By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of DNEG and Warner Bros. Pictures. South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho excels at creating dark social satires. Mickey 17 centers around Mickey Barnes, who agrees to be cloned an unlimited number of times to perform lethal tasks, in particular the settlement of the ice planet Niflheim where creatures known as Creepers roam. DNEG was hired by Production VFX Supervisor Dan Glass, who previously collaborated with Bong on Okja, to look after 350 shots dealing with Niflheim, three different types of Creepers and flying transport crafts known as Flitters. “Bong Joon Ho has a clear idea of what he wants and is good at communicating that,” states Chris McLaughlin, VFX Supervisor at DNEG. “The language barrier was never an issue. He did have a translator, but he can speak good English and certainly understood everything we said. Bong can also draw whatever he thinks. It’s a clean illustrative style, which went a long way in giving us an idea of what he wants.” “Sand and snow are both terrible! Especially with creatures that need weight; you can’t fake it. It’s wrapped in a single simulated entity, which is snow or sand, and if you do it too fast, you blow the effects simulation, which is based on dynamics that can [only] be changed a little.” —Robyn Luckham, Animation Director, DNEG A set about the size of a football field was built at Cardington Studios in the U.K. for the exterior shots of Niflheim, which consisted of white walls and Epsom salts for snow. DNEG went from having to deal with the sand of Arrakis to the snow of Niflheim. “Sand and snow are both terrible!” laughs Robyn Luckham, Animation Director at DNEG. “Especially with creatures that need weight; you can’t fake it. It’s wrapped in a single simulated entity, which is snow or sand, and if you do it too fast, you blow the effects simulation, which is based on dynamics that can be changed a little.” Several layers had to be simulated for snow. “You’ve got your snow on the ground; interactive snow, which is anything that gets kicked up; depressions like footsteps, tire tracks and Creeper tracks; and falling snow. At a distance, it becomes a volumetric mist,” McLaughlin explains. “There’s falling snow that lands on Mickey or in the hair of the Creepers, a thin dusting of snow on top of the Creepers, and ice on the underside of Mama because she’s constantly in contact with the snow. We simulated a ton of snow.” A full-size Flitter was built that had the functionality of a car. A set about a size of a football field was built at Cardington Studios for the exterior shots of Niflheim. “It had wall-to-wall white walls 30 feet high on all four sides,” McLaughlin states. “Then white lights on top to give you that broad, white overcast light. The ground was covered in Epsom salts and from the distance, it looked convincing as snow.  You get footprints in it as well and they appeared quite convincing.  Up close not so much. They are some close-ups of Mickey’s feet in the snow that were redone completely as a full CG shot with a simulation. That was probably the most difficult stuff to simulate but also some of the most successful. There was a whole team of guys with rakes, tools and a tractor who would smooth out the snow again at the end of every take.” The vast majority of the falling snow is CG. “They blew snow on the first take of everything,” McLaughlin notes. “We would always get that as a reference for how the snow should move and look, but generally, we would get a take that had no snow in it and completely replace all of that snow. For all of the shots on top of the Flitter, there was a lot of wind and snow blowing directly in their face because you’re so close up. It would have been difficult and expensive to simulate that stuff in CG. We did shoot plates of falling snow against bluescreen as elements that could be used later.” There is a misconception about animation that it is strictly about movement. “We were very lucky with Bong, as you get to create a creature from scratch with a brand-new language that nobody has ever seen,” Luckham  remarks. “The development and prep that we did six to eight months before working with Dan Glass, Bong and Framestore were the big part of it.” Bong consulted his frequent creature designer Hee Chul Jang and produced concept art and 3D models for the Creepers. “When you render that with some realistic lighting, it suddenly starts to look like a CG creature,” McLaughlin states. “You have to take that a step further. There was a small team at DNEG that started to look into the real details, down to the pores of the skin, to make it feel like an actual creature.” For the Creepers, there is the Mama, Junior and Baby versions. “Each Creeper had a different character,” Luckham continues. “We got a lot of storyboards and good concepts. Mama was the queen bee of everything.” The vast majority of the falling snow is CG. “If you think about the scale of a big movie like Avatar, our shot count [of 350] seems quite low, but the amount of content in one shot is like a hundred shots. There were so many bits to make one shot realistic. It was incredibly dense.” —Robyn Luckham, Animation Director, DNEG When it comes to complexity, the Creepers were one of the hardest creatures to animate. “We had so many legs outside and inside, external and internal mandibles, four sets of eyelids, tentacles, tail and tongue,” Luckham remarks. “Everything would move, and you had to keyframe quite a lot of that. Also, in the evolution of the creature from the page, it looks like a millipede that has lots of legs. It had to run, so we looked at one of my favorite films, Totoro from Studio Ghibli, and the Catbus for the gallop, and it was something that Bong really liked. The amount of animation inside of each creature was quite staggering. It’s a complete marriage of building and animating those details. We were changing the texture colors for the areas that are rubbing a lot more. A number of these details you would subconsciously absorb, but if they weren’t there, you wouldn’t know why it didn’t look real.” Robert Pattinson portrays multiple versions of himself, which at times share the screen with each other. “You’ve got your snow on the ground; interactive snow, which is anything that gets kicked up; depressions like footsteps, tire tracks and Creeper tracks; and falling snow. At a distance, it becomes a volumetric mist. There’s falling snow that lands on Mickey or in the hair of the Creepers, a thin dusting of snow on top of the Creepers, and ice on the underside of Mama because she’s constantly in contact with the snow. We simulated a ton of snow.” —Chris McLaughlin, VFX Supervisor, DNEG Getting creatures to emote is something that animators relish. “You have to start from what the creature is and its motivation,” Luckham states. “Director Bong gave us a bible of background history, and we could build up from that. We looked at what age they could be, and he