Plus, how the creatures were designed for the film.
South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin brings science fiction and action together in HOPE, set in a fictional harbor town near the Korean DMZ after the discovery of a mysterious extraterrestrial creature. As police, hunters and locals struggle to survive the escalating threat, Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender play alien characters J’aur and Ma’veyyo, with both actors performing their roles through motion capture.
The film is packed with large-scale action, from police-car chases and gunfights to aliens running amok through the village and nearby forest, with characters even charging into the action on horseback. An alien rampaging through several buildings (and people) is just one highlight, as is the transformation of Fassbender’s character from a bidpedal creature into a horrific quadruped.
Visual effects were crucial to creating the film’s creatures and integrating them into these sequences, but HOPE was equally committed to making the action feel physical and grounded, especially via its frenetic camera work. Here, befores & afters got to speak to Director Na about bringing the creatures to life and about the technical aspects of creating such a high-energy chase film.
Designing the creatures
The aliens featured in HOPE were designed to all look different from one another. They range in appearance from tentacled to humanoid-like forms, and they often appear injured and weathered (revealed to be from a crash-landing on Earth). Each alien is unique in appearance because, notes Director Na, “they’re all from different planets and they are united in this one front when we meet them in the film. As the mystery of the film is solved one by one, we really wanted to add that design element to be able to help bring that message forward. The first creature that we see, we wanted it to be almost formless, so we couldn’t immediately recognize what it is. And from then on, the structure, the shape of the creature, really helps with the mystery element that’s being unfolded.”
The earliest design incarnations of the creatures aimed at realism, the director also reveals. “However, that idea changed over time. We wanted to create a creature that was really fun, that was innovative and different from creatures that we had seen in other films. So we kind of went outside of the framework of American creature design and really tried to focus on more Asian-inspired line work and design. Also narratively, the creatures themselves have their own backstory, even though you don’t see it in the film itself. We wanted to deliver the sense that they had an entire life before we meet them in the film. And they also have a hierarchy and a mission that they’re living by.”
Alien leader Ma’veyyo, played by Fassbender, is normally seen as a bipedal creature. But he can also ‘transform’ into a quadruped when chasing down humans—one of the most striking shots in the film is Ma’veyyo in this four-legged form attempting to bite at two characters on horse back in slow motion. “The transformation mechanic was already set from the very beginning for this creature,” details Director Na. “The concept artist was able to design it in a very grotesque way. There was a little bit of inspiration from Ridley Scott’s Alien and a lot of other films that have creatures. It’s interesting that this transformation is not like a mechanical transformation, but it’s like a biological transformation.”
Shooting those insane action scenes
Sequences featuring the aliens were largely filmed with stand-in performers and dummies. In post, key actors including Fassbender and Vikander created alien performances on a motion capture stage (more on this later). Equally as impressive as the creatures are the action scenes themselves. A lot happens in the film—from a thrilling police car chase, to following one of the creatures rip through the town, and more pursuits in the mountainous forest and surrounding roadways.
Director Na and his team produced storyboards and previs to plan out the action. A key component was choreographing the action so that it stayed close to actors. To pull that off in the live-action shoot, all manner of camera rigs and setups were utilized, including drones, cranes and cable-cams. Specialist camera equipment production company XM2 itself provided equipment such as an e-bike fitted with a camera arm, a remote control slider and a remote control camera car dubbed ‘Charlie’. Sometimes these vehicles were even wrapped in bluescreen material, and fixed with stuffy heads of the creatures on extension poles.
“We had to get really creative because we had to rig cameras to a lot of moving objects,” notes Director Na. “There was a lot of discussion between myself, the DP and the camera operators. Setting up these shots was a really big task. We rigged to a horse, and of course we did a ton of car rigging. There were a lot of horses and cars on standby, around 12 of them. We have to give flowers to our stunt team because it takes a great amount of trust to get so close to the subject. The lens was probably only a foot away from the horse hooves. It can be scary.”
What made things even more challenging was that these heavy action sequences were shot on location, rather than on controlled sound stages. For shots in the town, for instance, a large green buck was driven through the street to smash up objects and debris. “There were all kinds of special effects, like explosions, that were happening in real-time as we were shooting,” says Director Na.
Motion capture and visual effects
Director Na’s editing process saw him rely mainly on the stand-in and dummy performances as plates while assembling the film. More directing came in the form of the motion capture shoot. Here, the actors representing the aliens wore both a body motion capture suit and a facial capture head-mounted camera (HMC).
The director particularly enjoyed this side of the production. “Being able to direct Alicia and Michael in the motion capture stage was incredibly smooth and also a lot of fun. We had a previs to reference as we shot Alicia and Michael, so I could show them these very roughly edited sequences and they knew what sort of action they would have to do going into the scenes. The biggest question for me was, how are these people memorizing these nonsense lines? It made me realize, wow, they’re true professionals and they’re famous for a reason because they’re able to get all these lines correctly.”
For Director Na, the facial performance of each actor was very important. It was being captured via the HMC and then translated onto the relevant digital creature. “A human has very intricate movement, so being able to add those elements to the creatures really opened up a lot of freedom for us. It influenced the fluidity, the amount that we wanted these creatures to be able to express themselves, the speed, all these elements. So the facial performance really enriched these creatures a great amount.”
In terms of visual effects, which were led by Westworld, Director Na mentions some of the more challenging aspects of the creature shots related to scale. “Monsters of this scale usually move very slowly. However, they move incredibly quickly in this film. When you’re shooting live-action, you don’t really get a sense of the motion blur as strongly because there’s shots where the subject is standing still. Also, we already have a perception of the form before the subject starts moving, so we’re less thrown off by the motion blur. However, when it comes to the creature, as soon as it appears, it’s running at a crazy speed. So it’s really easy to kind of be put off by the amount of motion blur of the creature. So that was kind of an issue that my VFX team and I were really trying to tackle and nail down throughout the process.”
