Sue Rowe and Erik De Boer Talk ‘The Maze Runner’

Warner Bros’ The Maze Runner opened to $32 million and currently stands at almost $225 million worldwide, an impressive number given that the VFX charged movie was produced for a mere $34 million. Based on the popular series of novels by James Dashner, the film features a group of teenagers who find themselves trapped in a huge maze from which they must escape. For director Wes Ball, this was an ambitious first feature film. But his background in animation and visual effects clearly helped him produce a film that punches well above its weight. Fox has already lined up a sequel with Ball attached to direct.

Method Studios was the main VFX vendor on the film, responsible for 530 shots, many of which were CG character shots - new ground for the studio. I caught up with VFX supervisor Sue Rowe and animation supervisor Erik De Boer to discuss their work on the film.

Paul Younghusband: Why don’t you give me a brief outline of the show and how your VFX work fits into it?

Sue Rowe: Well, the story is about a group of kid’s who find themselves trapped in a maze. They’re surrounded by 100 foot walls. They don’t know why they’re there and they don’t know how to get out. The doors to the maze open every day at dawn, and they close at dusk. And beyond the walls are these characters that come out at night called Grievers. They’re fairly nasty creatures with organic bodies and metal legs. It’s a really great concept and a great story. Method’s work was in creating the maze environment and the Griever characters.

PY: I understand the character animation work is new ground for Method?

SR: Yes it is. We were very keen to do this show. One of the plans here at Method has always been to develop the creature work that we’ve been doing. As you probably know Method traditionally has not been known for their creature pipeline. One of the things the company did, which I think was really smart, was they approached me in the UK because I’d done a few creature shows, and then we went on the hunt for the best people we could find to get this show going. We managed to get Eric to join us, who had just come off Life of Pi. We had another guy who joined us by the name of James Jacob who was a character TD at Weta. So basically Method tooled up and got this great team involved. And this was a good film to start on because although there were 150 character shots, the Griever itself is pretty similar in every shot. There are eight different Griever variations but they’re all the same kind of breed.

Eric De Boer: Yeah, the characters are all quite similar. They’re kind of like scaled up insects, and actually that’s the first place we went to look for our reference. Ants, spiders, cockroaches, even crabs. The main challenge was finding a way to make these guys agile enough and threatening enough that they could grab these kids, but also cumbersome and clumsy enough to give the kids a chance to escape them. So that was an interesting challenge. The scale and all the space we had underneath their bodies really helped us with that. We also really tried to justify their design in terms of how they locomoted through the maze. The characters were designed for this environment so they had to have a certain familiarity or definitely an ease with regards to how they moved through some of the tiny areas of the maze. That’s why we gave them telescopic legs, so that we could alter their leg length for certain actions. It was definitely fun trying to rationalize how these creatures fit together. They have hearts that are pumping hydraulic fluid through their bodies. And the legs we decided to treat as jack hammers to give them traction against the hard stone maze floors and walls. And that really made for a lot of fun in animation. Once you see them out in the open, their stride length is huge.

SR: When you fully stretched them out, their legs were about 15 feet. Their head was about 6 feet off the ground and their tail could extend 18 feet.

EDB: When you see them moving around in the maze environment they really worked very well. While we were designing the motion of these guys we definitely went too insectoid at the beginning, so we had to scale that back, and we started to go a little more mechanical. And I think that the sound design really helps sell these characters and solidify their appearance.

SR: When we first looked at the creature designs the thing that got us excited was the percussive sound you’d get from a character like this. The chest inflating, the blowholes and the wheezing.

PY: How challenging was it to take on this kind of work for the first time?

EDB: When I joined Method I was very lucky to find a great team of animators already present here and they had built a fairly solid set of tools that, especially in our Maya sessions, really helped us crank stuff out nicely. But around that we had to really build a lot of new processes. One of the big challenges was coming up with a way to design the motion and choreograph the characters and without having to go back through animation, be able to re-skin or reshape our geometry with a new look dev style, new UV or even model changes. And that can all bypass the animation stage once we have that fully locked down. So that was a big part of the new pipeline we had to build.

PY: And with no real track record in this area, was it a challenge to convince the studio you were up to the job?

SR: We were very fortunate that Fox has a great working relationship with Method from previous shows. So that allowed us to get in there and they were willing to take a risk. And we have definitely been the envy of some of my friends at other studios to get this work. It’s a really popular book with a big following.

PY: And this was Wes Ball’s first feature film too?

