A range of corpses were brought to life by the effects teams on Frankenstein with puppets, prosthetics and digital VFX. From issue #50 of the mag.
Victor presents his research on reanimating corpses to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. One of his demonstrations includes temporarily bringing a corpse to life and even making it catch a ball. Creature designer Mike Hill oversaw the creation of a half-corpse puppet for this scene. “Mike Hill is a genius,” marvels Berardi. “He made a fully articulated puppet that could be puppeteered. He actually had a couple of versions of it—a static version, which was up against the backboard that it rests against, and then the puppeteered version.”
Berardi mentions, too, that del Toro hand-selected the puppeteers to operate the half-corpse. Those crew members wore blue suits, with the idea being they could be more easily painted out by the VFX team. “We got a lot of the performances in-camera, especially for the ball catch,” says Berardi. “We had Oscar Isaac really throw the ball, and we had the puppeteer with a hand made up to look like the puppet. He had a rig that would control the arm that was connected to the elbow, the bicep and the shoulder area. And so the puppeteer caught the ball! I was always going to have to replace the arm from the shoulder to the hand for that, but we got the catch for real.”
Further augmentations were made to the half-corpse to give the heart and lungs some movement, and where the brain is exposed—“to make it juicier,” notes Berardi. “It’s another situation where it’s the perfect hybrid approach of a master of make-up effects with Mike Hill, great puppeteers, Dan Laustsen lighting it, Tamara Deverell’s amazing set, and then we come in as the visual effects artists bring it all together in that lecture hall. Every shot was a visual effect, but you don’t see them.”
MR. X was behind the visual effects work for the half-corpse. “We built a full 3D asset from a scan of the puppet, which was rigged and used for matchmoves,” observes Burgess. “We did accurate full body matchmoves of the puppeteered motion in every shot, so we could be flexible in blend points. We replaced the brain and the arm to introduce negative space and peel away more skin.”
“We also created HDRI-based lighting setups to match the on-set chrome ball/grey ball reference plates,” details Burgess. “This process helped ensure seamless blending between CG and practical elements. In shots where the puppeteer interacted with the red ball, we kept their fingers and blended them into the CG hand. Additional work included painting out the puppeteers and rebuilding the background using on-set photographs, the lecture hall LiDAR scan, and digital matte painting.”
Continued re-animation experiments by Victor see him try the process on other corpses, including for what was described as the flayed man. This was a corpse realized as a full dummy on set, again by Hill. As soon as it is re-animated, a one-to-one matching MR. X CG version was utilized. “The flayed man coming to life was an idea Guillermo had on the day of the shoot,” recounts Burgess. “We LiDAR-scanned the practical prop and used Guy Davis’ concept designs to guide the 3D asset creation. This asset had to hold up in close-up shots, so it was built meticulously. Using ZBrush, we sculpted and projected high-resolution details like wrinkles, pores and veins. To make sure we were building an anatomically correct character, we fitted internal skeletal and muscle geometry. This geometry was also used in a simulation step to compute accurate deformations in areas like the shoulders, hips, elbows and wrists.”
‘Frankenstein’: a look at the prosthetics, miniatures and digital VFX in the new magazine
Burgess advises that on-set lighting reference was important data for success in VFX shots like this. “We calibrated HDRIs to match the on-set grey ball/chrome ball lighting reference plates,” he says. “We filmed reference of an actor performing the movement, and hand-animated the flayed man in Maya, using the best parts from the performance and adding random involuntary spasms to give the movement an unnatural feel. We used Houdini’s Vellum solver to simulate skeletal/muscle/fascia deformation. Ragdoll Dynamics in Maya was used to simulate the ropes and weights attached to the flayed man. The drool was simulated using Houdini’s flip solver. Shot lighting was done in Redshift through Houdini, and the shots were composited in Nuke.”
