MICKEY 17 VFX BREAKDOWN
With the look of the creatures established, Luckham and his team were responsible for figuring out how they would move. “There are three types of creeper – the mothers, the general types and the babies, and they were supposed to swarm. We had to work out the characters and the acting. You initially look at them and think they look like cockroaches, but they had to run.” Though alien, Luckham sought to ground the creatures in something closer to home. “We tried to find similar creatures. We found these large swarms of reindeer on National Geographic . We also looked a little at bear cubs – how they fight and wrestle. I drew a lot of inspiration from Studio Ghibli. There’s a creature called Catbus in My Neighbor Totoro that has 12 legs.” Animating creatures of (apparent) flesh and blood remains a very manual process, shares Luckham. “There’s only so much you can do procedurally. Most of
it is cycles of hand-keyed animation. My ambition for the crowd was that it would feel hand-keyed everywhere. We’d create masses of clips and cycles that we could give to the crowd team, and just add more variation into that. “Initially,” Luckham continues, “we thought that the creepers circling the spaceship would be running around at a fairly constant speed. Later, we found the team wanted it to build up and create tension, so we had to do a walk,
CREEPER CRAWL The team drew inspiration from Studio Ghibli films and real reindeer
EACH OF THESE HAD TO BE defined by animation AND hand keyed ”
SCANNED & DELIVERED
M uch of the VFX workload on Mickey 17 relied heavily on 3D scanning work by Clear Angle Studios. Lead
specialist Ross Martin describes those sets as “of the highest quality in build and dressing. To scan and photograph them was a pleasure. Most of the heavy VFX work came when filming the exterior spaceship scenes and, of course, all the deaths of poor Mickey. As Robert Pattinson is playing two characters, the time filming on each set was doubled. “Everyone trusted Director Bong’s vision, and he was heavily involved in the filming process for every scene, which made the film feel really special,” Martin reflects, “like we were all building up this dream.” For himself, Dewar echoes the thoughts of several other crew members: “It was one of the nicest cast and crew groups I’ve worked with, there was this really friendly feel on-set.”
capture technician Alex Dewar worked with capture specialist Alex Walklate and senior capture technician Liam Edgeworth to scan people and objects. “Most of our scanning was done using our full-body trailer rig and prop rigs,” Edgeworth states. “Most were pretty straightforward, although there were a couple of things we had to do manually – such as the clone printer that Mickey’s printed out on. For a couple of costumes, we had to open the rig up a bit wider, like the dude in a pigeon suit!” With much of the action taking place aboard a spacecraft, LiDAR scanning was used to capture environments. Capture
SUSPENDING DISBELIEF Clear Angle Studios was commissioned to do 3D scanning work on Mickey 17, capturing people and props
33
DEFINITIONMAGS
Powered by FlippingBook