Plus, how the studio directly honoured the transformation of the G1 toy of Optimus Prime.
At one point in the final third Act battle of Steven Caple Jr.’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Optimus Prime and a now Mirage-powered-exo-suit-wearing Noah (Anthony Ramos) take on the evil Scourge.
Wētā FX, which crafted the entirety of the battle, launched head-first into this sequence with a significant amount of early blocking and motion capture to help the director and production visual effects supervisor Gary Brozenich with ideas for how specific fight beats–including between Prime, Noah and Scourge–would play out. The Wētā FX team was led by visual effects supervisor Matt Aitken.
Here, Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Mike Perry and Wētā FX animation supervisor Kevin Estey break down for befores & afters how the studio designed shots and action with this virtual cinematography approach, and how they executed them.
They also dive into the specific approaches to animating CG Transformers, and the elaborate and ‘to-camera’ approach to their complex transformations, including a neat reference to the original toy version of Optimus Prime.
Scourge’s death
Ultimately, Optimus Prime pushes Scourge up against some flowing lava, and rips his head off. This was an early beat that Wētā FX helped the production flesh out. The studio was aided in the fact that MPC, which produced scenes for most of the rest of the film, had built and textured the Transformer models, which Wētā FX ingested into its pipeline.
Still, only the broad strokes of the battle had been laid out. This meant that Wētā FX needed a way to quickly come up with the key moments in the battle, including for the final death of Scourge. The fastest way was to get into the motion capture volume at the studio with performers in mocap suits.
“We worked out a fight and then tried to slowly block it out,” explains Wētā FX animation supervisor Kevin Estey. “We also had some iPhones and iPads with us and we filmed the fight in the same way as you might cover it on set. It was good to have that tangible reality to see how you would react as a camera person to what’s happening.”
Estey then took the live-action footage and made a stuntvis-like edit out of it. “It was great because we used the new iPhone that lets you change depth of field in cinematic mode. I was actually able to pull focus after the fact, in Final Cut.”
Interestingly, that stuntvis footage was never shown to the director, but just made to assist Wētā FX in blocking out the animation. Says Estey: “We took the motion of the performers, put it on our characters, and then got cameras on the action. The idea of playing things out in a single take became the language of how we ended up doing a large majority of what we did in the third act, as well as for the cold open, which we also worked on. It was about long takes rather than doing individual shots, then putting cameras on it, then breaking them out into individual cameras. It’s a common previs approach, but in order to tackle the sheer amount of work that we had, it became the only way to really do it.”
“The main crux was that we wanted something that was a bit gory,” adds Estey. “Breaking the shoulder, shoving his face into lava, and then eventually having his limbs cut off and his face stabbed with a lava-covered sword. My favorite part was the giant sword in the face, creating a gaping hole with lava oozing out of it. They went for the whole thing.”
This overall approach was something Wētā FX followed for much of the battle, and the cold open, with the idea being to get a quick buy-off from the production team in a somewhat compressed timeframe. “We really had to deliver a full package,” says Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Mike Perry. “We couldn’t have done this shot by shot. We had to put a mark in the sand and at least generate a point of discussion.”
When Noah attacks
During the battle, a near-death Mirage is able to transform and transfer parts of himself into a metallic exo-suit for Noah to fight with. The character then joins Optimus with extensive leaps, rolls and high-level fighting enabled by the suit. Key moments–which often needed to combine live-action with CG–were again ones that Wētā FX would explore with more motion capture, stuntvis and animatics, even after live-action pieces with Anthony Ramos had been filmed.
“There’s one part where Noah jumps past Optimus and up onto Scourge’s leg, stabbing it,” discusses Estey, who himself acted out the scene on the mocap stage. “For that, we had previs and there was bluescreen live-action of Anthony in a gray suit with extra bits padded out to show where his robotic parts were. We took the idea onto our capture stage, where we needed to figure out how to approach that in terms of the scale differential, while also staging the move between the legs of the robots.
“What they had didn’t quite feel like a co-ordinated move between Noah and his buddy Optimus, so we thought, why doesn’t he jump off Optimus’ leg? That’s something that we proposed and they went for. It was a very quick turnaround.”
