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How the crazy chicken jockey scene in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ was made
Plus, Sony Pictures Imageworks on ‘cubifying’ characters and environments, making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly, and dealing with an intense array of different hair types on greenscreens.
Yes, the internet has gone wild over *that* scene in Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie, when a baby zombie rides on the back of a chicken—the chicken jockey. Behind the visual effects of that sequence was Sony Pictures Imageworks, working with production visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon.
“I remember early on looking at that scene and going, ‘This is the one the fans are going to love. The kids are going to love this,’” shares Imageworks visual effects supervisor Seth Maury. “That scene started with storyboards. Then we worked with Dan to create little animated vignettes of the characters. For the baby zombie and the chicken, we recreated one of the boards, which was the baby zombie falling out of the box onto the chicken. The director saw it and had such a good reaction to it, so we knew we were onto something that was energetic and fun.”
During production, the scene—which takes place in a wrestling ring in the Woodland Mansion against Jason Momoa’s Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison character—was filmed in a three-walled set. Imageworks extended that environment and then tackled the character animation. Says Maury about the final results: “I just remember looking at that one and thinking, ‘Wow, this looks great and people are going to love this,’ but you don’t know until you let it out in the wild what’s going to happen.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jared HessFinding the Minecraft look
In that chicken jockey fight, and in all of Imageworks’ visual effects for the film, the studio had to incorporate a specific ‘look’ to its characters and environments. It’s something Maury called ‘cubify’. “We had to work out, what does a cubified character look like and what does a cubified environment look like? The rules for the environment were that anything that was a hard surface was cubic and anything that was a fluid followed normal fluid rules. We spent months on what a cubic cloud looks like, for example. How square are they on the bottom? What kind of vaporous surface do they have on top? It had to look photoreal, but it had to look cubified. And my son came back from seeing the movie and he’s like, ‘I didn’t look at the clouds at all.’ And I laughed. It’s like, well, of course not, right? It’s a background element. It’s just meant to be something subconscious.”
“The characters were much, much more tricky,” adds Maury. “Until you start to see them in 3D and you see it turn and you see it move, only then you can understand, ‘How square is a square head?’”
For example, the character Chungus, a general Piglin in Malgosha’s army who is voiced by the director, presented several ‘cubify’ challenges to Imageworks. “We thought, what does it mean to cubify your tricep muscle or your back muscle?” notes Maury. “We would start to give it edged shapes, but it still had to have some kind of anatomical detail. If you pull back from a macro level, it looks cubic, but the more you push in, there is some organic quality to it.”
When Chungus leads a raid on the village, Imageworks also had to deliver shots of many villager characters. Their stand-out qualities, aside from their squarish heads, included largely expressionless faces. “The original brief from Jared was that they were less emotive than more,” advises Maury. “They didn’t have a ton of expressions, and their emotions came out through their body. We still built a proper facial system for all of them and then had to work out, well, how far do we push it? Do they smile, for example? In the end, most of their emoting came with eyebrows and just some small smiles and little frowns.”
“I was on set at one point talking to the choreographer and I said, ‘Well, what is their motivation? What are they meant to be doing?’ And she said that Jared’s brief was that they should be like chickens with their head cut off. They’re jumping around, they’re a little bit mindless, but they have some kind of intelligence. So, we started with the body motion and then we had to translate that same idea to the head.”
Integrating live-action and CG
For scenes involving live-action characters like Steveand Garrett, production filmed primarily on partial sets surrounded by greenscreen or bluescreen. Integrate the live-action actors with their many CG companions involved careful attention to matching the on-set lighting, notes Maury, who praises his lighters and compositors.
“We came up with two light rigs,” says Maury. “We had an HDRI from on set and we would use that to match the set lighting exactly. The other light rig that we had was a daytime light rig which was essentially a sun and a sky dome. Any time we had to integrate or put CG into live-action, the team had both of those going. We would typically use the on set HDRI rig in the middle of the set to make sure that everything integrated, since there would be lights coming from multiple directions. But the further you got out radially from the center of the action, we let it fall off into the daytime rig so that your brain still felt like it was photoreal.”
Another essential part of that integration effort was dealing with live-action actors who just happened to mostly have quite fuzzy hair. The keying and rotoscoping involved was meticulous. “We paid a ton of attention to it and we heard as well that the studio was very keen on hair edges,” recalls Maury. “There were scenes with the villages where the performers were wearing a robe and a gray skull cap on with some tracking markers on it so that we could place the head, and they might walk behind Dawnwho has very curly hair. Also, because all the characters were heavily rim lit, you picked up every little bright hair. Simply, it was a ton of keying work and a ton of roto work, and, at the end of the day, painting back hair by hair if necessary.”
Then there was Garrett’s pink jacket with all of its tassels, as Maury describes. “This was the thing that kept me up at night. The jacket has got all these tassels hanging off of it and he’s flying on the greenscreens and those tassels get lost in the motion blur in an instant. Many, many times we were painting those back or we had a CG version of them, which meant we’d cut them off along the bottom of the arm and replace them with CG.”
