From on-set to final visual effects in ‘Spaceman’. A new excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
Johan Renck’s Spaceman–now streaming on Netflix–had two major visual effects challenges. One was how to depict lone deep space Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) in weightlessness, and the other was to have him converse with a mysterious spider-like space creature, Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano).
The look of weightlessness would eventually be achieved via a combination of wire work, careful staging and occasional CG replacement. Meanwhile, for Hanuš, on-set stuffies and performer stand-ins were employed as something for Sandler to interact with.
Overseeing this work, as well as a number of other visual effects tasks such as the distinctive extraterrestrial Chopra cloud and distorted Jakub memories, was production visual effects supervisor Matt Sloan.
He enlisted MPC as the principal vendor (MPC’s visual effects supervisor was Bryan Litson and MPC’s animation supervisor was Brett Purmal. Craig Calvert from MPC also oversaw some additional VFX shots).
Here, Sloan shares with befores & afters the on-set methods for staging shots, and then how they were brought to fruition for final visual effects scenes.
Weightlessness: every trick in the book
Having acted as visual effects shoot supervisor on Ridley Scott’s The Martian, Sloan was intimately familiar with various ‘zero-G’ tricks to make it appear as if astronauts are weightless in space. For Spaceman, the overall approach would involve Sandler on a wire rig and then wire removal visual effects. These wire rigs were made possible partly by building spaceship set pieces that accommodated the removal of sections as the rig passed through the set.
“There’s large swathes of the movie where the roof or wall is missing from the spaceship set that we would then later replace in VFX,” details Sloan. “To get there with that wire work was a real collaboration between stunts, art department and costume. The stunt department, led by Michael Li, first laid out tape on the stage floor in the shape of the ship and tried various actions of how they would maneuver Adam through the space.”
“The majority of the set was then modular and breakaway,” adds Sloan, “so we could pull walls off quickly. We could open them like giant doors, basically. They’d flip up and over out of the way so we could pull up parts of the set this way. That became a matter of discussing the approach with production designer Jan Houllevigue to be able to dress out where the splits were with enough high detail texture that you wouldn’t actually be able to tell if it wasn’t sealed up, since we didn’t want to have to cut and then redo the joins or anything like that each time we dropped the roof.”
Another part of the collaboration was with costume designer Catherine George, notes Sloan. “We would all work together to try and reduce the contact points required for the wire rigs. There might be times where we’d hoist Adam up and the wires were slightly cutting across one of his arms or something was pushing into the fabric. So we’d look to move to a different pick point. Also, wardrobe put some stiffness into Adam’s shorts so that they held their volume, even if his legs weren’t touching on the fabric itself. That helped immeasurably to help sell the illusion of zero-G.”
Many of the zero-G sequences inside the ship were acquired with a 70-foot TechnoCrane positioned outside but pointing into the set. “DOP Jakob Ihre could maneuver to anywhere that had a 15-foot drop on the head,” says Sloan. “We could just drop the camera in through the roof to get into different positions.”
Meanwhile, exterior spacewalks that Jakub makes were filmed on a greenscreen stage. Sandler wore a practical Orlan spacesuit and was suspended on a wire crane, with the camera moved around him to give the illusion of his own spacewalking. “Essentially we hung him and rotated him,” describes Sloan. “All the movements were done using the camera, so if he was floating towards us, we’d actually just track the camera towards him. That was a decision that was made early on because the flying rigs for that were just getting too big and too expensive for the movie. Plus, spacesuit shots involved mainly CG suit take-overs.”
Working out the camera moves for the spacewalks was reverse engineered from some ‘low-fi’ previs Sloan had worked out in his quarantine hotel room during pre-production. “I had a coat hanger taped to the top of my TV with a little model spaceman hanging off it and some concept art of the Chopra cloud playing on the TV. It involved me just tracking the camera around and getting different shots that editorial could start just having a play with and assembling. For any of the moves that we liked from that, we then reverse engineered it to make it a camera move only on the hanging spaceman, which was pretty much how I shot it in my hotel room.”
Another relatively low-fi aspect of both the interior ship scenes and spacewalk shots involved stunt performers surrounding Sandler in green or neutral gray suits who had the task of holding the actor’s feet or steadying him in the heavy suit, as Sloan explains. “We called them ‘Adam puppeteers’, and they were there also to ensure we didn’t get any ringing or swinging from the wires. They’d dampen that out, but it did mean you had these ghostly gray guys who we then had to paint out. Sometimes up to four of them were inside that set with him, and that would mean we’d often have to roto Adam out completely and replace the entire set, which was actually faster than doing patches for rig removals from clean plates.”
To deal with interior spaceship wire removals, Sloan first arranged for the set pieces to be LiDAR scanned, a task undertaken by Myriad Studios. “We scanned the ship extensively. In fact, we scanned it not on a shot by shot, but on a scene by scene, basis. Then for textures we would grab these when we could by shooting them in flat lighting.”
What that then allowed was for MPC to rebuild sections of the interior behind the wires and behind stunt performers in CG–“In the end,” says Sloan, “we had a full high-res version of the ship and it was quicker to replace the ship and to try and remove these guys than doing it in the traditional sense.”
On occasion, the VFX team was also required to replace small sections of Sandler’s character digitally in order to sell the weightlessness effect. “Most of the time where we utilized CG was only from the shoulders down,” notes Sloan. “We would keep his arms and replace everything under that. Sometimes we were also more or less cutting and pasting Adam’s limbs to stabilize them and give them a little bit more float.”
Acting with a creature that’s not there
Hanuš the spider began life as concept designs from creature designer Carlos Huante, with Sloan continuing to oversee elements tackled by the MPC team during the CG build process. “There were a lot of iterations working out how much hair he had, how long it was, its coarseness, and there were his mandibles and the addition of his pedipalps, which is what we called the little face tentacles that he has. On top of that were his stages of decrepitation from his illness, which involved sores and patches of dry skin.”
Hanuš’ eyes turned out to be one of the particularly challenging aspects of the character design and build. “We went around and around on his eyes for a long time, looking at goat eyes and cat eyes,” states Sloan. “We ended up going back to a simple round pupil since any of the other ones were a little bit too alien. My wife has a chihuahua named Mr. Pickles. He has these big, soft brown eyes that are constantly wet. We used that as reference for Hanuš a lot of the time.”
“Having Paul Dano’s voice added another element to Hanuš,” continues Sloan. “It was very different to what a lot of people were expecting, which made him a much calmer, very sage sort of creature. But Johan also wanted Hanuš to be absolutely grotesque and at the same time you needed to love him by the end of the movie.”
On set, Sandler primarily performed against an actress wearing a gray suit from the stunt department. “She was mostly used for offscreen,” says Sloan, “but for someone that Adam could interact with and act against, and would respond and would move slightly. As soon as we got into areas where it was Hanuš and Jakub in close quarters, if we couldn’t split the actress in there, we used a stuffy.”
Sloan advises that a full-scale hairy giant spider stuffy reference became too expensive a proposition, so two much more low-tech solutions were found: a giant plush spider found online and a body proxy of the creature which was more of a bean shape. “However, we did get a 3D printed Hanuš face made with a bit of a terrible wig stapled on top of it for hair reference. That ended up being used for scenes like where Jakub is in the sleeping chamber to give him a very precise eyeline. Interestingly, we had it printed 5% under scale for Hanuš, the thought being that we could bury him under the CG creature, but that never quite worked out because we had to move the creature around. Adam was great and he worked with the imaginary creature extremely well.”
Read more in the full article in print.
