in the makeup trailer to concoct these backstories, and then we would tell the story in the prosthetic makeup.”
CREATING PHOTOREAL AND NATURALISTIC LIONS FOR BEAST October 18,2022
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Nathan (Idris Elba), Martin (Sharlto Copley), Mare (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) attempt to survive an attack from a rogue lion in Beast, directed by Baltasar Kormákur.
Whether it’s trying to reach the world’s highest mountain peak in Everest or a doctor breaking the Hippocratic Oath in an effort to protect his drug addict daughter in The Oath, Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur has the ability to shift between blockbuster productions and smaller passion projects. Beast has him channeling the former as Idris Elba portrays a recent widower on an African trip with his two daughters and becomes the target of a man-eating rogue lion. Obviously, for safety reasons the animal had to be a CG creation, with Visual Effects Supervisor Enrik Pavdeja hiring Framestore as the main vendor as well as BlackGinger. “Baltasar had a good understanding of what he wanted for Beast, and with that in mind he allowed us to contribute and lead the film from a visual effects point of view,” Pavdeja notes. “In total, we have 240 shots; however, on this show we had eight or nine anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000-frame shots [with BlackGinger being responsible for 50].”
Special effects built a stage car where you could take it apart completely and rebuild it again depending on the needs of the shot.

A year was spent by Framestore developing the lion assets.
Master shots were broken down into what were called ‘child shots.’ “Even just 10 shots of a 10,000-frame shot is still quite a crazy number,” Pavdeja notes. “The main driving force behind the big shots was previs by The Third Floor. That’s where we started figuring out how these shots were going to come together and began to understand the detail of what the lion action was going to be, because a lot of this work relied on interaction, not so much following the lion through the frame.” Obvious stitches were to be avoided. “We try to find clever situations such as doing a paw print or a bit of car coming to a yield,” Pavdeja explains. “All of the time we’re trying to keep some sort of live element in the plate that we could then bridge the two shots.” The main cinematic reference was The Revenant, which features Leonardo DiCaprio being mauled by a grizzly bear. “That bear scene was the piece we used closely as inspiration for the fight at the end because it’s a brilliant piece of visual effects with a lot of interaction. It’s visceral,” Pavdeja declares. “We’re close to camera. And it’s a long take. There are maybe three cuts, which is basically what we tried to achieve.”
Not only did the lions have to be photorealistic, but also photo natural in their performances.
“That bear scene [in The Revenant] was the piece we used closely as inspiration for the fight at the end because it’s a brilliant piece of visual effects with a lot of interaction. It’s visceral. We’re close to camera. And it’s a long take. There are maybe three cuts, which is basically what we tried to achieve.”
—Enrik Pavdeja, Visual Effects Supervisor

Beast has 240 visual effects shots, with eight or nine of those being anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000 frames long.

The grizzly bear mauling in The Revenant was a major reference for the finale.
Thousands of reference images of every type of tree, branch and leaf were taken to digitally recreate the environmental assets.

