Freefolk discusses its approach to invisible visual effects in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’, including stitching plates together, re-times and just the right amount of bug additions.
We previously broke down the visual effects in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme here at befores & afters with production visual effects supervisor Dan Schrecker. In this article, we dive deeper into the film with VFX vendor Freefolk.
The studio’s work spanned several shots and sequences, including the model dam scene, the opening airplane explosion and jungle moments. The total VFX shot count for Freefolk ran to 153.
“Most of it was 2D work,” outlines Freefolk visual effects producer Hannah Dakin. “We started off with five or six comp’ers and then it grew a little to about 10 of us in the end. At Freefolk, we have the ability to be quite small but grow quite rapidly depending on the job. So that’s what we did.”
Freefolk’s main sequence involved the reveal of the model dam, railway and tunnels, and its sudden explosion and release of water. This was actually a miniature dam built for in-camera shooting, combined with an effects shoot of a matching proxy miniature for the water and explosion of the dam. Freefolk was tasked with compositing the separate plates together, as visual effects supervisor Steve Murgatroyd explains.
“Rather than trash that lovely huge model that they built, they used a more simplistic proxy version. It lined up pretty well. But in order to achieve the explosion and do the takeover from one model to the next with all that fine water spray, the line-up had to be more than just close.”
“So,” adds Murgatroyd, “we spent quite a bit of time re-jigging and re-timing the positions of trains and buildings from one model to match the other. Sometimes we did it on the hero to match the proxy, and vice versa. The water came past and it was transparent for most of it, meaning, if they didn’t line up, it didn’t work. Then, as the polystyrene bits of the proxy bridge broke, we had to project the images from the hero model onto those or you would see the blue polystyrene pieces.”
Re-times were also necessary for a range of other shots, including where two separate plates might be being stitched together as part of a VFX shot. These re-times came about where, during the editorial process, a range of frames, say 6 or 12, might be cut out of a shot while the performance was being built up.
“Obviously,” notes Murgatroyd, “if you cut those frames out and try and stitch the two remaining parts together, there’s a jump. So we had to use fluid morphs in Nuke to do the stitches. We still had to do a lot of clean-up where there were bits of the frame tearing. The fluid morph gets you 90% there and then there’ll be a little bits that tear and they not quite working and you solve that by doing a more traditional morph between a couple of frames, patching over, just old fashioned paint work, or sometimes cutting bits out from the previous or the next frame and overlaying it. It’s standard repair work but can be very time consuming.”
One particular piece of stitch and compositing work that Freefolk looked after was the opening moment on the plane with Zsa-Zsa (Benicio del Toro), where a flight attendant meets his end after an explosion. Two main plates were filmed for the long shot; the first for the attendant being sliced in half and part of the fuselage falling off, and the second for Zsa-Zsa’s performance. Other elements like the back of a set being ripped off were also filmed.
“They all lined up really well,” says Murgatroyd. “The stitch point is where there’s a bit of metal just beside the door and it gets ripped off and more light comes in and hits the floor—that’s where the join is. We took debris and paper from the first plate and carried that on for about three or four seconds into the second part of the take and vice versa, meaning the debris from the second part was also put onto the first one.”
Scenes of the characters navigating the jungle after a plane crash involved adding to the jungle background, delivering dappled moving shadows, and increasing the amount of dust and bugs in the air.
“You became really aware when it was either too little or too much,” observes Dakin. “Either it would be, ‘We’re not really looking at anything,’ or, if it was too much, we’d see these massive flies moving around the actors and it just looked a bit silly. But if it was there and you didn’t notice it, then that was the right amount of atmosphere for the jungle.”
“Dan Schrecker did a mock-up himself to show us,” describes Murgatroyd. “Wes was looking for just the right amount of dust and bugs for it not to be properly noticed, but enough to make a difference.”