Wētā FX took a CG model of Noah and brought that into its system to use for final shots. “In the end,” says Perry, “we’re replacing almost everything with CG except for Anthony’s facial performance. Even where we did see his face, sometimes that was also an all-digital version of his performance. It gave us a lot of options.”
“Actually,” recalls Estey, “we’d sometimes be looking at a WIP render of a Noah exo-suit shot and someone would ask, ‘Does this have plate in it or not?’ and I would say, ‘No, we haven’t put that in yet.’ Well, that told me we didn’t actually need to put in the plate because our CG version of Noah was great.”
The art of animating giant robots
As well as helping to craft key moments in the battle, Wētā FX had to tackle the particular movements of the final large CG robots in the scene. Early on, Estey conferred with animation sequence supervisor Kevin Lan who had worked on a previous Transformers film. “Kevin suggested the first thing we needed to do was, take the motion, if it had been captured, and slow it down 20%. You get a decent amount of the right ‘weight’ just by doing that.”
“The other thing that we found a lot of value in,” continues Estey, “was that we had a layering of controls like primary, secondary, tertiary controls that let you bring in the extra details down to almost as fine as the nuts and bolts. You could jiggle every panel and spin every screw.”
“For example, Optimus has the two windows of the truck as his chest. To get some good heavy jiggle in those, I would say to animators, ‘Open up those tertiary controls and just go a little nuts.’ It helped get this sense that these are trucks that have been pushed and pulled in certain ways and not everything is tightly screwed on.”
Perry observes, in that same vein, that wheel movement on the transformed robots was also a useful way of selling motion and scale. “As soon as I saw that Optimus had tires on his legs, I’m like, ‘Spin the wheels!’”
‘It’s always a big hack every time you do it’: the trick of transformations
Turning a vehicle into a robot, and turning a robot into a vehicle, are no easy tasks. Wētā FX approached this like other VFX studios have on Transformers films, by animating transformations ‘to-camera’, which means that what the audience sees might not always be exactly physically correct as all the parts and pieces move around, but still give the feeling that a robot was inside the vehicle, and vice-versa.
“When you do a transformation, you actually have two, if not three, separate puppets,” explains Estey. “You have your robot, say the Bumblebee robot, and then you have the car and you basically slowly disappear one as you appear the other. If you went frame by frame, you’d see a lot of things appearing, disappearing, and whatnot. We had a lot of controls for all of that. And it’s always a big hack every time you do it.”
“What we developed was the ability to essentially pull apart and put back together any piece of the animation puppet,” adds Estey. “Usually we’re restricted, but here we were completely unrestricted so we could scale, rotate, make invisible, make visible, and then that was all publishable. We’ve never really had that level of control before.”
To animate a transformation as part of a shot, the team followed some advice direct from MPC’s animation director Emile Ghorayeb, which was to get the base movement happening without any transformation. “He said then you can start teasing it in once you have the base,” relates Estey. “It’s then about building on top of it, going piece-by-piece. I think the lesson is if you can see the transformation without an actual transformation happening, where you can say, ‘Oh, that works, now let’s make it actually work,’ then you’re on the right track.”
One transformation moment became particularly important to the Wētā FX team, and that was where they could give a very direct shout-out to the G1 Optimus Prime toy which, when transformed into a truck, had the Autobot’s head hiding underneath the chassis and his arms hiding in the side doors.
“I wanted to be able to see that and feel those actual things, as opposed to it being like, ‘Hey, where did the head come from or where did the arms go to?’” remarks Estey. “We had a transformation in our sequence where we thought there was the opportunity to do that.”
“We worked towards that, and then I remember there was a moment right before we sent it to the director, I said, ‘Hey, how are we getting rid of his head? Can we actually flip it back just like the toy does?’ I thought maybe we could create a little plastic piece like the toy, which his head rotates back and under. We directly referenced it from a G1 toy I had on my desk.”
When that animation test was sent to the director, it was approved. Estey was elated. “Mike actually supervised that final sequence, and they crushed it. I’ve been giddy ever since. It was actually in one of the trailers and people are frame by framing it and they immediately recognized it. They’re like, ‘They did the G1 toy!’”
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