“The claws are some of the most complicated engineering types of devices ever. It’s a fine line between having fluffy-looking claws that look cute in a paw, then, all of a sudden, the claws come out and it looks like a vicious fighting machine. A lot of development went into that.”
—Enrik Pavdeja, Visual Effects Supervisor
There were always three different iterations of simulations to get photorealistic muscles for the lions.
A year was spent developing the lion assets. “With a show like this, a lot of challenge came from creating some digital creatures that were completely photoreal and also photo natural in the way that they performed,” Pavdeja notes. “We had such long shots, we had to change our approach in how we would review the work and how we handled all of that data logistically.” Tools were created that allowed reviews of the ‘child shots,’ which were then automatically inserted into the master shot. “Lions are mostly made of muscles. For every moment and movement they make we had to create different shapes for the muscle and how you read and perceive it, and how the skin goes over it. The animators would go in and animate the different muscle shapes that would then be simulated on top of that. There were always three different iterations of simulations to get a photorealistic muscle. The claws are some of the most complicated engineering types of devices ever. It’s a fine line between having fluffy-looking claws that look cute in a paw, then, all of a sudden, the claws come out and it looks like a vicious fighting machine. A lot of development went into that.”
For obvious safety reasons the lions had to be entirely CG creatures.
“Martin Battles [Sharlto Copley] hugs some lions he has brought up since they were cubs on his big reserve. This was driven by the puppeteering guys as they built specific costumes for them to have that interaction with Martin. We did a digital-double takeover of Martin because the performance of our CG lion didn’t necessarily line up perfectly with his movements. Martin Battles [Sharlto Copley] hugs some lions he has brought up since they were cubs on his big reserve. This was driven by the puppeteering guys as they built specific costumes for them to have that interaction with Martin. We did a digital-double takeover of Martin because the performance of our CG lion didn’t necessarily line up perfectly with his movements.”
—Enrik Pavdeja, Visual Effects Supervisor
The production assembled a massive library of realistic lion reference material which was then incorporated into the rig.
There are two moments of heavy lion interaction. “Martin Battles [Sharlto Copley] hugs some lions he has brought up since they were cubs on his big reserve,” Pavdeja explains. “This was driven by the puppeteering guys as they built specific costumes for them to have that interaction with Martin. We did a digital-double takeover of Martin because the performance of our CG lion didn’t necessarily line up perfectly with his movements.” For the end fight, a stunt performer wore a big lion head and a grey suit to get the proper interaction with Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba). “We kept Idris’ head when it made sense. For the most part, it was a full digital body and digital lion,” Pavdeja adds. The biggest simulation work was the sand interaction. “Simulations would take anything between 24 hours to three or four days depending on which layer we were simulating,” he says. “For example, the first thing we would have to simulate is the lion against Idris. They would be fighting together, the muscles, skin, fur and cloth, and that is one side of the simulation. When we were happy on that front, we had to simulate it against the environment with all of the sand. Then there would be another iteration on top of that where you would end up having to fix certain elements to combine the two correctly together.”
“For the end fight, a stunt performer wore a big lion head and a grey suit to get the proper interaction with Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba). We kept Idris’ head when it made sense. For the most part, it was a full digital body and digital lion.”
—Enrik Pavdeja, Visual Effects Supervisor
Special costumes were created for stunt performers to interact with Sharlto Copley, which were subsequently taken over by CG lions.

