VFX BREAKDOWN MICKEY 17
FIELDS OF WHITE DNEG animated how the snow moved around the actors (this image); Director Bong instructing the cast (below)
run, gallop and super gallop. It wasn’t just doing a run cycle and speeding it up. Each of these had to be defined by animation and hand keyed, then within that we had to do tons of variants, little jostles, jumps, all that hand keyed too.” Meanwhile, the snowy environment demanded lots of computer time for procedural simulation – and animation changes often meant redoing that from scratch. “We had this falling snow, interactive snow on the ground, footprints, snow being kicked up by the movement of tyres and feet,” Luckham says. “It sticks on the hair of the creepers and Mickey’s costume. “Since the animation is staged, we can have a crude representation that gets the acting points. Once the simulation gets started, it takes a long, long time to redo that animation. Things can grind to a halt if they put the wrong setting on a simulation, and suddenly 20 of your artists aren’t able to work.” Even so, advances in the state of the art mean fewer concerns over render time, as McLaughlin points out. “There used to be conversations about some shot taking 15,000 hours of rendering and simulation. That conversation has died down. On our side, we have hundreds of artists, various render farms across
the globe, stacks of drives in different locations. Just handling all that data is a difficult job that needs to be considered.” Mickey 17’ s VFX workload required DNEG to collaborate with Framestore, creating a few challenges of its own. High-end VFX companies often develop in-house tools to handle fundamental things like rigging and lighting, and as a result, McLaughlin says, “I’ve never been able to share an animation rig. Our rigging system is proprietary, so you can share the skeleton, but not the actual rig. Framestore has a completely proprietary lighting and shading system, but they can give us tons of info. They have their own fur render and simulation software.” Ultimately, Bong’s ambitious alien creature crowd scenes would be realised by sheer combined effort. “We saw the storyboards at the start, and I thought, ‘how the hell are we going to do that without having a thousand million animators?’,” Luckham recalls. “There was nothing we could do with motion capture. There’s 12 or 16 legs each side, mandibles on the face, a body, tongue and tail, and that’s just one – you’re animating ten or 20. We talk about the shot count being 300, but the intensity could create ten times the amount of work in one shot. We pulled it off anyway. It was staggering.”
“Director Bong loves detail in the characters,” Luckham says. “You watch it again and again, and you’ll see things you missed before – little bumps and looks. One shot I’m proud of is where a mother creeper comes to Mickey at the end and sheds loads of creatures. Bong would watch some of these scenes we’d created and giggle to himself! The more you watch, the more you see.” That sort of attention to detail, though, requires the sort of coolheaded maintenance of purpose that McLaughlin suggests can only come from the top. “It’s working with a good director who has an idea, which doesn’t change too much. A director who has the final cut, without producers meddling and making things different. On this film it was pretty clear from the beginning what he was after, and that idea stayed true to the end.”
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