VFX BREAKDOWN MICKEY 17
VFX BREAKDOWN CLONES GAME of
Chris McLaughlin and Robyn Luckham from DNEG discuss working on Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17
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M ickey 17 is unusual: it’s a Adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 , the film was directed by Bong Joon Ho, whose successes on films such as Parasite have earned him an enviable degree of creative authority. That authority makes for unique and interesting films – but it also brings a consistency of approach that VFX- heavy projects don’t always enjoy. Chris McLaughlin was DNEG’s VFX supervisor on the film, generating the hordes of alien creatures in the snowbound landscape that characterises some of the film’s most memorable visuals. “Dan Glass, the production VFX supervisor, divided the work out to various vendors,” McLaughlin begins. “We chatted about the creatures, about our work and we were awarded just over 300 shots.” big-budget science-fiction film that’s not part of an established franchise. McLaughlin was pleased to discover such well-laid creative foundations. “The director had already done some of the work with his creature designer, Jang Hee Chul, who he’d worked with previously. Bong has been featuring CG creatures for ten or 15 years. He’s super savvy; everyone was. He came to us with a pretty fully formed design for
these creatures – concept art and even a 3D model – and we refined them. We got into the details of texture, skin, flesh, bone, mandible and we did just about everything that’s outside in the snow.” Mickey 17 went before the cameras towards the end of 2022. “They shot our sequences in Cardington,” McLaughlin recalls. “This huge airship hangar, where we got a lot of height. The rest of it was at Leavesden, but they built the snow fields at Cardington. The ground was covered in Epsom salts, which looked pretty convincing. Instead of a blue- screen studio we had a white-screen studio, with 30ft white walls and a grid of SkyPanel softboxes overhead. We didn’t do any scenes that had hard sunlight, but we could weight the lighting to be a bit stronger and more yellow on one side, which made it much easier to integrate.” A glance at the trailer hints at the sheer scale of the VFX workload, leaving animation director Robyn Luckham with a slate of work, including several huge crowd scenes. Even so, Luckham says, the vision of the man known as Director Bong was as consistent as it was far-reaching. “The idea at the start was massive. Normally, it increases by the end and gets insanely complex, but Director Bong started off complex.”
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