SR: Yes. He has done short films before, and has experience in animation and visual effects. I think that really helped. He’s part of this new breed of directors that really understand the visual effects process and fully embrace it. We were able to have lots of really constructive conversations about what we can do and what we can’t and how we can push it and take it to the next level. I think Wes recognised in Method that he had a good team on his hands. And he was great to work with, his background meant he was really able to articulate what he wanted.

EDB: It’s funny actually, Wes is a young and energetic guy, but he’s also super calm and very thoughtful. But when we were discussing some of the Griever shots he would just turn into this maniac, run across the edit room, bounce off the walls and scream at the top of his voice to give an idea of how ferocious and how predatory he wanted these creatures to be. And then within a split second he would just sit back down, pick up his pen or his tablet and say, ‘something like that.’ It definitely helped hit home what energy and aggression these guys needed to have, but it was a little bit scary to be in the room with him when he did it!

SR: He was even like that on set. Eric Brevig, my co-VFX supervisor was on set for the full duration of the shoot, but I went down for the some of the relevant character work as did Erik. I remember walking onto the set for the Griever finale. We had 360 degrees of bluescreen, apart from a piece of floor, and we’ve got the guys in blue suits, with blue sticks pretending to be the Grievers. And at one point, because the guys weren’t getting it on stage, Wes jumps up and starts acting it all out, hitting the ground and practically hitting the kid’s. He’s just got that way about him.

PY: Let’s talk a little about the Maze…

SR: Well, the walls themselves are 100 feet tall and we rendered those using V-Ray and they were built in Maya. They were actually fairly straight forward in some regards, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to get scale on a 100 ft wall. So we did a lot of cool lighting effects, especially since as a story point the walls are opening at dawn and dusk, so that was pretty beautiful.

But the big challenge was putting ivy on the walls. As you know with tiny leaves and vines a CG scene can get really complex and difficult to work with. But Houdini lends itself very well to this type of work. We found some freeware that built ivy, and we used it as a starting point to develop our own in-house foliage software that allowed us to physically grow the ivy. I know it sounds geeky but it was exciting, because if you try and grow something procedurally, it doesn’t always look organic. It has something very ‘mathematical solver’ about it. So we developed a tool that allowed my artists to draw lines on the walls where they wanted the ivy to grow, then we could define how many branches and and how thick the lines would be at the base. Then for the hundreds of thousands of tiny leaves we roped in a sort of randomised tool that also allowed us to control which areas the leaves would grow in, and in what direction. So I’m pretty proud of that.

PY: This was pretty low budget for a VFX-heavy movie?

SR: Yes it was. I am actually quite proud of the fact that it wasn’t a huge budget because I don’t think you can tell from the screen. I really think we did a great job for Fox. One of the things I think helped us was that Wes understood the process and he was very pragmatic when it came to making decisions. In some cases we actually managed to make the shots better because of the constraints of the budget. Take for example the maze rearrange, which I think was one of Wes’ favourite sequences. The kid’s almost find their way out and as a result the maze triggers a rearrange. The walls start moving, the floor starts cracking these huge cogs and wheels start rising up out of the ground. It’s almost like the kid’s are running through an earthquake. Wes shot the sequence in a car park out in Louisinia, with 180 feet of bluescreen and a lot of imagination! Then when we got it back to the office we added a lot of dust, debris, soil and particle effects. We simply didn’t have the budget to create a huge wide shot with all the destruction, so we decided to keep the camera really close, over the actors shoulder where you can see the floor cracking below them. And actually I think that worked out much better than the shots you might have had in bigger budget shows. It kept it very real and very pacey.

PY: Looking back do you have a favourite shot or sequence?

SR: I do actually. There is a shot where a Griever is set on fire. The kid’s are attacking the Griever at night. They’re running for their lives and Teresa, the female lead, grabs an oil lamp and throws it at the Griever. Of course when we were on set we had no Griever; just a green stick where the creature was going to be. We had the actor throw an unlit jam jar at the stick, and there was only me and Wes in the middle of this field in the middle of the night who could actually imagine what this burning Griever was going to look like. So we were really enthusiastic but I think everyone else was a little underwhelmed. But the resulting shot is really good. We ended up doing it all with CG fire and doing interactive lighting in V-Ray. It’s a very cool shot.

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Paul Younghusband is a producer and writer based in London. He has previously served as editor of Visual Magic Magazine, and has contributed to publications such as VFX World and Animation World Magazine.