The leading creative studio delivers 500 shots across 11 sequences on the final film of the Marvel and Sony ‘Venom’ trilogy, including a Symbiote dance sequence, a battle atop an airplane, and the first non-human takeover… of a horse.
Going from winning an Oscar for Tenet to working on Venom: The Last Dance, DNEG VFX Supervisor David Lee has certainly seen his share of varied visual effects, everything from invisible VFX to CGI spectacles. For his work on Venom: The Last Dance, Marvel and Sony Pictures’ final instalment in their Symbiote trilogy starring Tom Hardy and directed by Kelly Marcel, Lee oversaw DNEG’s delivery of 500 shots across 11 sequences.
The DNEG VFX team’s work included creating new characters like the Venom Horse, Xenophage, and green Symbiote as well as familiar ones such as Venom and Wraith Venom. They also handled a dance sequence with Mrs. Chen, a high-altitude battle on top of an airplane, skydiving and a split face conversation between the host and parasite. “It’s sometimes nice to be matching reality so closely because you have such good references and are trying to make the highest level of output that you can,” states Lee. “But something like Venom has a subjective look for a lot of these characters, especially the ones we’re doing in the latest film. I enjoy both types of work.”
Central to the success of the Venom franchise has been convincing the audience that there is an alien inhabiting the body of a human (Tom Hardy) that now and then forcefully emerges in a physical form. “With a lot of these types of effects you’re always trying to create so many points of interest that you’re not giving the eye long enough to necessarily linger on any one component,” remarks Lee. “For us, it was looking at how would this really come out of the body. At first you might have some idea of a seepage coming through the skin, so that provides a base layer. The skin itself starts to turn black, showing a bit of subsurface oil running underneath. Then you might get a layer coming on top of it that starts to build and build. It’s about increasing the complexity of these layers, so it feels organic.” Another key to the franchise’s success has been the Abbott and Costello-type interplay between Hardy and the Symbiote that adds humor to the proceedings. “It is a testament to Tom Hardy and his performances in terms of how he makes it work and voices Venom and has these dialogues, essentially, between himself. There are always multiple versions that we can try to use and make it work. It’s an interesting challenge to get that eyeline working on some of these shots because sometimes you don’t want it to be quite where Tom might be looking.”
Adding additional complexity to the work was that not all scenes take place at night. “That brought with it a particular set of challenges in terms of how you get something that has only been seen in these dark moody environments working in the full daylight,” states Lee. “You don’t want it to be a black hole in the shot. So, it’s a fine balance. We would end up taking some creative license with the lighting. Normally if you were out in the desert, you’ve got one source light, which is the sun. That’s going to give you a defined reflection. But Venom doesn’t work like that. Because he is only black then literally Venom is just reflection. We were having to cheat a lot of these little point lights all around him while still trying to allow the environment to motivate that lighting, so it doesn’t look like it’s popping out of the scene. But that then gives us these nice defining reflections that shape him. We would do subtle things like increasing the level of bounce coming off the ground. We would give compositing a whole lot of these lighting passes and that would be where the balancing started. Once we got that look it would be fed back to lighting again so they could adjust it on their end and then everything else begins coming through more out of the box. But there was still a lot of comp work to balance that.”
Fluid simulations are an essential aspect of Venom Wraith. “Wraith is a head with essentially these oily liquid tendrils that seep all of the way over,” Lee explains. “And even where it joins the head, you have this paint dripping effect that comes down over the top of his face. We altered the tendrils a little bit from previous shows because the technology has changed. But once you get that setup, as long as you have a rigorous base to work on, they flowed through quite seamlessly. Apart from his facial performance, which is driven by the animation, what we do is attach a rudimentary pipe to the head that then drives where the effects tendrils would go. It’s almost like a broad transformation tool that then drives the effects work on top of that.”
Venom is a show that relies heavily on effects. “If you saw an early version of Wraith that had a pipe coming out attached to Tom’s back, your first instinct is to say, ‘Is that how it is? Because that looks terrible.’ It's making sure that we’re taking everyone along for the ride so that they understand that these early versions are not necessarily indicative of the final look, but are the place where we want to get direction in terms of does Wraith’s neck bend with a softer curve or does it want to be tighter coming over the shoulder because that’s where the tendril is going to be coming in.”
Motion capture was utilized when Venom dances with Mrs. Chen. “We had a dancer and choreographer who designed that sequence with Kelly Marcel,” remarks Lee. “We always looked at Venom as Arnold Schwarzenegger; he’s a big man, powerful, a lot of muscle mass, and moves slightly differently. How does that work? Luckily YouTube is a fountain of different people dancing so we referenced that heavily. That meant when the dancer gave us the motion capture data, we would then have to take that and see how we needed to move that into Venom’s character. Did we need to slow some things down? There's a stylistic element in terms of trying to get a certain look and feel. Big dancers are still quite light on their feet. It’s not necessarily a lumbering giant type of thing. That’s where our expectations laid when we first started looking into it. But we eventually got lighter and lighter, and more fluid throughout the whole sequence. It worked quite nicely with what Kelly was going for. That’s a comical part of the film.” Arm extensions aided in getting the proper interaction between the extremely tall and tiny dance partners. “These extensions allowed Mrs. Chen to place her hands on his forearm accurately,” says Lee. “We could keep as much of her performance as we possibly could. For eyelines, which went up another foot or so, we had the same thing. Our dancer had an eyeline helmet on as well, so Mrs. Chen was always looking at and touching the right places.”
