The old-school (and new-school) effects used to make the Taika Waititi series. Warning: this article contains spoilers!
The Apple TV+ series Time Bandits, based on the 1981 film from Terry Gilliam, goes to many, many locations in telling the story of a gang of thieves traveling through time with a new member of their troupe: the eleven-year-old history nerd, Kevin.
The gang finds themselves in prehistoric times, the ice age, ancient Troy, the Mayan period, New York City during prohibition, and several other locations and times.
To realize so many settings, Time Bandits–created by Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris, and Taika Waititi–relied heavily on visual effects. In fact, there are almost 5000 VFX shots, overseen by production visual effects supervisor Tobias Wolters.
Looking to lean in on its classic roots, the visual effects work featured classic approaches such as miniatures and even oil paintings for some matte painting work. Animatronics were also a key part of bringing creatures to life.
Alongside this old-school work, Time Bandits relied on the latest virtual production approaches and digital visual effects, too. The key vendors included DNEG, Rodeo FX, Dimension Studio, ILM, Distillery VFX, Platige Image, Cause and FX, Leitmotif, Bot VFX and ReDefine.
Here, Wolters breaks down just some of the key–and crazy–moments in the series.
b&a: I think you used many different techniques for the show, including classic ones. Where did you get started on creating so many shots?
Tobias Wolters: Being a Terry Gilliam classic, it really allowed us to embrace everything that has been done in the past and marry it up with what we’re doing right now in VFX, even including virtual production. We would ask ourselves, say, ‘How can we involve miniatures in a way where we don’t just replace them all in the end?’ I think a lot of people are trying this and it often doesn’t quite work, but I think here it worked well, because it gave that handcrafted feel of the miniature that we actually wanted.
Through the art department, we built our own miniatures. Sometimes we scanned them outside in real light, so we’d have the light baked into the miniature. We would use that photogrammetry of the asset, put it on the Volume and marry it in with CG assets. And in the background we’d have big panoramas that we shot with camera arrays all over New Zealand.
Early on it was pretty much just going through the script and identifying which technique was best. Where could we use the Volume? Where could we use miniatures? We’d go, OK, the ships are good for miniatures. Or, little moments like the head in episode one coming through the wardrobe, that was great for a miniature element. And where can we even use oil paintings? Where can we do a classic hand-painted matte painting?
Actually, the first idea was doing a glass matte shot on the set, but when we thought about it further, with the HDR camera resolution nowadays and the time we actually had to achieve the effect, that was not feasible. We contacted a great matte painter, Deak Ferrand from Rodeo FX. He also did a lot of our concepts. We wanted to do some classic establishers, such as for Troy in episode one or when they enter Cairo in episode six. Those are like Lawrence of Arabia or Spartacus shots–those big reveals and classic ‘crane up’ shots.
The idea was, we’d go to a location, we film a plate and then we build an asset of the city to 50% completion. We’d print that as a reference for Deak to create the oil matte painting. We then took that oil painting and reprojected it over our asset. Now we have all the parallax, we have the lighting work together, because it has been informed by a lighting pass and we can now add in sprites, we can add in some people moving, we can add in fog, whatever we need to really make it come to life and not be just static. It actually worked really well.
b&a: You mentioned miniatures as well for the Chinese ships. Were the ships the only miniatures?
Tobias Wolters: We did a few things with miniatures. I’ve always had a big love for miniatures–the texture, just the feel. You look at shots in Lord of the Rings and you can perhaps see that it’s a miniature, but you still accept it, you still know it’s a real tactile thing. It’s a bit tricky on the schedule of a TV show to incorporate miniatures, so we had to think outside the box. We assembled a little VFX shoot unit to do miniatures. The good thing in New Zealand is that there’s a lot of incredibly talented model artists from previous well known projects that we could hire.
The miniatures we ended up building were the ships, a Mayan pyramid, and parts of the Fortress of Darkness, which was more for texture and getting assets. So, there’s a shot of a ship in the background exploding–that’s a miniature. In episode three, the camera orbits around a ship at night before we find Saffron on the chinese junk. For that, we shot a drone plate of a lake. We then tracked that plate, applied the move to a camera mo-co crane, which was scaled down to work in scale with the miniature. The only thing we had to do in post, was add some more ripples to the sails and wake on the water.
We also built miniature elements such as the wardrobe in Kevin’s bedroom. We built a quarter scale version of his wardrobe inside a little blue box, which was a quarter scale representation of Kevin’s bedroom with cutouts for the windows so the lighting would be correct. And then we had a scale version of the head made out of rubber. Using an air piston, we shot the rubber head through the balsa wood wardrobe for the splintering effect when the head comes through, which was then used as an element for all the debris.
