R A I S ING D I ON ON THE COVER .
RAISING DION Mr Dark Sky CINESITE VFX CAREFULLY BALANCES REALISM WITH FANTASY I n Netflix’s Raising Dion , a newly widowed mother tries to protect her son, who is blessed with supernatural powers. While searching for the truth about her weather-enthusiast husband’s death, ‘rain people’ warn her about a danger fast approaching.
Skies darken and clouds roll in when he appears – and he is made of clouds, with an outline highlighted by lightning bolts to form a human shape. When first introduced, his human form is silhouetted, but it becomes defined over the series as he consumes more people. For these effects, the team combined live action photography with projection and animated matte painting. Larger lightning strikes – hand-animated – are close to the ground, forming his main features, while smaller bolts provide definition for details. They followed the laws of physics as much as possible, but since real lightning travels at the speed of light, a degree of interpretation was needed to create a coherent form. Making this natural phenomenon believable was a challenge for Cinesite, but a convincing one – The Crooked Man is terrifying.
These rain people are the souls of those killed by storms, manifesting as mist-like apparitions. To create them, Cinesite’s Montreal team projected LiDAR scans of the actors onto fluid simulations, with density disturbed using a custom velocity field made from a curl noise of their performances. This retains the actors’ efforts in the finished shots. When the danger finally presents itself, it’s a menacing, 100m-tall figure known as The Crooked Man, who manipulates weather patterns with varying degrees of intensity depending on his mood.
05. MARCH 2022
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