Go behind the scenes with Scanline VFX on their work for the Adam Sandler film.Kyle Newachecks Happy Gilmore 2 features a range of visual effects work overseen by production visual effects supervisor Marcus Taormina. For a number of the Maxi Golf events seen in the film, Scanline VFX took on the task of extending environments, generating crowds and dealing with some fun golf-related moments.In this interview, Scanline visual effects supervisor Dann Tarmy breaks down the work for befores & afters.b&a: How would you describe the style of VFX that Scanline had to orchestrate for its shows on Happy Gilmore 2? How did you perhaps lean into that style?Dann Tarmy: As a comedy, it was critical that the VFX of Happy Gilmore 2 be there to support the story and the humor, without taking away any focus from the actors performances. This was a topic that our production VFX supervisor Marcus Taormina and I got in sync on very early in the show, and to be honest we never needed to discuss it again. Much of the work we were creating was intended to be invisible VFX, and so the style we leaned into was precisely what they had filmed on set. Realistic, exciting, engaging, and above all, believable.b&a: For golf course scenes during Maxi Golf events, in general, how and where were these filmed? What approach did Scanline take to adding stadiums and extra environmental elements for these?Dann Tarmy: All of the Maxi Golf events that Scanline contributed to were filmed on location at a golf course in New Jersey. While we had shots sprinkled throughout these events, the three primary scenes that we worked on were the Maxi stage intros, the Maxi forest hole (the first hole of the contest), and the Maxi thousand yard hole (the final hole).For the Maxi stage intros, the Happy Gilmore 2 creative team wanted this to feel somewhere in the mix of a music festival, and a sporting event. We looked at a lot of images for events like Coachella, Osheaga, NASCAR, F1, and of course PGA events. Each had a specific vibe to them that we were able to learn and borrow from to find what would ultimately fit for a Maxi event. We presented several variations of concepts before we hit upon the right balance. From there, Scanline CG supervisor Mark Norrie guided the asset and shot teams efforts to create the necessary elements, and one of our comp supervisors Mauricio Valderrama Jr. helped bring it all together with the plates.The Maxi forest hole had a somewhat unique creative challenge. The story point was that the forest in front of the tee box was so dense and long, that the golfers would need to drive the ball over 500 yards to clear the trees, but from our research we could see that the average PGA golfer drives the ball under 300 yards, so it was important that in constructing the forest that there not be any gaps where it would look like a safe spot for the golfers to lay up. On top of that, we needed to find a solution whereby we could see over the forest, all the way to the putting green. Marcus provided us with a list of tree species that the head greenskeeper provided for the shoot location, which Scanline environments supervisor Thomas Warrender and Head of 3D Mathew Praveen used to create trees that would blend seamlessly with the photography. The team used SpeedTree to generate the foundation of each tree, as well as to add some subtle wind, and then used ForestPack to scatter the trees across the terrain. A background DMP was created for the putting green and distant environment.The bulk of Scanlines award took place on the final hole of the Maxi tournament, the thousand yard hole. The initial brief from the Happy Gilmore 2 creatives on this one was that it needed to appear long, predominantly flat, and dead straight. Very little of the environment from the photography was in line with this brief, and so it all needed to be replaced. We couldnt find any golf courses worldwide that had a hole that matched this concept, so while we had a few references, creating this fairway would take some experimentation on our part.For the fairway, one of our Scanline artists, Chris Pember, set about creating the initial environment by modelling the terrain, and then scattering the same trees we created for the forest hole. Additionally, he created CG grass as well with a ForestPack scatter. A simplified version of this environment build was used by our layout team, lead by Maegan Veloso, to help capture the feeling of extreme distance for each camera and lensing. This helped us come to the conclusion that literal distances didnt always ring true and we wound up creating bespoke versions of the environment from each location, splitting the work amongst many talented environment and DMP artists, so that the audience would feel what Happy Gilmore was feeling in those moments, that the distances were vast and he would need to hit the heck out of the ball if he was going to have a chance at victory. Thankfully, another of our comp supervisors Siddharth Shah had an eye towards keeping all of these environments in line with one another, while staying true to camera lensing so that the audience would never know.Once we reached the final putting green, the teeter-totter green, it was important that we could look back at what the golfers just accomplished in reaching the green in 2 shots. Due to the sheer volume of shots in this scene, Thomas and Mathew devised a plan to create a cyclorama to maximize efficiency. They worked with Scanline comp supervisor Khaled Zeidan and DFX supervisor Natalia de la Garza to ensure that the cyclo gave our compositors the ability to match the look of the fairway shots, while maintaining the flexibility to address client creative feedback.HAPPY GILMORE 2. BTS (L to R) Joseph Vecsey as Billys Caddie (Co-Producer) and Haley Joel Osment as Billy Jenkins on the set of Happy Gilmore 2. Cr. Scott Yamano/Netflix 2025.b&a: How did you tackle crowd shots in particular?Dann Tarmy: There was no singular solution to the crowd shots. We were fortunate enough that in some cases, Marcus had the opportunity to shoot some crowd tiles and some extras on bluescreen when he was on set for both the Maxi stage scene and the teeter-totter green finale. While those tiles were certainly used to their fullest extent, there were scenarios where the camera angles and lighting of the tiles were not viable