An excerpt from the re-published issue #1 of befores & afters magazine.
I recently re-published issue #1 of befores & afters magazine in landscape format. You can grab that issue here. In this excerpt, we look at some super fun stuffy stories featuring a variety of stand-ins, puppets and classic stuffies.
John Bruno (visual effects supervisor): For The Abyss (1989), to get a sense of the scale of the pseudopod, we walked the set with a ventilation hose and kind of puppeteered it to mimic its movement. Phil Norwood and I designed and storyboarded those shots, but by using tubing this helped director James Cameron, the camera crew, all of us, visualize where the pseudopod would be in dimensional space on set. How large it was and how it would be lit. Casting shadows. John Knoll and Dennis Muren from ILM were there taking reference photos for lighting and composition.
Later, of course, ILM would replace the ‘empty, clean plate,’ with the first successful CG creation of a photo real ‘creature’ that still holds up today. The tubing helped visually define how big it was, how far off the floor should it be. It also gave actors, everybody, eyelines. You have a physical object, on set, that’s lit, so when you replace it you know the sources of light and how it reacts on the object in the shot. This was all pre-HDRIs.
With The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Parts 1 and 2 from 2011 and 2012), Phil Tippett had been doing this kind of work for the three previous films. He showed up on set with full size foam core wolves. One thing that was obvious from the cut-outs were that the wolves were large! I had a conversation with Stephanie Meyer, the author, about this and questioned their size. Some of these wolves were the size of a 1200 pound horse transforming in 12 frames from a 150 pound actor. I thought the physics of mass and weight would be difficult to do in a convincing way. Could the wolves be smaller, I asked? Could we make them 10% smaller? And she said, ‘No, you can’t make them smaller. They’re spirit animals. They’re magical.’ I think they look great in the films.
Sheena Duggal (visual effects supervisor): For 50 First Dates (2004), we shot mostly in Hawaii which was perfect place to be on location especially as Adam could go surfing on lunch breaks. The title ’50 First Kisses’ changed to ’50 First Dates’ to accommodate the more squeamish younger male Sandler fans. It’s a nice movie, a cheeky love story, with some naughty bits, animals, children and it was only a year of our lives.
We fabricated a stunt penguin to stand in for Willie the penguin, to be used when Willie gets run over by Drew in the car. I was jumping between first and second units depending on where VFX was needed the most, this was back before the time when VFX had a big footprint on set, so it was just me and a VFX PA on set for about a 200 shot show. The majority of the work was completed using ‘Flame/Inferno’ and a proprietary compositing system. It included multiple blue screen composites, 2D and 3D matte paintings, CG elements, background enhancements and scene transitions. To create the shot we used Flame to comp plates we’d shot of the real penguin and stunt penguin together to seamlessly achieve the illusion he is run over. I think it worked well.
In a ploy to get better catering on 2nd Unit we had fun with the stunt penguin, we sent a ransom demand to 1st Unit—we tied up stunt Willie, put a knife to his throat and sent a picture of this accompanied by a note demanding better catering or the penguin buys it and the day’s newspaper! Surprisingly, it worked; we did get catered to better that day at least, a special meal arrived which we really enjoyed.
Easter egg: Victoria Alonso was the VFX producer with me in post and we had a great time on this film, everyone was wonderful.
Howard Berger (co-founder, K.N.B. EFX Group Inc.): In the world of making animal and creature stand-ins for VFX on set reference, K.N.B. EFX Group has made many in their time. Though productions will refer to these items as ‘stuffies’ we feel they deserve more respect and like to refer to them as ‘replicas’, as that is what they are. There are times where VFX has requested a blue, or grey or green form that can interact with an actor, that creates the spatial reference required, and sometimes they will need more.
On The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), aside from all the hundreds of makeups, suits and creatures, K.N.B. was charged with creating, VFX supervisor Dean Wright requested replicas for the wolves, beavers, badger, fox and, of course, Aslan. Originally VFX requested a big blue Aslan, as R&H and Bill Westenhofer would be creating him digitally. I just did not want to show up in New Zealand with a big blue lion, so I took it upon myself to work towards creating several versions that could be screen-used. The first was the entire upper half of Aslan when Lucy and Susan ride upon his back. We built a fully radio controlled puppet to allow the actors to perform while riding him, and VFX had something more than spatial reference to use.
The second was the Stone Table version, which was a full-size bound and lying down Aslan. Jeff Himmel and Leonard MacDonald were instrumental in bringing him to life, as for me the cosmetics had to be spot on. We started to build this version in Los Angeles and finished him off in the New Zealand workshop as I was fearful of shipping him across the world with all that delicate flocked fur.
Again VFX requested a blue form, but I knew that would not give the girls much to play against, as Georgie, who played Lucy, was just eight years old and playing against a blue form would not bring her to tears. On top of the cosmetics, we added breathing in the body, slight head movement, ear twitch, eye blink and muzzle movement. Andrew Adamson, the director, and I did not want the actors to see the puppet until cameras were rolling, so my team got on stage early to get everything ready for the shoot. The girls were brought to set, all puppeteers were poised and ready, Aslan was breathing and alive. The cameras rolled, and the girls walked out, saw the lion and began to cry. All this is in the film and that crying is real. I was never more happy that I ignored my VFX brothers and did what I felt was best as we would not have gotten real tears if we used a big blue lion on the table.
