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Getting the chance to work on a sequel to a cult classic, One of Us contributed digital versions of a miniature plane, simulated stop-motion oceans, stretched faces, and sequences featuring sandworms across 317 shots inBeetlejuice Beetlejuice. The directive from filmmaker Tim Burton and Production VFX Supervisor Angus Bickerton was to preserve the spirit of the original Beetlejuice (1988). The first film had a different vibe than what was coming out at the time, observes James Brennan-Craddock, VFX Supervisor at One of Us. We wanted to pay homage to that original aesthetic in the new film. We started off doing some early CG tests of the sandworm in an old-school style. The asset we created wasnt so much skin and muscle but latex and foam. The end result in the film was done fully stop-motion. We were still heavily involved with Mackinnon & Saunders in the early stages because we did all the postvis for the sandworm sequences.Tim arrived with a small, green toy snake and was going, The snake goes here and then there, recalls Brennan-Craddock. But how do you translate that to a snake which couldnt even fit into this church? But due credit because what they shot was workable and the first thing that we did was postvis how the snake would move and fit into the scene. We did the same thing with the sequence on Titan, the desert planet. We did all sorts of things like cheating the scale of sandworm shot per shot; the scale is reasonably consistent, but weve done it in a way that you dont notice. The sandworm is not an organic creature. According to Brennan-Craddock, A lot of that came for free from the stop-motion version of the sandworm. We had to be wary about that when doing postvis because you can take a CG rig and move it however you want. We had to keep the physicality of the sandworm in mind and not create too sharp a bend or turn. When you see the side-by-side comparisons of our postvis and stop-motion version, theyre damn similar in terms of their overall movement. Until we did the postvis, it wasnt clear how the sandworm was going to react. Any shot that had complicated cameras we would stabilize those postvis plates. We gave stabilized plates to Mackinnon & Saunders so that they had something they could animate to.Lighting the sandworm in the church was particularly intriguing. Theres this motif in the film that whenever youre in the afterlife there is a constantly changing blue to green light bathing the sets, Brennan-Craddock says. Even though the church is in the real world, because Beetlejuice took over, that blue green motif came back. Onset it was these big LED lights that you could control to swing between blue and green. It was being done randomly and if you actually watch that sequence from shot to shot, youll see that one shot ends in green and the next shot starts blue. That happens all the time, which might bug people from a continuity perspective, but it totally works because of the kinetic energy of the scene. Essentially, there was a blue and green light that were on and off. Mackinnon & Saunders provided each frame that they shot the blue and green light version of the sandworm, because if you shine a blue and green light on an object its not only a grade difference, but there are also subtle differences in how the surfaces react. We would take the blue and green light versions of the sandworm and treat them as CG lighting passes. We would animate the intensity of one up and the other down based on the shots that they were in, eyeballing it with what we could see in the environment itself. That was an unusual challenge. The Titan sequence relied on CG to create an otherworldly yet tactile aesthetic. There was a patch of sand that the actors were running on while everything else is CG, Brennan-Craddock explains. The aesthetic look was a blend of something that felt purposely miniature while also having the scale of something that could be more realistic. At no point were we going to make our own version of Arrakis in Dune. We created these red noodle rocks to feel like polystyrene. Then we had these bigger mountains in the background called the Cheese Mountains because they have holes in them. But the actual environment itself, the undulating sand dunes, is something reasonably realistic to tie it to. There is an expectation these days that things feel grand. We wanted to balance the grand with the Beetlejuice cartoon aesthetic. Reference consisted of Titan in Beetlejuice and real-world deserts. Angus had found a NASA rendering of the real Titan early on, which had some interesting rocks. And we looked at the blue sky, sandstorm and noodle rocks in the original film, he adds.Most challenging was the church scene where the Influencers get sucked into their cellphones as it was a last-minute decision by Burton. There was quite a short turnaround on this film, remarks Brennan-Craddock. From wrap it was around eight months in total. It was two sides of the same coin. On one hand it was quite a logistical creative challenge to build everything and knock the shots out. On the other hand, it was an exciting creative challenge because the brief for the Influencers was open to discover. We wanted to get rid of the Influencers, theyre the friends of Rory who is one of the villains, in a cartoony way. Thats the case with Beetlejuice too. Hes like a live-action cartoon character in a lot of ways and his magic has that aesthetic too.Like everything done one the film, the visual effects were meant to evoke a practical aesthetic. Stop-motion animation was an influence. We did