How DNEG made Venom dance
Plus, DNEGs visual effects for Venom Horse and the Venom vs Xenophage airplane fight in Venom: The Last Dance.At one point in Kelly Marcels Venom: The Last Dance, our heroes Eddie (Tom Hardy) and Venom run into their old friend Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu) in Las Vegas. It culminates in a dance routine between Venom and Mrs. Chen inside a casino. DNEG, which has worked on all three Venom films, took on the dance sequence. We had a wonderful choreographer and a couple of dancers who developed that entire dance scene along with Kelly, outlines DNEG visual effects supervisor David Lee, who worked with production visual effects supervisors John Moffatt and Aharon Bourland on the film. It was filmed at Leavesden and we did some motion capture tests beforehand to test eyelines, and ensure we were staging them correctly to accommodate the size difference. Mrs. Chen has a couple of spins and gets lifted up by Venom, so we just needed to make sure that what we were doing would actually work on the day, and that included just the ability to scale up our dancer and our mocap data. For the shoot, the stand-in performer for Venom was around 6 feet tall, although Venom is another foot on top of that. We gave him some extendable forearms to dance with and that allowed him to get a better idea about his reach, particularly around the environment, but also it gave Mrs. Chen a point of reference on the day, and something to hold onto when they were interacting with each other, explains Lee. The distance between performers was of utmost importance. We didnt want Venoms arms to be forced artificially close to his body when it came time to animate, so this allowed both performers to always have Venoms true stature in mind throughout, and place themselves accordingly.A separate motion capture session then took place in order to provide data and reference for the final CG Venom. Lees initial thoughts were that DNEG would need to add a sense of weight and slower speed for the large Venom character, but then after considering reference of dancers with large frames, it became apparent that some of these big guys are incredibly light on their feet. I mean, thats the whole thing with dance, isnt it? Its very much, no matter what your size, you can be incredibly graceful and quick. So it just meant that we kept Venom a little bit pacier than what we were expecting at the start. It was really fun doing that sequence, and I think it went down really, really well. The animators in particular had a great time acting out to that. Crafting VenomHaving worked on the two previous films, DNEG was certainly familiar with the character. Still, the Venom model was effectively re-rigged and had facial shapes re-developed to deal with changes in the VFX studios pipeline over the years. DNEGs fresh challenge on The Last Dance was seeing Venom, and Wraith Venom, the tendrily character that emerges out of Eddie, in broad daylight.Venoms lighting is driven primarily by reflections, says Lee. So if you are in a desert, for example, and youve just got the sun as the primary light source, that meant that we wouldnt necessarily be getting all of the detailing and shaping on him that we would get in a night scene, where you might have all of these multiple light sources that can be quite small. They give us a lot of opportunity to shape and give form to this silhouette.We still ended up using quite a bit of creative licence within the daylight scenes and essentially adding multiple small light sources, but still biasing them towards the keylight direction, adds Lee. That enabled us to get more shape and form on Venom, allowing him to keep a similar look to the previous films and not just losing him to one very hot, bright reflection coming in from the key side, which just wasnt aesthetically very pleasing. The idea was to ensure that Venom and Wraith Venom did not feel like a black void in daylight scenes. We would look at imagery of oil as the natural reference, advises Lee, and if it wasnt getting any reflections, oil almost looks like a black hole into something else entirely. It can look completely unreal. That was something that we were very conscious of trying to avoid. So, we began adding these smaller, additional lights within the rigs that would give us more specular points of interest on Wraith, biasing it towards the key light. This gave us his classic wet look and, when combined with a soft subtle bounce, it really helped get some nice shapes and form without flattening him out from broad, bright sky reflections.In terms of animating Wraith Venom, DNEG leant heavily into the emotion of the scene with Eddie, allowing Wraiths lips to have a larger range of motion. Its really challenging from an animation point of view when youve really only got these eyes without any kind of eyebrows or any other kind of facial features and a mouth with very rudimentary lips, admits Lee. Even though he doesnt have eyebrows, we would treat the top of the eyelids in a very similar way to how we would when we animate with eyebrows. In addition to building Venom and Wraith Venom for the film, DNEG was also responsible for the CG builds for new characters Venom Horse, Xenophage and the green Symbiote. Builds were shared with other VFX vendors, including Industrial Light & Magic.Wait, Venom Horse?Yes, Venoms symbiote abilities transform a horse that he and Eddie ride on in the desert. DNEG referenced Shire and Draft horses to analyze how large muscular horses moved. Theyre actually reasonably light on their feet when they start running, states Lee. Also, when we were doing initial tests on this, you see theres a couple of different ways that you can traverse a distance. You can either move your legs faster or you can have a longer gait. We played around with both, as Kelly wanted to lean into the comical side of the sequence.Initially, to push this comical aspect, DNEG increased the speed of leg movement but the result was something too cartoonish. So, instead, we increased the gait to sell the weight of the horse, says Lee. Venoms a big guy, and you always want to have that sense of power running through his performance.For the look of Venom Horse, DNEG had to be careful with its black liquidy sheen. What we found, reveals Lee, was that, with the speed of the horse, it would often read a little bit too much like noise, and it would often end up in quite streaky motion blur, which just aesthetically didnt really look particularly great. The studio therefore added a broader sheen like real horses. It was about leaning into something the audience could grab onto, says Lee. We still had a touch of that Venom-esque tighter specular running through it, and again, we would bias it onto the key side and allow it to fall off on the shadow side. I think it looked quite successful in terms of its surface characteristics in the end.Encounter with the XenophageEarlier, Eddie and Venom had hitched a ride on a jet plane, only to fight against a Xenophage mid-air. The sequence was filmed on stage on a partial airplane section, which enabled Hardy to be shown hanging onto the side of the plane. That enabled us to get a really good grounding in terms of Toms performance and interaction, notes Lee. It also enabled us to film the interior of those sequences to a degree, since we had about seven or eight rows of seats, and then could do an extension.DNEG built a CG plane and environment. One of the principal challenges was selling the right sense of drama and tension with a plane traveling at that speed. Thats where we made sure that we had a lot of clouds that were always visible in the scene, says Lee. Underneath the plane, we had our wispy clouds that were passing by, but we also really dived into the idea that Venom was essentially something that could liquefy. We really lent into the idea that with this speed of the wind, it was essentially disrupting this solid topology using additional cloth simulations, and giving him all of these ripples all over his body to try and sell that environmental impact.Animation took a strong lead in terms of trying to sell the difficulty of moving against that kind of force, continues Lee. So when the hand comes up to try and gain a new position, for example, you might see it being pulled backwards slightly before he regains his strength and starts pushing it forwards. We looked at a lot of referenceits fantastic when we have people like Tom Cruise actually doing some of those stunts for real and being able to say, Well, thats what your face looks like when you are strapped to the side of the plane.For the Xenophage itself, DNEG considered references of praying manti, reptiles and even turtles, given the creature was somewhat of a mix of an insect and a shelled beast. Says Lee: Kelly was really keen to have something that we hadnt seen before for, even down to the conveyor-belt teeth effect, where youve got these rows of teeth that are essentially emerging from underneath the gums and pulling its prey back to the back of the teeth where it then gets crushed by an additional two rollers of teeth.Venom in attack modeFending off an attack in Mexico early in the film, Eddie and Venom unleash their traditional weapons made up of spindly hands, as well as showcasing the classic transformation between Eddie and Venom seen in the previous movies. Those kinds of transformation shots are just always complex in terms of the feedback between animation, CFX, shot sculpt and effects, outlines Lee. The ideal situation with all of these departments in a normal film is that everyone just moves on one at a time, and that makes it very, very straightforward. But with these kinds of shots, everyones standing on each others toes. Its just not a very linear process, and credit to animation, creature FX, and FX for really working together as a strong unit to get the shots working.One particular shot sees Eddie be almost pushed out of Venom and then thrown across the room via Venoms spidery tendrils. That was an opportunity for us to really play around with the idea of Venom almost shedding his skin, discusses Lee. Wraith emerges from Venom while hes still Venom and pushes him out of his own body. And then this allowed the head to actually split in two and start to disintegrate and liquefy as he gets pushed out. It was quite fun taking these established conventions and then just tweaking them a little bit and playing around with the character. All Images Courtesy of DNEG 2024 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.The post How DNEG made Venom dance appeared first on befores & afters.
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