Some of the environments were procedurally generated.
Idris Elba has an on-set conversation with Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur.
Two different takes were shot of Idris Elba fighting the lion. “The idea was when we filmed that scene it was one long take, so we filmed it two ways,” Pavdeja remarks. “One way, we had a clean Idris, no wounds and blood. Then we did the same take again with full makeup so everything to do with wounds and blood and all the dressing would be on him. Then throughout the fight, we would then reveal those wounds. Idris being fully digital allowed us, once we had scanned him with all of the wounds on, to reveal those wounds and progress them throughout the shot. In the end the shot was divided into two shots so we had a cutaway, which allowed us more flexibility, but wasn’t the sort of thing you would pay so much attention to in terms of progression. That end fight is so visceral, in the moment and manic, that all you’re looking at is this crazy action-packed moment between a lion and a man.”
HOW DIGITAL DOMAIN EMPOWERS MS. MARVEL October 11,2022
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Digital Domain and Marvel Studios.
Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) is the first Muslim-American teenager-superhero in the MCU.
If your dreams came true, would they meet your expectations or become an unwanted burden? This is a prevailing question that drives the MCU Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, which revolves around a teenage Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) wishing to be a member of the Avengers and is unexpectedly given supernatural powers and abilities. With Nordin Rahhali acting as Overall Marvel VFX Supervisor on Ms. Marvel, and Sandra Balej and Sandro Blattner as Marvel VFX Supervisors, Fuse FX VFX Supervisor Kevin Yuille helped guide the visual effects for the six episodes, working with Digital Domain to create the powers of the title character, digital doubles, Ms. Marvel being transported back in time, an iconic lamppost shot, training montage and elephant toothpaste. Digital Domain VFX Supervisor Aladino Debert is proud of a particular aspect of Ms. Marvel. “The fact that Ms. Marvel is the first Muslim American teenager superhero in the MCU is culturally great. It showcases Muslim families in way that no other show has done.”
Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan travels back in time to the eve of the Partition of India.
Practical smoke and steam had to be replaced with CG because they were not conveying the proper scale in wide shots.
The powers and abilities illustrated in the Ms. Marvel comic books had to be reinterpreted. “Ms. Marvel is a polymorph, meaning she can stretch her body, grow and shrink,” Debert explains. “It is a bit of Fantastic Four and Ant-Man. The creatives wanted to stay away from that, and for powers to be more magic and energy-based than physical.” Two important aspects were grounding non-realistic effects in the familiar and creating something that looks cool. “That balance is always an interesting one,” Debert notes. “We wanted to showcase the powers as being separate, yet manipulated by her. It feels physical and solid in certain parts of her body, but not others. It also depends on what she is trying to do in a specific shot. It is like a moving target because you want to maintain a cohesive look to her powers.”
Among the various simulations that Digital Domain had to create was fire.
“The good thing about having photorealistic digital doubles is that it gives the creatives freedom to experiment with things that they couldn’t otherwise. We ended up using the digital doubles in sequences that were never part of the original plan because they looked great, like when Kamala is running through the city.”
—Aladino Debert, VFX Supervisor, Digital Domain
One of the powers of Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) is the cosmic, photonic and mystical Noor energy.
One of the powers of Ms. Marvel is the cosmic, photonic and mystical Noor energy. “We wanted to come up with something that felt part of the MCU universe; however, at the same time different because it’s a new character,” Debert states. “What we talked about was hard light. The idea is that her powers are essentially light made solid, so the hard light is what gives her the ability to embiggen herself and walk on it. It also enables her to create shields to protect herself. On the other side of the coin, it is what gives Kamran’s [Rish Shah] powers a sense of danger; he creates this similarly nature effect that is out of control, jagged and destructive. It’s like a cosmic cactus coming at you! We wanted to come up with something that had a similar source between Kamran and Kamala, but with a different feel as far as the color palette. Kamala’s powers are mostly cyan, amber and magenta, which goes with the colors of her suit. Kamran’s ended up being cyan and gold, which is on the opposite of the color wheel.”
“Ms. Marvel is a polymorph, meaning she can stretch her body, grow and shrink. The creatives wanted to stay away from that, and for powers to be more magic and energy-based than physical. That balance is always an interesting one. We wanted to showcase the powers as being separate, yet manipulated by her. It feels physical and solid in certain parts of her body, but not others. It also depends on what she is trying to do in a specific shot. It is like a moving target because you want to maintain a cohesive look to her powers.”
—Aladino Debert, VFX Supervisor, Digital Domain
Digital Domain was tasked with filling a massive train station with tens of thousands of people clambering and jumping the trains.
Digital doubles were created without knowing how they were going to be utilized. “We just knew that the digital doubles were going to be used at some point,” Debert explains. “We took scans and created turntables to make sure that the characters looked photorealistic. Then we did some animation and CFX to test the behavior of the character with different clothes on. In the case of Kamala, we did two different digital doubles because she changes her attire. She has a version with clothes and an early type of suit, and then later a super suit. The good thing about having photorealistic digital doubles is that it gives the creatives freedom to experiment with things that they couldn’t otherwise. We ended up using the digital doubles in sequences that were never part of the original plan because they looked great, like when Kamala is running through the city.”
Digital Domain was responsible for the battle between Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) and Kamran (Rish Shah).

“What we talked about was hard light. The idea is that her powers are essentially light made solid, so the hard light is what gives her the ability to embiggen herself and walk on it. It also enables her to create shields to protect herself. On the other side of the coin, it is what gives Kamran’s [Rish Shah] powers a sense of danger; he creates this similarly nature effect that is out of control, jagged and destructive. It’s like a cosmic cactus coming at you!”
—Aladino Debert, VFX Supervisor, Digital Domain
Noor energy was treated as a hard light, with Ms. Marvel’s (Iman Vellani) version having a color palette of cyan, amber and magenta.
Kamala travels back in time to the eve of the Partition of India. “The time travel was more of a storytelling technique than an effect itself,” Debert notes. “What we were tasked to do was creating the Partition shots. There is massive train station with tens of thousands of people clambering and jumping the trains. Some plates were shot in Thailand with a couple hundred extras. You’re outside with a crane, so it was nothing like motion control. They were single plates, usually with Kamala in the foreground and few hundred extras around, on top of the trains and close up to the camera. Then you pull back and see everything. You see the greenscreens, cranes and camera trucks. Especially in the wide shots, we ended up replacing most of it.” Atmospherics assisted in conveying the proper size and scale. “One thing that people don’t realize is smoke, fire and water don’t scale easily,” Debert adds. “The biggest challenge was that the plates had on-set effects such as steam and smoke, which come in handy for close-ups, but become tricky when you pull back because it has to be rotoscoped out and be replaced with our own steam.”
Kamran (Rish Shah) has a hard time controling the Noor energy. causing him to manifest something that is jagged and destructive.
Kamran’s (Rish Shah) version of Noor energy has a cyan and gold color palette to stand out visually from what is produced by Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani).
The decision was made for the powers of Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) to be more magic and energy-based than physical.
“If you want to go down the rabbit hole, just type ‘elephant toothpaste’ on Google or YouTube and you’ll have a feast! When the chemical components join, they explode in volume creating an extra dimension of foam. Simulations in general are challenging, but when you’re dealing with something that is not quite a fluid, liquid or solid, such as foam, it becomes extra tricky. We spent many a month working on that until we were able to nail not only the behavior, but also the specific look. As it expands, pieces fall off. It was really challenging for our effects team!”
—Aladino Debert, VFX Supervisor, Digital Domain
It was important to showcase the powers as being separate, yet manipulated by Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani).