For the first time in the trilogy, Venom takes over a creature rather than a human. In this case, it’s a horse. “Initially, we dialed into Venom, which involved taking all the textured look and put that onto the horse,” Lee shares. “We thought no matter what body was being taken over by Venom, the process itself is still the same, as well as the movement. You would always finish with the head. But also, visually, it’s a nice thing to finish with. The horse was shot further away with wider shots, but there was also a lot of motion because it’s supposed to be running so fast. We actually started to dial down that tight oily spec look that we had on Venom because it looked overly streaky and visually unappealing, almost being confused with noise. We started looking at Arabian horses, which are black and have this beautiful sheen that defines the muscularity and shape. In fact, they’re so black that when they’re backlit they are almost like silhouettes against the environment. We essentially gave Venom Horse a more horsey look.”
In one sequence, Venom Horse gallops off a cliff. “That’s a great homage to the first Venom when Tom Hardy sends his tendrils down to grab the motorcycle. This is the reverse, with the horse shooting up the tendrils. That shot was heavily prevised before we started shooting it. It gave us a great base to work from. Actually, when you look at the previs compared to the finished film, that sequence is coherent compared to where we started. We did shoot elements of Tom to get a facial performance and projected that onto where it was required, such as the shot where he’s coming towards the camera.”
Not all the fights occur on land. In another sequence, as Venom tangles with the Xenophage on top of a flying passenger airplane. “The Xenophage went through a lot of versions in terms of how it looked,” explains Lee. “There is a lot of lizardy homage and an insect-like feel to it. How it moved was a fun challenge for the animation team, which spent a lot of time playing around with different movement styles. By the time we finished the film, there was a lot more of the staccato insect movement. It was difficult to rig because the way the Xenophage was designed meant that there had to be a range of motion that was unnatural for a creature of that construction. The tail splits into three tails. How does that work when it’s not split? Eventually, we came upon the idea that it's essentially three triangles that can fit in, almost like a Trivial Pursuit board. It forms a whole from the parts. Once we got things like that working, it started to make a lot more sense. That helps with animation as well because they understand the restrictions that you would have with these kinds of creatures.”
The Xenophage emoted through its tail and head movement. According to Lee, “We didn’t dive into these deep humanistic emotions. They were more centered within a broader animalistic style. One signature physical trait is the rotating teeth. We would have our build department construct the external teeth, which were rigid. Our effects team would populate the interior of the mouth with these rotating teeth that pop out through these little gummy slits. It’s almost like a conveyor belt and then they come back down again.”
Environments were crucial in driving the action. “On top of the plane, we definitely wanted to drive home the speed and drama,” says Lee. “For Venom, we did additional cloth simulations to push the sense of him being liquid at his core. His entire body, head and skin start to get this flutter like a dog hanging out a window of a fast-moving car. We leaned into things like that; poses and animation were important to make sure that whenever the hand was coming up to take a new pose it was having to fight against this horizontal wind that was coming through. The Xenophage was easier to a point because it’s digging into the metal so it’s trying to claw its way up.”
Generally, every single shot features a CG plane. “When the camera goes through the cabin, comes out the window and sees Tom having his Tom Cruise moment, that was a real plane [in the studio],” Lee notes. “We ended up replacing all of the exterior.” Skydiving was hard to properly achieve. “Tom was shot in the studio on wires,” Lee continues. “We would keep his face and arms, and then replace the rest of him. The key with that is getting the speed and intensity of the fabric, which is why we ended up replacing the majority of Tom. We had a lot of fans going when we were shooting, but it just didn’t have the terminal velocity that is so fast, with the high frequency flicker to the cloth.”
Kelly Marcel and Production Visual Effects Supervisor John Moffatt’s mantra was. “Try to capture everything in camera.” “John Moffatt and I are a big fan of trying to shoot everything at least for reference so you know what it should look like at that time of day in that place,” remarks Lee. “With the horse sequences, for example, they were all shot on drones following a motorcycle to try to get the speed and pace. But by and large we replaced the entire environment with a CG build to give us more control over the camera. The airplane and skydiving sequences are all CG environment replacements as well when the horse starts running and the beginning of the river battle where the water had to be replaced to give it a sense of rapids that weren’t there on location. Venom is also running through the forest and causing this wake of broken and falling trees. That was all replaced as well. By the end, the only part that was left was the shoreline.”
Noting how enjoyable the varied scope of the VFX work was for him and his team, Lee concludes, “It was fun for me to work on this kind of film because if you’ve got an idea about how something can be more exciting or might help the narrative, then everyone is open to those types of ideas which is fantastic.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