alluded that the Juniors would be like teenage boys. The Juniors had so much charm, and I wondered how they could relate to each other. What if they were best friends and competitive with each other? We found great footage of these jostling bear cubs.” Variation had to be retained within the crowd simulations. “Throughout the course of the film, the crowd of Creepers marching around the spaceship goes from a walk to a trot to a gallop to a super gallop,” McLaughlin notes. “Each of those four variants had to have its own keyframe animation, which comes from Robyn’s team. Within each of those four, we had to have variants of that so they don’t all look the same. You multiply those four by five or six. Then you need to have lots of little characteristics, like jostles, bumps and jumps. Each of those have to be done at a different speed. This all starts to add up!” A fun part for the animation team was assisting in designing the Creepers from scratch. “In the evolution of the [Creepers] from the page, it looks like a millipede that has lots of legs. It had to run, so we looked at one of my favorite films, Totoro from Studio Ghibli, and the Catbus for the gallop, and it was something that Bong really liked. The amount of animation inside of each creature was quite staggering. It’s a complete marriage of building and animating those details.” —Robyn Luckham, Animation Director, DNEG Interaction was achieved procedurally. “Our effects supervisor did setup that whenever a new version of animation was published, we could run that, and it would simulate the crowd,” McLaughlin reveals. “You could do hundreds of Creepers trampling through the snow, and you would get the kick-up out of that. In terms of the interaction on set with the cast, for the scenes where they are holding the Baby, there was a stuffie, which looked similar and had a nice weight so you could tell they were holding onto something. It was the exact size and shape, so our CG sat quite nicely over top. For the crowds, we had numerous yoga balls on set that were about the right height and size, and Robert Pattinson would be staggering through and tripping over them.” Puppets were utilized. “We had the company Stitches and Glue mainly for Mama,” Luckham states. “Mama was incredibly interesting. Framestore built the asset, but we had quite a lot of the acting shots. As you see in the story, she is cheeky and secretive. We looked at a cheeky granny who may be old but still has her complete wits about her and knows how to put things together. Mama is a big, slow and lumbering creature, and we have to make sure there is weight. Especially in the acting and talking shots, it’s a lot about doing less rather than more. You’re looking at the eyes, the micro movements and believing what she said.” Flitters are bulky industrial machines that happen to fly. The crowd pipeline at DNEG had to be revamped to handle the massive number of Creepers in some shots. An audio language was created for the Creepers, which required answering several questions. “We had to go to the base of everything,” Luckham explains. “What’s its lungs? Why does it want to communicate? Where does it come from? Where does the air come in and out? If the air is passing through the mandibles, does that make a different sound? Certain mandibles moved at the higher range, and at the lower range, other mandibles moved. That’s more related to what you expect humans to do. Different parts of the face move depending if it’s a higher or lower pitch. It was like chicken and egg. They were like, ‘Give us some animation and we’ll work out the audio.’ And vice versa. If you got the logic right, that was a great place to start. Then Dan and Bong worked with the sound designer to create a hybrid sound, and then I know what motions can be attached to that audio.” The audio has a noise pattern. “We had to try break it down and relate that to what those words could mean,” Luckham reveals. “The ‘beep-beep’ means ‘How are you doing?’ and the ‘blop-blop’ stands for ‘I’m good. How are you?’ Then you would have to stitch that audio together and go, ‘There’s a sentence.’ What’s the action going with that noise? It was complicated and thoroughly enjoyable.” The Creepers provide a sense of depth to the bleak, snowy environment. Practical tire tracks were expanded upon and altered in the final shot. Several layers had to be simulated for snow. Resembling a flying garbage truck with a jet propulsion system are the Flitters. “Very heavy and cumbersome, which was the intention,” McLaughlin notes. “They were quite industrial. The setup is not meant for a fighter pilot. It’s about getting things done. We had to manipulate it in the sky with less elegance than you normally would. There was one full-sized Flitter that was functional as a car. You could rotate the engines, open the top and sit on top and bottom. Then there was another one that was a buck. It was a top section that was used to film the actors in, and we had full CG ones as well.” Icicles and snow were added to the aircraft. Fiona Crombie [Production Designer] wanted the Flitters and the massive spaceship that is their base to look like you would never get inside them.” Particular words of advice were given to the animators. “I would say to them, ‘This thing is always falling,’” Luckham recounts. “‘And make sure that you manipulate the air correctly for the weight.’ There is also lot of small details, like a thruster shimmer for heat.” He adds, “The intention of the Flitter was a chunky-looking piece of industrial machinery that happened to fly. That’s our boundaries we can animate in. If you start doing things that are not congruent with the actual design, it won’t look right.” Filmmaker Bong Joon Ho discusses a shot with Cinematographer Darius Khondji during principal photography at Cardington Studios in the U.K. DNEG improved on one area of the pipeline. “We didn’t have to change anything, but I would say we haven’t done crowds of creatures to this extent in a long time,” McLaughlin notes. “Most of our in-house-built crowd tools are for bipeds, while these were eight-legged creatures, so we had to rebuild a lot of that tooling.” Animation did not modify tooling but certainly had to be acutely aware of scale management. “Definitely, the amount we needed to prep was much bigger because we wanted to find the actors,” Luckham states. “The amount of variation in animation that we had to do for the crowds was way bigger than you would expect. Because they’re so complicated, you have to keyframe so much more. Our animation team was much bigger in order to get that crowd-feeling dynamic. These Creeper piles, and all of these little things that Bong wanted, was a lot of work to key.” The shot count of 350 is misleading. “If you think about the scale of a big movie like Avatar, our shot count seems quite low, but the amount of content in one shot is like a hundred shots,” Luckham observes. “There were so many bits to make one shot realistic. It was incredibly dense.”