Behind the creation of the stand-out manifestation of Pennywise. An excerpt from issue #57 of befores & afters magazine.
In IT: Welcome to Derry, Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack) sees a vision of her father as a monster made of pickles—dubbed ‘Pickle Dad’. The vision relates to the death of Lilly’s father in a tragic pickle processing factory accident.
Visual effects supervisor Daryl Sawchuk notes that Andy Muschietti would provide rough sketches for what Pickle Dad would appear like. “We saw that it was going to have all sorts of intestines and limbs, almost like an octopus. I’ve done similar creature work before and it’s very challenging to get accurate skin sliding, friction, changes of volume and that feeling of thickness and gravity. Ultimately it was all made up of different body parts, so we knew it had to be this very unique rig, since the dad’s head was sliced into multiple parts.”
Further creature designs were delivered based on the original sketches, and then provided to Rodeo FX. “The team there quickly worked up a ZBrush sculpt to get things working as a 3D form,” discusses Sawchuk. “They’d then make the hand even more grotesque, or the foot have a bigger wound. Very quickly, they started moving into motion tests. I sent them lots of reference of creatures and animals that we wanted to follow, and they took that on board and started doing a bunch of pretty creepy looking things early on.”
“The inspiration for Pickle Dad was obviously the octopus, but to achieve something more in the spirit of the It franchise, we did a lot of research and exploration with staccato movements and also keeping some of the happy accidents from the CFX rig,” states Rodeo FX visual effects supervisor Pier Lefebvre.
“We actually built some physical tentacles in our live-action studio and did some exploration by manipulating them in a pool of real pickle juice. The octopus usually has stretchy skin that allows fluid movement. Our goal was to create something a bit more grotesque by having the organs bind, giggle and pop. Using the final animation as a base, the CFX rig applied the deformation and simulation based on speed, friction, and internal colliders like pieces of the jaw and slices of the skull. We would finally artistically retarget the areas back to the base rig deformation based on the lip sync.”
On set, the prosthetics team had built out a Pickle Dad head. “We were able to jerry rig that on top of a mechanical platform that we could push on a stick,” reveals Sawchuk. “It would displace some of the pickles that we had on the ground, so we managed to use a lot of practical pickles and brine and juice on the day.”
“It gave everybody an eyeline reference to look at and it gave us great lighting reference. When we had to wrap the tentacle around Lily’s neck and constrict her, we worked out a solution where we could actually physically tug her with the help of the special effects team, led by Darcy Callaghan. Even though Clara already has one of the best horror screams of all time, having something physical for her to react to elevated the performance.”