and thats where we employed other techniques.At Scanline we have a library of stand-alone crowd elements, so I developed a Nuke based tool that would create a 2.5D card system for scattering, randomizing, and time offsetting each element. Using a Nuke based Metric3D surface normal estimation tool, we were able to generate normals for our card based crowds, and relight them to fit in with each plate. This approach was used for some of the stadiums in the flashback sequence, as well as in scattered shots throughout the show when we needed to patch small areas with extra people.In places where the tiles, bluescreen elements, and 2.5D cards could not be made to work, full CG crowd sims were employed. While Scanline CG supe Mark Norrie oversaw the creation of the crowd assets to ensure they matched the sequence wardrobes, crowd supervisor Krisztian Kinder oversaw the creation of the performance clips and simulations in Golaem to ensure that our CG crowd brought the necessary energy and vigor to support each and every scene.Finally, there was a pair of shots for which none of the above options would work. We didnt have bluescreen elements from that angle, our 2.5D card system lacked the performances requested by the Happy Gilmore 2 creatives, and it was close enough to camera that to use CG crowd would have been both time and cost prohibitive. For these shots we leaned on our colleagues Eyeline Studios to help create an element shoot. Eyeline virtual production supervisor Nhat Phong Tran led the efforts to tech-viz the shots in advance so that we were sure to get elements that matched the lighting and camera angles. The team then leveraged the superior lighting capabilities and controlled environment of its proprietary Light Dome stage to conduct a highly precise crowd element shoot.b&a: For that moment of Harley getting a large drive, can you break down what went into the digi-double build for that character? What were the challenges of replicating his costume? What reference did you look to for the golf swing itself?Dann Tarmy: The Harley digi-double build itself was pretty standard. Marcus had the actor playing Harley (Oliver Hudson) scanned while in wardrobe on set, and provided some reference photography as well. With that data, our assets teams set about modelling (supervised by Benjamin Lepine) and surfacing (supervised by Uira LAmour) every facet of his body and wardrobe, with groom and cloth setups (supervised by Cobol Yu) added on top. We also had a bluescreen reference of Harley swinging a club to get a feel for how the cloth elements of his wardrobe behaved so that our sims would feel natural and believable.For his swing performance, there were two aspects of the brief that we needed to focus on: making it look and feel like a pro golfers swing, and capturing the story point that this swing was anatomically impossible without the surgical procedure mentioned in the movie. Animation supervisor Mattias Brunosson and his team studied slow motion swings of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and Bryson DeChambeau to capture the nuances and timing of how they shift their weight, the angle at which they bring down the club, and the overall speed and timing of their swings.Once we had the swing in a good place, we then had to exaggerate it for the story point and rotate his hips and spine at both ends of the swing beyond what a normal golfer could achieve. Since Harleys jacket would cover much of the effect, we needed to find another way to help illustrate this. The reference Marcus and I came up with was the idea of wringing out a wet towel, with deep and twisted folds in the cloth. To achieve this we started with a base cloth sim to define where the twists and folds would fall, upon which we sculpted deeper more defined folds with a pass of shot modelling. Finally, we ran an updated cloth sim to give it that last bit of life.HAPPY GILMORE 2. BTS (L to R) Haley Joel Osment as Billy Jenkins and Joseph Vecsey as Billys Caddie (Co-Producer) on the set of Happy Gilmore 2. Cr. Scott Yamano/Netflix 2025.b&a: For elaborate camera moves following golf balls in the air, can you talk about the particular challenges of bringing those moments to life (ie. synthetic courses, ball motion blur, virtual camera moves, etc)?Dann Tarmy: In each of our soaring golf ball shots, plates were filmed that initially were intended to serve as the primary camera move, with standard VFX additions of the golf ball, CG crowd and set extension. However, as often is the case for shots of this nature, once we get in there the shows creative requests end up pushing us towards full CG shots. That is precisely what happened on most of these shots for us.Any time youre doing a big, full CG shot with a complex environment and thousands of CG crowd agents, you run a host of into CG, render, and comp technical issues and that was no different in our case. Each of these shots took some of our best artists to manage all the files, and elements needed to even bring the shots together. Funny that you mention motion blur in your question. One of the decisions we made early on that ended up being a saving grace was that we rendered everything in these shots without motion blur, and used the motion vectors to add motion blur in comp. This enabled us complete control of the amount of motion blur on each element without having to go back to render for each change. In the end we settled on a recipe that had a slightly exaggerated motion blur on the environment closer to the camera, and less motion blur on the golf ball so that it would get lost in the shot.From the performance side, Scanline animation supervisor Mattias Brunosson and I studied a lot of real world golf drone shots to ensure we were creating a shot that felt physically real. He and his team of animators presented various camera and golf ball animation iterations, each one side-by-side with the footage of an actual professional golf shot, so that the Happy Gilmore 2 creatives could evaluate which felt best for this use case. In some cases we had to exaggerate the speed and dynamic nature of the shot to capture the energy of the story point being told, but it was always with an eye towards keeping it believable.The post Crowds, courses and some crazy fun effects: the VFX of Happy Gilmore 2 appeared first on befores & afters.