For Simon Hughes and his Union VFX team, Yorgos Langthimos’ dark comedy, a stunningly designed visual maelstrom, required something completely different from a typical VFX project, including odd, surgically created hybrid animals using as much actual footage as possible, integration of plates shot with 3 different film stocks, 11 enormous wrap-around LED screens, 50s style painted backdrops, and some really crazy colored skies.
Often, the best way to describe something is through comparisons. This approach, however, proves seriously flawed when discussing the uniquely styled movies of Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). However, if such comparisons are required, Poor Things, his adaptation of novelist Alasdair Gray’s 1992 book, “Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer,” combines the graphic surrealism of René Magritte, the beautiful macabre of David Lynch, and the social commentary of Mary Shelley. From Searchlight Pictures, the critically acclaimed dark comedy hit U.S. theaters December 8 – it opens January 12 in the U.K. This past September, it won the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice International Film Festival.
Lanthimos’ satirical fantasy revolves around a scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), with a habit of creating hybrid species of animals, who resurrects the body of a young woman who committed suicide, thereby enabling her reborn self, Bella (Emma Stone) to rediscover life and all it has to offer – with a particular energy and perspective. Joining Lanthimos in creating his visually stunning maelstrom, which combines black and white and color film stock to reflect Bella’s personal growth, was VFX Supervisor Simon Hughes and a crew of 70 at Union VFX. The visual effects studio delivered 177 shots, 11 LED plates, and 60 CG assets, with additional support from Absolute Post, Time Based Arts, and Cheap Shot VFX.
“It's an incredible challenge with the whole aesthetic of the show,” admits Hughes. “The more we dug into what their ambitions were, the more it became clear this was not your typical visual effects world-building exercise. There were two production designers, Shona Heath and James Price. Shona has a fashion background and was offering up a lot of the surrealistic imagery. We were having numerous chats with her and Yorgos Lanthimos. It took awhile to get a picture of how far they wanted to go. Yorgos wanted to embrace things that weren’t quite right; that was an interesting conversation in its own right as we were talking about traditional filmmaking practices from the 1940s or 1950s with the painted backdrops, and how things aren’t quite right, or the perspective is off but wanting to keep some of that. Miniatures were a big thing that we looked at as well. The most successful visual effects in so many ways are the ones that find a sweet spot between all these different skillsets.”
Even though 11 enormous wraparound LED screens were utilized at Origo Studios in Budapest, the content was not generated in real-time by Unreal Engine. “We supplied 24K renders that were fixed on the horizon,” states Hughes. “11 sky setups were created that resembled animated matte paintings that had some fluid motions, and we were adding these layers of inks in water and strange things in and amongst the skies. There were different variations depending on the scene.” The art department supplied packages that served as the visual foundation for the skies. They were split between each location and showed the preferred color palette, cloud texture, and sky definition that Heath and Price liked for real clouds that appeared to be surreal and strange.
Lanthimos wanted an additional abstract layer that felt miniature. “I offered up the idea that when you shoot inks and detergents in water tanks at slow framerates, you get these bizarre shapes and patches that almost feel like cloud textures,” explains Hughes. “We started looking at the art world to see if there were any artists doing experiments with this kind of material, and there are hundreds of them. That was something that caused everybody to get quite excited because you can create real skies that are being pushed with rich color palettes and strange shapes and formations, and then you can have this strange additional layer of movement. This led us to an artist named Chris Parks who does in-camera experiments using different liquids and oils. The production team chatted with him, and he allowed us to use some of his footage, which could be composited into what we were creating rather than going into a big special effects shoot.”
A 3D quality was added to some of the shots to make them feel as if they were underwater. “We ran displacement passes that could be run through the sky, so you have a cloud movement that is largely done in a 2D way, but there is an overall set over the whole thing that has an additional eerie undulation created by the effects team,” remarks Hughes. “We had the additional challenge of marrying miniatures to real sets where there is a degree of having to do things with pinpoint accuracy, but then we had to add these additional layers of lapping water on the shorelines that had to feel miniature. You take everything that you know, and now let’s break it! It’s like the 1950 film version of Titanic. What is it about the way the water laps on the side of the boat that feels miniature? We got the team to study it, ran lots of tests, and drilled into it. It’s like reinventing the wheel. You have to get this foundation of things that are pinpoint accurate and chuck in this creative brief on top of it. Definitely, a lot of head scratching!”
“The cable car system in Lisbon is an interesting subject because when we did the first pass, it had what you would expect of an object moving in a real world,” Hughes continues. “But when coming around the poles, they felt too perfect. What can you do to make it feel miniature? You try to make it do a little kink as it hits, as if it were a toy that goes around a shape and hits an object, it would move. You find areas like that to highlight the fact that there is something a little off about the scale. In the big, wide revealing of Lisbon, when Bella is on the balcony looking out to sea, we had to do animated cable cars that start in the real world and then interact with the set in the correct perspective. There is a point when they move into a matte painting, effectively something with a false perspective. We did a lot of head scratching to figure out how to animate going from real into something where everything about it isn’t correct. A lot of those things are trial and error.”