a lot of complicated and simple things to convey that, Brennan-Craddock notes. On the simpler side we played with motion blur a lot by turning it off or exaggerating it in different places. We completely broke our digital double rigs to get the characters into bizarre poses for the four or eight frames you see their bodies getting pulled into the phones. We played a lot with the timing of the effects. Initially, it was going to be slow, heavy footed, getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner type thing. But through Tims direction we ended up with something quite elastic. There is this slow stretch where the faces are being pulled and contorted. We also used the opportunity to pay homage to the original when Barbaras [Geena Davis] and Adam Maitland [Alec Baldwin]s faces get pulled. As their face gets stretched, each of the Influencers form a different goofy pained expression. For the most part we pulled it off. There is this elastic stretch and at one point, the pressure is released, causing the whole body to shoot in. Secondary animation and effects provided the desired elastic physicality. Its not a human anymore, explains Brennan-Craddock. Its a prosthetic human that we created. The fleshier areas of the face, like the cheeks, jowls and lips, had a lot of vibration. The Influencers are in elaborate dress, have crazy hair styles, and numerous accessories. So, we played with that as well. Necklaces would come up and start to wiggle. It was partly suctioned, gravity, and magnetic. Technically, the cellphone effect could be applied to each face. Towards the end I was mixing and matching to see what things looked like, Brennan-Craddock says. But we have a robust and smooth digital double creation process. The bodies and skin share the same topology, and the workflow is similar, so you could take a sculpt design from one face and put it on another. We had 22 hero characters with varying degrees of complexity. The closer ones were much more detailed than the ones further back. Later there was a request to put more Influencers in, so we created three different generic face structures for background characters and matched the skin tones and hair color. We had some repetition there, but not much.Stop-motion animation was used to explain the death of Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones), which involved a plane crash and shark attack. We worked closely with Mackinnon & Saunders, who animated the characters in the plane and ocean, remarks Brennan-Craddock. We built the plane, but the most challenging thing we did was the ocean itself. The mindset for this was how would a stop-motion artist build an ocean and replicate that. We split it into two categories of oceans. There was the foreground, and the background ocean. In the foreground we needed some kind of interaction between the character and the ocean. In the background we didnt need interaction. We just needed to fill the space. How do you get interaction with a stop-motion ocean and a puppet? You would probably embed the character in plasticine. The character would animate, and youd smoosh the plasticine around to create waves and splashes. We followed that mindset for the virtual version. We created a viscous fluid simulation and then completely messed it up. The look development shifted from plasticine to a translucent resin, creating cellophane splash elements that get stained red when the shark comes along. After initial work, it was decided the gore had to be pulled back. It was a compositional thing in the end, reveals Brennan-Craddock. You can get away with quite a lot of gore when youre pretending its plasticine! The characters were full stop-motion at different scales. We did scans of the puppets and shark, body tracked those as the basis for the simulation and lighting interaction, and then went from there, he continues. Once we got the footage, the shots had to be recomposed to get Charles and the shark to match as required and then we would scale our tracks accordingly to make that work. When that shark starts to move it creates a lot of red stained cellophane. We art directed the blood to cover Charles, splash outwards and hit the lens. Humor is a big part of this film. And a big part of humor is timing, which was something we had control over. If the effects slap comp in the dailies makes you smirk, then youre on the right track. The interior of the plane was constructed by Mackinnon & Saunders, which was extended digitally while the exterior was entirely CG. VFX placed a cellophane splash around the plane that was reasonably straightforward.Core software programs were Nuke and Houdini. The procedural pipeline that you get is so flexible and weve got a bunch of talented artists who know the ins and outs of the software, observes Brennan-Craddock. We just made sure that we were going in the right direction in matching the correct aesthetic. On Titan, when the sandworm blasts out onto the surface, it kicks up a lot of sand. But but we didnt want to create 20-metre-high sand explosions because you want it to feel like a miniature. Brennan-Craddocks love for the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit franchise came in handy. He concludes, I remember when we were looking at making stop-motion foam for the ocean in Charles Deetzs demise, all I could think about was A Close Shave, when Gromit becomes a window cleaner, and they create these stop-motion soap suds that to me looked like tiny plastic marbles. So, we used that as a reference when we tried to create our white water! Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
