Bringing the robot character to life, and death, for season 3 of Foundation. A new excerpt from the magazine.
Laura Birn’s Demerzel acts as loyal aide to the Emperor of the Galaxy. Her robot nature has over the course of the Foundation series been revealed by showing under her ‘skin’ and into her endoskeleton. Largely, the visual effects for Demerzel in season 3 were handled by Outpost VFX.
“Demerzel’s robot form remained pretty consistent from previous seasons,” discusses Outpost’s Mathieu Assemat. “We’ve done all the Demerzel ‘under the hood’ work since season 1 so we have a good asset and a good understanding of how it works. One particular challenge this time around was the sequence where she reveals her true face to Zephyr Vorellis (Rebecca Ineson). We had revealed Demerzel’s robot face once before in the big face rip shot at the end of season 1, but however difficult that shot was, the robot Demerzel was screaming so had a consistent mouth shape. This time around we had to show her talking, which is quite tricky to achieve well when a character asset doesn’t have lips.”
“We had a fun ‘maintenance’ sequence again this season,” continues Assemat. “It’s a running theme that at some point Demerzel will be in her chambers fixing this or that. This time around we see her talking to Day without her head attached. It was far simpler than it looks, though, thanks to what they shot so well on set.”
Production visual effects supervisor Chris MacLean explains that the sequence was filmed with Birn wearing a black leotard for the moment she is on the table. “We cut away the top of the table so she could be sitting there, and then we had a headrest for her so she wouldn’t move. We then replaced the top of the table digitally, added some of her make-up jars and jewelry boxes underneath her head and her neck, just to add to the magic trick.”
“Then when she grabs the head,” adds MacLean, “the scene was edited so we could have her touch her face practically and pick it up. Then cut to a shot where Laura lifts the prosthetic head through the frame out of focus. Then, in the hero re-attachment shot, we see her put the head back on. We had her do three takes of that where we had her take the prosthetic head and just pull it down in front of her face. Then we had her do the action of just holding it above her head. We took the prosthetic head away, and then she brought it down. That’s the take that Outpost actually used for their base plate. So, we did a CG head that came down onto her neck, and then there’s a blend between the plate of her just touching her face and pulling her hands away.”
For that moment of the head joining to the next, Outpost VFX added in some extra wires. “It was about riffing on the same visual language we’d employed in season 2,” says Assemat. “Those moments were quite a bit of work in comp in terms of tracking little details. Also, this is the same room she had sat in for our repair work in season 2 with mirrors everywhere, just to add a bit of complexity. In fact, the trickiest thing in these shots was actually removing all of the fingerprints on the mirrors! This set has been used a lot and Chris had a really good eye for detail so everyone wanted it to look perfect. Everything had to look really pristine, so we had a lot of cleanup work to do.”
Another attribute of Demerzel that Outpost VFX needed to deal with this season was her finger tendrils, which extend out from her hands while she probes Gaal Dornick’s (Lou Llobell) mind. “Demerzel’s finger tendrils were rigged and animated,” describes Assemat. “We had a rig that snapped onto the roto-animation. We then used this rig to drive some lights that were lighting some sublayers of the skin including a skeleton layer, a vein layer, and subsurface. The rig was providing comp with various maps that allowed them to have control onto the various aspects of the tendrils like the hot spots traveling and the propagation of the light.”
During the probe into Gaal’s mind, Demerzel discovers that one of Gaal’s visions incorporates the infrasonic signature of a black hole. To depict that on screen, Crafty Apes helped to re-imagine what had been filmed practically. “The original plan for this sequence involved integrating Demerzel into a luminous tunnel on set,” outlines Crafty Apes visual effects supervisor Damien Hurgon. “Production simulated the effect using a circular laser beam cutting through smoke, and while the idea was strong, the footage proved difficult to unify. The laser behaved unpredictably depending on angle and distance, and what worked for wide shots often felt artificial or distracting in close-ups.”
“So, we stepped back and reimagined the aesthetic from the ground up. We removed all the laser elements from the plate but retained the idea of light interacting with smoke—bending it, pulling it, almost consuming it. Our new concept was that the light wasn’t external at all, but instead radiating from Demerzel herself, with the environment responding to her energy as she’s drawn into the black hole. One of our guiding visual references was Frodo’s disappearance in The Lord of the Rings, the way light wraps, stretches, and fractures around a character caught between worlds. That gave us a foundation for the kind of gravitational pull and volumetric deformation we wanted. From there, we developed a custom solution that blended character lighting, volumetric smoke simulation and subtle warping.”
For the devastating fiery moment that Demerzel attempts to save the baby threatened by Dusk, Outpost VFX worked closely with MacLean to establish the main beats of the death scene. “There was a lot of back and forth,” notes Assemat. “Around a year before we finally delivered this sequence, we had a couple of FX artists doing quick R&D passes, such as getting the skeleton to melt or getting the skin to melt, just to start building up some base elements. It was a really iterative process.”
Birn performed the scene wearing a motion capture-style suit that would ultimately be replaced by Outpost VFX with a CG costume. “In some shots where the fire is just starting, she had the proper costume on, so we had to match it really closely with our CG version including full cloth dynamics and proper lighting,” outlines Assemat. “When the fire starts propagating, we have replaced various parts of the costume with a CG version using the seams to blend in order to be able to damage the costume. The fire was entirely CG but based on references that were shot on set of the practical costume burning, which was really useful. We also had reference of Laura in a black suit performing all the actions.”
Outpost simulated elements in Houdini as multiple players, including the core of the fire, the embers, the smoke, and the interactive layer close to the costume and face. For the first beat of the death scene, everything but Demerzel’s head was mostly CG. “The main takeover,” says Assemat, “occurs when the fire starts to engulf her face. For that we had to use some of our layers to help with the transition. Then for the melting we had already built the full Demerzel exoskeleton. We then created multiple passes including the costume burning and flaking, the skin burning and getting crisp, the skin melting, the metal warming up and getting emissive and melting and embers and debris. Multiple artists in FX were tackling tasks at the same time that were then rendered and deep comp’d together. Lighting created multiple shaders in order to have multiple stages of melting metal and multiple stages of skin. Comp then had the mission to combine all of this with the plate and had to do a ton of integration work to feel like Demerzel is actually in the fire, along with creating the look of the energy beam.”
“We took a step back some way into the process and felt that there wasn’t enough emotion in the CG Demerzel performance, compared to the reference they shot with Laura,” mentions Assemat. “So, we added glinting eyes and details like that to add more life, as well as removing some of the fire from her face so we could eke out more performance from the digital character. Chris also had the idea to have her eye flash in Morse code at the end, which was a nice touch that a lot of viewers picked up on.”
Outpost VFX also had a hand in designing and building the Asterion character—essentially a male version of Demerzel but less technologically advanced—that is seen on the moon base with Kalle (Rowena King) in the final season 3 episode. “We based the initial design on all the work we’d done for the Demerzel substructure but made it feel more primitive,” details Assemat. “There is a lot of common language. We then rigged and animated the character, however, he only had to step forward a little towards camera. It’s a really cool reveal to close the season out; a new robot character, a big fly-through of a CG moon environment, the big sweeping shot of Earth, then credits.”