The art department used Unreal Engine to setup models and visualize set extensions. “The art department had a solid foundation and was involved in the process of what that design needed to be when it comes to visual effects,” Hughes says. “It was a good collaboration figuring out what that is. Unreal Engine was great to show Yorgos and take a couple of cameras around to see the set. The art department also spent some time doing paintovers on some of their stuff to help us figure out the color palettes they were aiming for and the overall direction. The production was very much a collaboration between the art department and visual effects, which is always going to get you the best result. Also, 3D models were supplied by the art department. Those were done in software packages that could only get you so far but are always a good foundation. It eliminates the time spent bouncing back and forth.”
One major challenge on the film was cinematographer Robbie Ryan shooting with an 8mm fisheye lens. According to Hughes, “The biggest challenge with those lenses was that they were used for big wide establishers, so we had to do set extension work. We had to de-lens plates to unwrap the distortion, and once you do that on an 8mm fisheye, that resolution is enormous and was breaking our pipeline!” Visual effects had to be integrated into several different black and white, and color film stocks: 35mm, VistaVision, and Ektachrome. “It was quite a challenge to get those scanned,” Hughes notes. “The Ektachrome was used for the reanimation sequence and a couple of London Bridge shots. It’s the rich, vibrant, high-contrast-looking part of the film, so the blacks are deep and have an oversaturated appearance. We had lots of variations in film stock, which meant matching grain, and lens properties. Some of these environments were taking up 70 percent of the frame, so we had to make sure that everything was sitting perfectly and photographed nicely! Luckily, a good part of our team at Union VFX has a film background, including myself, and consequently, knew what the challenges were going to be and had some of the tools already.”
The reanimation of Bella features CG electrical effects. “We had to show her brain being taken out of her head, which is a big comedy moment and nod to the original Frankenstein,” observes Hughes. “It was a combination of effects and comp techniques. Tesla arcing is bouncing around the room, so we had to work to get those things lighting up the environment and interacting nicely. We also had the main shot of looking at Bella’s head when she is being woken by electricity for the first time. There is a big glass dome around her. We had to do simulations that interacted nicely with the glass dome and these electrodes on her head and make them look like they were lighting up the inside of her head. The brain was a prosthetic taken out of a dummy’s head that was shot from the same angle, and then we put Bella in place and shot her with the same lighting. It didn’t feel gooey enough so we did additional arteries and pieces connected to the brain, so when it is pulled out you get this suction and slap back into the head as well as little drips of blood coming down.”
Sorting out how to do the hybrid animals was a major puzzle. Yorgos was keen from the start to find a solution that involved using actual footage of animals as much as humanly possible. “A lot of people they were talking to told them to do it in CG,” Hughes says. “We did a lot of testing upfront of different animal combinations to see how much an animal wrangler could even control an animal, what kinds of things that they would do, then looked at the body shapes of animals and tried to find that sweet spot of strange combinations that obviously weren’t right, but we would still have parts of their bodies that could connect. A goose is entirely different than a dog, but there is a point in its midriff that fits quite nicely on the shoulders of a dog. It was drilling into as many of these animal combinations as possible so that they worked well. It was quite a long process where we were doing initial comps of these animal combinations, which only gets you so far as there is going to be an issue with where they actually join and connect.”
There were issues with lighting as well. “What if the lighting is coming across the screen should be casting a shadow on the dog’s body and the dog’s body doesn’t have that shadow?” Hughes remarks. “We had scans of the animals, which was a challenge in its own right because they move around a lot. We modelled those combinations to match what the compositors had done to get them as close as we could in CG using the actual scans of the animals. Then you have to create a bespoke rig for those animals. It’s a complicated process because you’re going from rig to animation to compositing and then back again. You’re going through several iterations until everything locks. The saving grace is using real footage of the animals doing what they do so you’re not having to reanimate. It becomes more a technical exercise of making sure that footage marries perfectly.” Cast members interact with the hybrid animals, such as Bella feeding snacks to siriusQuack. “Bella actually gave snacks to a dog in the garden, and we kept its body but replaced the head with a duck’s head,” reveals Hughes. That was the peak of the interaction beyond what it’s about within the scene. We do have a goose that runs down the stairs as one of the characters walks up them.”
“The first hybrid that we see is a character called gooseWillis [goose and bulldog], which follows Bella walking down the hallways,” states Hughes. “It was complicated to make that work. I’m also a big fan of davidEggham, which has a body of a chicken and the head of a pig and stands on the chest of Max McCandles [Ramy Youssef] eating food; that one kills me every time I see it because physically it shouldn’t work. The chicken was physically shot on his chest nibbling food. We took him out, put a pig in so it had the same lighting, and composited the two together but it had to be a CG join. It’s a good example of the surgery scars that we had to do as well; that’s the Frankenstein part of the story that we’re trying to sell. It was tricky but I do think if we had done these as full CG animals, they would come under a lot of criticism and scrutiny. Because we’re using real animals there is something about it that works a lot better.”
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.