We were constantly trying to mix our techniques and to never have the same effect twice. In the case of the head in the bedroom, the sequence continues and the head walks through the room. Well, that was a guy wearing a wearable head stumbling through the bedroom, which was very strange to shoot. But it gave us all the right movements and the light interaction, because there were some practical lights glued to the prop. So, when we replaced it and added all the smoke, we were still working with a real plate. The wall falling away was a practical effect on an elevated set, the infinite bedrooms behind created by DNEG. Then when the room reassembles itself, we basically blew up the room with air cannons and in post played it in reverse, together with a CG version of the head and smoke.
b&a: Tell me about the virtual production side of the show. I imagine that helped you go to so many places?
Tobias Wolters: When it came to the decision of building an LED wall, it was quite daunting because there wasn’t a stage you could walk into. There are stages all over the world, but this was the first time virtual production was done in New Zealand to this degree where we were building a fully tracked stage with live rendered content.
The second you start suggesting the use of a Volume, it does become interesting for people in production because they see it as a time saver where we don’t need to travel anymore. The challenge is, it works well for certain things, but not others. Hard light situations don’t work. It’s a big soft box. It’s light from all directions and you don’t get a 12K light source through a Volume unless you dismantle the panels and put actual physical lights in there. Plus, it being comedy, we needed a lot of flexibility. We needed a lot of improvisation and multiple cameras. We knew we had to be a bit more flexible than usual.
However, we knew the Volume would work well for night scenes. It worked well for shaded scenes, say, when they’re in a tent looking out over the desert, or when they’re in the ice age. Actually, the ice age was pretty much all Volume work, which proved to be the most challenging, because snow being white meant you could see any kind of light mismatch. It’s immediately apparent and blending this seamlessly into the world required a lot of work. We spent a lot of time previs’ing the set builds. The art department trusted us at that stage to help and design the physical set together. Sets needed to be designed together with our virtual art department (VAD) so that they’d be influenced by each other.
For the Volume, the panels were rented from one company. The tracking came from another. Then DNEG 360 and Dimension Studio operated the Volume and supplied the build teams. The entire team really did an outstanding job. The job of the virtual production teams and built team is often misunderstood and the huge effort it requires to bring to life should really be appreciated. I’m also so thankful to my VFX producers Will Reece and Max Serges for handling most of the logistics.
b&a: Was bluescreen and greenscreen photography still used as well?
Tobias Wolters: Yes. What we really stressed to everyone, in working out how to shoot something, was what it meant to change an environment or how long we needed to turn around the set schedule-wise. So for the ship, for instance, we did not shoot that on the Volume because we had to have the weather elements. We wanted to shoot on a gimbal and have wind elements and physical explosions, so it was easier to shoot on a bluescreen. We also put the Fortress of Darkness, because it was so big, on a bluescreen. It would just have taken too long to occupy a volume stage with that. It’s always a case-by-case scenario where we explore all options and then find the best solution.
b&a: Let’s talk about the creature work, starting with the flying dinosaur in episode three.
Tobias Wolters: When we started with the dinosaur, I felt a bit insecure about it. I felt like it had been done so many times and we have all the Jurassic franchises and even some dinosaur documentaries that have been done really well. We decided, let’s not just make another scary dinosaur, let’s make this a character. This is when we used our concepting team to make something fun and create something more flamboyant and more like an angry grandma dinosaur rather than your typical just monster.
I figured we could really do something special through the design and create a character. We looked at the bird kingdom, looked at how many colors there were, and used feathers for expressions. The dinosaur has that feather crown on the back of the head similar to a cockatoo. We used that to emote. And we gave her a name, it’s Trudie. ILM did fantastic work on the dinosaur.
We wanted to make the dinosaur very fun and clumsy and when it moves on the ground it’s constantly slipping and falling. When we shot it we used an AR tool which was an iPad where you could always see the scale of the dinosaur. The camera work was informed where the creature was. I wanted to stay away from too wide plates where it’s always perfectly framed for the dinosaur. We also built some practical bits for the beak. There’s even a shot where it’s literally the practical beak in shot.
One big challenge was the character of Fianna. When I started thinking about what her design could look like, we were nearing post. It was important that it made her appear almost like a shadow. Played by Rachel House, we had this fantastic performance that we wanted to preserve with all details and nuances. I think we went through almost 100 versions of designs to achieve what we had in mind. We looked at skins of toads, turtles and various burnt surfaces for reference. The biggest challenge was actually the mouth and nailing the various levels of stiffness of the skin and muscle textures. Rodeo FX led this work and absolutely nailed it.
b&a: Then there’s the saber-toothed tiger, the woolly mammoth and the rhino creature in episode seven. How did you approach these?