Kamala situates herself on top of a lamppost. “It was one the shots we started the earliest on the project because we knew that a version was needed for the trailer, which turned out to be lightly different than the final one in the show,” Debert reveals. “Originally, she was shot against greenscreen on a live-action lamppost with wind and wires. We knew that Manhattan, Hudson River and the buildings around her had to be created, but we were not sure to what degree. In end, 95% of the shot was digital, including her body. The wires that she had for safety were wrinkling her suit in way that wasn’t pretty, and even though we could paint them out, it was tricky to get rid of every single wrinkle. Since we had a digital double that was hyper-accurate, we suggested using her head only because it was easier for us to give them a clean suit. We decided against CG hair because of how close we got to it and the fact that we could make it work. It involved a fair amount of rotoscope to replace from her neck down and keep her hair in.” The trickiest part was animating an iconic, blowing red scarf which had to interact with real hair. Comments Debert, “We simulated some CG hair so that the scarf would have a natural interaction, but getting rid of the CG hair and compositing the scarf under the real hair.”
Making Noor energy a hard light enables Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) to create shields to protect herself.

Training montages are a staple of the superhero genre. “What made it easier for us is that Kamala has a unique personality; she is cute, perky and bubbly,” Debert observes. “We did a full CG version of her jumping and doing parkour on this roof in New Jersey. We didn’t have her doing the performance, so we had to mimic what she would have done. This was designed way after the shoot. We looked at a lot of the footage that we already had of her and got the animators and stunt double to try to come up with what Kamala would do. How would she jump over this? How would she react? At the end we had a bunch of different versions, and Kamala celebrates in a unique way, fist pumping and jumping. It was fun presenting all of those options to the creatives to see what they felt represented Kamala best.”
Digital Domain wanted to come up with a power for Mr. Marvel (Iman Vellani) that felt part of the MCU universe, at the same time different because it’s a new character.
Ninety-five percent of the shot where Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) is seated on the lamppost was digital, including her body.
What proved to be more difficult was the foam for the elephant toothpaste sequence, which took a year to get right. “If you want to go down the rabbit hole, just type ‘elephant toothpaste’ on Google or YouTube and you’ll have a feast!” Debert laughs. “When the chemical components join, they explode in volume, creating an extra dimension of foam. Simulations in general are challenging, but when you’re dealing with something that is not quite a fluid, liquid or solid, such as foam, it becomes extra tricky. We spent many a month working on that until we were able to nail not only the behavior, but also the specific look. As it expands, pieces fall off. It was really challenging for our effects team!”

What are the four primary components of mise en scène?

There are broadly 4 elements of mise en scene using which the director stages the scene for the film to provide his audience a visually delightful experience..

The Setting. ... .

Costumes and Makeup. ... .

Lighting. ... .

Characters..

Which of the following types of shots involve camera movement?

Camera Movement Based Shots Dolly shot: The camera operator moves the camera along a track, either away from or toward the subject. Tracking shot: The camera follows the movement and action of the subject using a gimbal or dolly.

Which of the following are not responsibilities of the cinematographer?

Which of the following are responsibilities of the cinematographer, and which are not? Responsibilities of the Cinematographer: choosing the properties of the shot, framing shots, determining the speed and length of the shot. Not Responsibilities of the Cinematographer: editing the film, designing the mise-en-scène.

Which of the following is the measure of how sensitive a film stock is to light?

ISO (Film Speed) ISO is the measurement of a film's speed, defined by its sensitivity to light. The lower the film speed, the less sensitive to light and the finer the grain in the resulting image. The higher the film speed, the more sensitive to light and the larger the visible grain in the final image.