Challenges
Neill presented Image-Engine with an amazing challenge. Take something completely foreign and seamlessly insert that element into a cinematographic shooting style that is designed to feel overtly unpolished and raw: a documentary film sensibility. There are aspects to many of the shots that are simultaneously bizarre and surprising, yet totally believable and completely integrated into the live action photography. That challenge was not sequence based, but rather existed in all of the shots. "We had many short sequences and one-offs that proved very challenging from a tracking and digital management perspective," explains Walsh, "but ultimately our work was like one 27 minute sequence dealing with variations on similar digital assets."
Just make it look Cool!
One of Blomkamp's best and most often used directions will simply be this: "Just make it look cool". Creature Supervisor James Stewart thinks the word 'cool' has a tremendous amount of implied trust as it assumes that they are thinking the same thing when that word is used. "Firstly, the greatest aspect of Neill's directing was his ability to empower the team as artists," says Stewart. "This was the key aspect to our relationship with Neill. He thinks like an artist so we were able to cut through a lot of red tape and get a tremendous amount of art on the screen."
The sculpts from Weta gave the Image-Engine (IE) team their starting point for both creatures. Christopher and Little CJ. So much of the creature was laid out initially and it was up to IE to interpret it into something that would work logically and rig it that way.
James Stewart's job was to play art director and supervise the build process. Crew familiarity for the character started when Shawn handed them the book, 'A Smaller Majority'. This was the book that Neill had used to wrap his head around the character. Inside were incredible pictures of bugs, slugs, crabs, spiders. They asked the author to send a DVD of RAW images so they could have the most realistic images possible. |