Tobias Wolters: They all have three very different techniques that we used to make them. The rhino is an animatronic. The mammoth is actually a half-scale puppet. Wētā Workshop built this amazing mammoth costume, which looks absolutely real. Two people were operating it, one was the front legs, another one rear legs, and then the snout was operated with wires. This was partly shot on the Volume.
There’s even half scale puppets on the back for Saffron and Kevin. So, for all the wide shots and those aerial shots when they’re traveling, it’s literally the puppets on the back.
Then there was a full scale buck, which was a full scale build of the upper half of the mammoth, which was on a remote controlled motion base. We animated the mammoth movements early so that we could ingest that animation data into the motion base and it would give us the correct movement. We could even scale down the content on the Volume, so it would all be the same size.
The saber-tooth–his name is Diego–was another ILM build. I’m quite proud of that one, because I wanted it to feel really lived in, in that world. The ice, the wind, the harshness. Part of the brief was, we wanted to feel the snow land in the fur, melt from the warmth in the fur, drip down and then freeze again, forming clusters of icy fur. ILM actually created a new toolset for that to achieve this. I think it just adds so much realism in those close-up shots.
b&a: I also love when the cat was paused in the next episode, that was kind of cool.
Tobias Wolters: For that we actually built a stuffy again, a full-scale bust, for the shoot. The mouth was operable, so the actors had something to interact with. When it came to the shot work, we started with it just being frozen and it looked just a bit weird, so it became about bringing back some life and also enhancing the comedy. The saber-tooth tiger is so confused while it’s really fighting against that frozen pose. So we conveyed all its emotions with the eyes. You can sometimes see that the paw is doing little flinches trying to break free. There’s drool coming out of the mouth, you still feel the cold breath, that really sold it.
b&a: Another ‘creature’ was Posiedon, as played by Taika. What was the mix of real Taika and CG here?
Tobias Wolters: That was quite a thing, quite a challenge together with all the giants at the end. We wanted to, of course, avoid the Uncanny Valley, which was hard because it’s this 80-meter tall version of a well known person. But we thought, let’s embrace it and let’s go for this over-the-top heroic, backlit dramatic version, with hair that’s always very floaty as if it’s underwater. I think that worked because you’re not trying to be too realistic.
We shot Taika with a beard and the staff and he was in complete blue except for his face, which then ended up being a projection of his face onto a CG version. So we did scan him, but the face itself is not a complete CG creation. There’s a mix of projections of his actual acting. The body is fully CG. This was done by Rodeo FX.
b&a: Finally there’s Hen the Giant, with the island on his head. How did you tackle that, especially with the scale challenges?
Tobias Wolters: That entire sequence was quite a challenge and we went through a lot of versions of how we could shoot it. We found this island, which is actually a peninsula, it’s not an island, that we then changed the layout of to match in a miniature that we built that was glued on top of the actor’s head. We then shot him on Phantom cameras just to get the slow-mo movements and all that muscle jiggle and all the details working well on that scale, which required a lot of light. Even though he’s not wearing a lot, it was really hot on stage.
We used certain scale cues such as the clouds moving down, the constant seagulls and little bits falling off the island. With the makeup and the skin texture, that was something we couldn’t really change without going full CG on the face. So we said, ‘Okay, it is fine to feel that there’s makeup in play. It’s a human.’ We embraced that handcrafted feeling, but then using depth, using haze, using clouds, using birds and the water–which was fully CG–as our scale cues. With the camera, we made sure it was never too crazy and almost felt like it was operated by a helicopter, which sometimes was me just filming a cardboard box in my office with my phone to give us a handheld movement which we tracked and applied to the plate. This work was done by ILM. That entire sequence is quite mythical and right up in the Gilliam visual language that we embraced for the show.
Vendor breakdown
Rodeo FX: Concepting, Troy, traditional DMP work, Poseidon, all ship work, Harlem, Fianna the Demon, portal work
DNEG: Fortress of Darkness, Sky Citadel, desert work, Supreme Being head, Mayan world, bedroom slide portal
ILM: Dinosaur, saber-tooth tiger, Hen the Giant, the mammoth
Distillery VFX: Time of Legends salt desert, stately home
Platige Image: Fianna in rock form, the black void
Cause and FX: Additional Fianna work
Leitmotif: Supporting compositing and FX work across all episodes
Bot VFX: Cleanup and 2D work, Kevin’s glasses
ReDefine: Supporting compositing across all episodes
