How Wicked’s VFX Team Did “The Hardest Things You Can Do in CG”

From bold talking bears to motion capture monkeys, from AvatarFrom sentient space whales to Toho’s relentless Godzilla, computer-generated creatures are increasingly taking center stage in films these days. When a big-budget movie comes out, you’re likely to find a mountainous sandworm or a sound-hunting alien in it. The growth of visual effects technology has unleashed an entire biosphere of the imaginary, like dinosaurs erupting from it Jurassic world to stroll the aisles of our local movie theaters.

The Hollywood film adaptation of the first half of the global sensation Evil adds some more memorable characters to the digital menagerie, notably the erudite goat professor Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and the military ape sergeant Chistery from The Wizard of Oz. With so many creatures like these popping up on such tight Hollywood sales schedules, how the VFX teams bring them to life is increasingly important. To EvilPablo Helman, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, says he used an unusual process that began long before director Jon M. Chu started sending him footage.

How Wicked made animal VFX different

“I knew that (Chu) likes to be tactile and that he likes to be organic, so we suggested creating an ‘animal unit,'” Helman said in a recent interview EvilPublication. Typically, an animal unit on a film or television set consists of live animals and handlers, but in this case it was a group of “about 15 people” who were tasked with filling in for digital characters on set and alongside the actors Cynthia Erivo (as evil future witch Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (as her roommate and antagonist Glinda).

“Everyone had an animal or a character that was supposed to be a CG character,” says Helman. “I suggested to Jon that he lead these people. We might change (a digital character’s performance or voice) later, but that would give him an idea of ​​the timing options.”

This decision is related to Helman’s problem of relying too heavily on digital green screen replacement technology. (Or blue screens, in Evil(In this case, it’s due to the unique issues caused by Elphaba’s skin tone.)

“I have this idea that the decisions you make as a filmmaker are different when you’re in a blue screen environment or a completely blue screen environment – you don’t have an actor there – than when you have everyone there .” because you point the camera at certain places,” says Helman. “You decide what you want to see in the background. So when we have someone playing Chistery, Dillamond or the Bear, we have someone the other actors can interact with and react to. Then happy accidents happen when you think about things that aren’t necessarily in the script but happen on set.”

Wicked’s animals aren’t mo-caps – which complicated things

As the CG creature ecosystem has grown, so has the discussion about who the industry and public credit for the success of CG creatures. Take the Andy Serkis trilogy “Planet of the Apes” and its hero Caesar, whom Serkis portrayed using motion capture technology. Is Serkis primarily responsible for performance? Or is it the animation team working on Caesar’s facial expressions? Is Serkis just a platform for the animators or are they just translating Serkis’ work? Is the individual case a chaotic combination of the points mentioned above?

To EvilThe “animal unit” consisted of actors on set for temporal reference and to provide a sense of spontaneity, but no motion capture was performed. (Aside from scenes where a real goat was used as a Dillamond reference, says Helman.) So the creatures’ faces were entirely original CG animation, a far more difficult task than adapting a mo-cap performance. “You don’t want to make (Dillamond) a human character with a goat’s face,” Helman explains. “How do we get the feel of a particular line (of dialogue) without making an animal that has no muscles in certain parts of the face say it?”

In response to this problem, animators essentially became actors. “There was an effort, and we had the animal department there, but we also had the animators, who are actually the actors you cast, right?” says Helman. “Sometimes it’s difficult because when you cast someone, you’re asking that actor to give you something (to work with visually). And in this case, it’s an animator doing it.”

“One of the hardest things to do in CG”

Over the course of a nearly 30-year career in effects, including a 27-year collaboration with Steven Spielberg and significant credits ranging from two of the Star Wars prequels to Martin Scorsese’s last three films (Be silent, The Irishman, Flower Moon Killer), Helman believes he’s learned the key to making a CG creature work.

“For example, you always want to make a (composed digital) recording and stop it in the middle. Look at the frame,” he says. “You always want to see something behind your eyes. A lot can go wrong with CG. And if you look at the performances of different actors, you will notice that the nuances that an actor displays convey to you something that is very difficult to portray, which is ambivalence. It’s very difficult to fit that in there.”

He points out a crucial scene near the end Evilwhere Elphaba casts a spell on Chistery, causing him to grow wings in a grotesque, disturbing way. “How is he?” Helman asked. “Does he feel pain or not? How does he mitigate that? There is a lot of ambiguity there. And that’s one of the hardest things to do in CG. Having done this for different projects and different films, I pay a lot of attention to how we portray (ambiguity) and what kind of tools we give the director to model that in post-production.”

While some artists may want to leave old projects and old philosophies behind, especially as technology changes, Helman feels his new work is cut from the same cloth as when he realized creatures like these The Lost World: Jurassic Park And The Spiderwick Chronicles. “Even from these projects or the ones I’ve done The Irishmanfor example, and working with Al Pacino, Bob De Niro or Joe Pesci to simply do homework Evil was what got me into it Evil.”

In fact, he believes in his work Evil is a sort of distillation of the lessons he learned from watching the great old masters of acting on screen, truly understanding what a human performance needs to move an audience – and in turn, knowing what a digital one needs Beings would have to do the same thing.

“You learn a lot from human behavior and what makes something important,” he says. “Like ambiguity or thoughtfulness or good thoughts or not so good thoughts or like, ‘How do you live in the gray area of ​​not being white or black?’ There is a lot of this in the living creatures we have Evil. I would say Evil that’s what it’s about. The point is that nothing is exactly what it seems. So you have to transfer that to these creatures. And I would say all the projects I’ve done over the years have gotten me to this point.”