ILM VFX supe Russell Earl and ILM anim supe Kevin Martel examine the third act battle in ‘The Electric State’ and a few robot Easter eggs to look out for. An excerpt from issue #65 of befores & afters magazine.
b&a: For the amazing third act battle, what was the plan in terms of shooting plates?
Russell Earl: The end battle was shot in Georgia. Having worked with the Russo brothers before, we knew what to expect. We’ve done some of these big third act battles. We knew from the outset that we were going to have to be able to create any shot that could be imagined. We had this field to shoot at. We made sure that we LiDAR scanned it all. We did drone photography. We did the normal photo capture for everything, so that every blade of grass and every tree could be rebuilt if we needed it. In the end, almost every single shot is a fully digital shot, from close-ups on the grass to big wides.
When we were out there, we did have a proper second unit out there, and we had some stunt performers. We would work through the different beats. There’s a shot, for example, where the football bot throws Honeybear. We did have previs that we were working off of. We would look at the previs that we had and then we’d talk with the stunt performers and try to come up with these little beats. Then we would shoot them with the Xsens MVN suits. And it grows from there.
We also realized at a certain point that it was just a big empty field. We wanted to add some interest to it, and it was a great opportunity to go back and add a lot of the Stålenhag-esque set dressing, if you will. There’s a beat and then battle where Peanut and the Marshall meet up at what is one of these cool iconic Electric State towers. Well, one of the main interests on the field was a tree, but it was winter time and there were no leaves on it. We played some beats and composed them with that tree in mind. And then we said, ‘What would be cool is if it weren’t a tree, and then let’s replace it with something that feels more Stålenhag-like.’ So that’s what we did.
Kevin Martel: Full credit to the gen team at ILM. They were really able to render this whole world, which definitely helped if we had to relocate something to somewhere else on the set in the battlefield.
Russell Earl: I was continually just blown away by our environment team. At one point we had sent some shots down and we got a note back from editorial saying, ‘Where did you guys pull these plates from? These aren’t the selects. Where did you get these?’ And of course those were actually our synthetic plates. I mean, we just had an amazing team across the board—animation, layout, environments, lighting, modeling, paint, roto, everybody.
Kevin Martel: We made a lot of maps. In the battle and in the shopping mall. Who’s on this side? Who’s on that side? So many maps.
b&a: With those maps, are they being drawn on a whiteboard or are you grease penciling it on a screen, or on paper?
Kevin Martel: Russ would draw maps in dailies just on the screen. So we’d have those maps and we’d screengrab those. But a lot of our maps we were doing at the layout stage. We’d start putting in digital markers with pins that show where the characters would be and where they go. Then we’d start to see how those pawns moved around, and then we’d start to replace them with the actual bots, then look at it again, see what it looks like from those multiple camera angles and views, and then adjust.
Once you start, you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t want him on that side. So now he’s got to go to that side. Now what does that do to that?’ It’s constantly evolving until you really figure out where everybody should be. For the end battle, we talked about the progression. ‘So it’s going to go from here, then that guy goes down here. Oh, now he’s going to end up in the background of all these shots. Well, we don’t want that, so then we’re going to have to do such and such…’.
Russell Earl: You just hope that it doesn’t get recut, so a beat falls. That beat that was here, ‘Oh, now that beat has moved up in there.’ Because some of them with the vignettes, you could do that. I think we got relatively lucky with not too many things being shifted around within the cut.
Kevin Martel: I don’t know about you, Russell, but I feel confident that if people frame by frame try and deconstruct all of this, that they will see that there was no spatial cheating going on. Things are where they should be and it should all track.
Russell Earl: There’s a couple…
Kevin Martel: There’s a couple, yes. Okay, we won’t talk about those ones…
b&a: In that third act battle, there were some fun shots of Chris Pratt’s character getting lifted up and sitting on the shoulder of Herman.
Russell Earl: That particular shot where Herman reaches down, we shot that outside one of the stages. We had laid some sod on the ground up against bluescreen on shipping containers, and there was a rig. It was basically a seesaw rig with guys on one end lifting it up. Then Chris ran up, climbed on it and it spun around and lifted him up.
It was a pretty simple rig so we just backed into that. Again, we have a great layout team that’s able to take that, match what we had and then bring it into our world and then adjust that to get it as close as they can. And then Kevin and his crew took it from there.
Kevin Martel: We just tried to make it all physically make sense, trying to find the body pose that connects the lift to his hand.
Russell Earl: We always want to try to keep as much of the real photography as we can, but if it’s going to make his legs being a little unsteady on the hand, we just try to do what looks best.
Kevin Martel: It’s basically anything to help that connection further seem valid. So it’s all anchored to the original photography, but then we found ways that we could continue to improve the interaction.
Russell Earl: You always sit in these meetings and you look at the shots and it’s like, ‘Okay, are we going to go digital there?’ And a lot of times, you don’t really know until you see it if it’s going to work. So for the most part, we’re doing at least rough matches to our character, say Chris Pratt here. Once we then have our digi-double and a rough matchmove, we can render it and see how it looks.
There was another great shot where Herman is falling and Pratt is jumping out. They shot a great stunt of that, but the timing wasn’t quite right so we went digital in the end. He’s rolling on the ground and at the end of the day, it was all digital, but very tightly matched into what the stunt guys had done on the day.
Kevin Martel: When you have that original performance and that original photography, it really helps inform you. So then we’re just doing those digital augmentations as choices. I think that is a great example of having something lay the foundation practically and then turning it CG to further blend it into the world.
Russell Earl: Also, we are always looking to match all-CG shots back into the live-action to try to keep the same energy and feel.
Kevin Martel: And the balance is achieved when people in dailies don’t know which version you’re looking at, say, if you’re looking at the plate or you’re looking at the CG one. When everybody’s thoroughly confused, then it’s in a good place.
b&a: There’s another great shot with Pratt’s character and Herman where Herman grabs a heli drone out from the sky and then uses the roto blades to cut the other one. I thought that was a really cool shot.
Russell Earl: That’s all Kevin and the animation guys. I could tell they were having fun on this one.
Kevin Martel: I mean, I think for many of us that have chosen this career path, having robots fight each other is pretty much what we’ve always wanted to do! So, coming up with new creative ways for them to destroy each other was a blast. That creative pitch session was really the best.
Russell Earl: There is so much in there, too. I mean, I’d suggest people go back and don’t focus on the hero characters. Go back, watch the movie, and look at the background and what’s happening in the background because there’s so much stuff. There’s a shot with the football bot and trying to stick the head back on.
Kevin Martel: I think there’s even, well, this one is a little bit of an Easter egg, but the security drone that gets the ski pole into the head, we did put him in the background of a shot. He’s still wandering around with that ski pole lodged in his head. So he’s having a rough time of it, but he’s still standing.
Russell Earl: He’s still out there somewhere.
