THE SUBSTANCE VFX
GORY DETAILS Each scene needed to refer visually to the rest of the film to ensure coherency and fulfil Fargeat’s vision
HORROR INSPIRATIONS Another (somewhat complicating) factor was that Fargeat gave Noid Studio a mood board of eighties movies to draw inspiration from, which had to feed into the overall look and feel. “We didn’t have as much difficulty doing a CG version of Demi because it wasn’t just creating the realistic look of an actor, but more trying to figure out which points we should enhance on the body to help people recognise Demi Moore,” reflects Shafaghi. “We also had to be able to produce a little bit of movement around the eyes, for example, and the mouth. Coralie asked us to show her how we could achieve this animation and still match the film’s look.” References spanned everything from The Thing to The Fly , while Noid Studio suggested looking to the Netflix series Stranger Things for more modern animation techniques. “We kept looking back at the rest of the movie because there were other scenes that could help inform the look, the texture of the skin and other elements like this. We needed to match this every time,” Shafaghi adds. This was both a boon and a challenge. “Our animation team had to figure out how to improve everything while retaining the feeling of these old-school movies,” says Shafaghi. “It was very new for us, but it was kind of cool. I grew up during the generation of these older movies. Some of the youngest animators, they were told to look at these movies as references so they could develop a feel for the styles when they were working and animating. They were also advised to keep in mind that they didn’t need to follow them exactly or be perfect.”
“We did what we call a volumetric scan of Demi Moore – it’s basically a static scan but with a camera,” explains Shafaghi. “The result is a reproduction of Demi’s performance exactly as it was directed by Coralie. “We had to match everything from the set, so there wasn‘t a lot of room for creativity at the beginning because it was more about how we could enhance the ideas than bringing in anything new.” However, recreating the visage of an icon like Moore was no small feat. “It was the likeness of someone everybody knows, so it was very challenging for us to produce,” says Shafaghi.
RATHER THAN MAKING THE VFX obvious, THE AIM WAS to make them disappear ”
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