Making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly
While evading a group of Piglins, Steve, Garrett and Henrynarrowly escape by launching themselves off a cliff edge using elytra wingsuits. Mid-flight, they are chased through canyons by a series of flying Ghasts, which eventually meet some fiery ends.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jack BlackImageworks began its work on the flying scenes with an Unreal Engine scene and previs from production. “We had two canyons we needed to build,” outlines Maury. “Canyon A was modeled after the American Southwest and looked a little like the Grand Canyon. We found some photos of the Grand Canyon and sculpted the silhouettes of what it looked like to go down into the gorge, and we copied the staining patterns and the color banding. Then they go into Canyon B, which was much more of a limestone look. There’s some mountains in China that we used for reference there. The effects team and the environment team did an amazing job putting all that together.”
The actors were filmed on wire rigs against greenscreen. “Dan Lemmon’s view was that, if your characters are going to be anywhere foreground to midground, you want them on a plate,” states Maury. “When they’re midground to background, it’s a digi-double. What we did a lot as well, because the rigs that they were wearing were either bulky or didn’t allow them to move as if they were really flying, was limb replacement. We might cut them off at the waist and replace the legs and then do a cloth sim. One of the trickiest things there was lighting interaction. When you’re on a greenscreen, it’s hard to get all the live movement that will sell—the rolling and tumbling and all that as they’re flying—so a lot of that we did in 2D later on to give it some dynamic movement.”
The post How the crazy chicken jockey scene in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ was made appeared first on befores & afters.
#how #crazy #chicken #jockey #scene
How the crazy chicken jockey scene in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ was made
Plus, Sony Pictures Imageworks on ‘cubifying’ characters and environments, making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly, and dealing with an intense array of different hair types on greenscreens.
Yes, the internet has gone wild over *that* scene in Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie, when a baby zombie rides on the back of a chicken—the chicken jockey. Behind the visual effects of that sequence was Sony Pictures Imageworks, working with production visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon.
“I remember early on looking at that scene and going, ‘This is the one the fans are going to love. The kids are going to love this,’” shares Imageworks visual effects supervisor Seth Maury. “That scene started with storyboards. Then we worked with Dan to create little animated vignettes of the characters. For the baby zombie and the chicken, we recreated one of the boards, which was the baby zombie falling out of the box onto the chicken. The director saw it and had such a good reaction to it, so we knew we were onto something that was energetic and fun.”
During production, the scene—which takes place in a wrestling ring in the Woodland Mansion against Jason Momoa’s Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison character—was filmed in a three-walled set. Imageworks extended that environment and then tackled the character animation. Says Maury about the final results: “I just remember looking at that one and thinking, ‘Wow, this looks great and people are going to love this,’ but you don’t know until you let it out in the wild what’s going to happen.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jared HessFinding the Minecraft look
In that chicken jockey fight, and in all of Imageworks’ visual effects for the film, the studio had to incorporate a specific ‘look’ to its characters and environments. It’s something Maury called ‘cubify’. “We had to work out, what does a cubified character look like and what does a cubified environment look like? The rules for the environment were that anything that was a hard surface was cubic and anything that was a fluid followed normal fluid rules. We spent months on what a cubic cloud looks like, for example. How square are they on the bottom? What kind of vaporous surface do they have on top? It had to look photoreal, but it had to look cubified. And my son came back from seeing the movie and he’s like, ‘I didn’t look at the clouds at all.’ And I laughed. It’s like, well, of course not, right? It’s a background element. It’s just meant to be something subconscious.”
“The characters were much, much more tricky,” adds Maury. “Until you start to see them in 3D and you see it turn and you see it move, only then you can understand, ‘How square is a square head?’”
For example, the character Chungus, a general Piglin in Malgosha’s army who is voiced by the director, presented several ‘cubify’ challenges to Imageworks. “We thought, what does it mean to cubify your tricep muscle or your back muscle?” notes Maury. “We would start to give it edged shapes, but it still had to have some kind of anatomical detail. If you pull back from a macro level, it looks cubic, but the more you push in, there is some organic quality to it.”
When Chungus leads a raid on the village, Imageworks also had to deliver shots of many villager characters. Their stand-out qualities, aside from their squarish heads, included largely expressionless faces. “The original brief from Jared was that they were less emotive than more,” advises Maury. “They didn’t have a ton of expressions, and their emotions came out through their body. We still built a proper facial system for all of them and then had to work out, well, how far do we push it? Do they smile, for example? In the end, most of their emoting came with eyebrows and just some small smiles and little frowns.”
“I was on set at one point talking to the choreographer and I said, ‘Well, what is their motivation? What are they meant to be doing?’ And she said that Jared’s brief was that they should be like chickens with their head cut off. They’re jumping around, they’re a little bit mindless, but they have some kind of intelligence. So, we started with the body motion and then we had to translate that same idea to the head.”
Integrating live-action and CG
For scenes involving live-action characters like Steveand Garrett, production filmed primarily on partial sets surrounded by greenscreen or bluescreen. Integrate the live-action actors with their many CG companions involved careful attention to matching the on-set lighting, notes Maury, who praises his lighters and compositors.
“We came up with two light rigs,” says Maury. “We had an HDRI from on set and we would use that to match the set lighting exactly. The other light rig that we had was a daytime light rig which was essentially a sun and a sky dome. Any time we had to integrate or put CG into live-action, the team had both of those going. We would typically use the on set HDRI rig in the middle of the set to make sure that everything integrated, since there would be lights coming from multiple directions. But the further you got out radially from the center of the action, we let it fall off into the daytime rig so that your brain still felt like it was photoreal.”
Another essential part of that integration effort was dealing with live-action actors who just happened to mostly have quite fuzzy hair. The keying and rotoscoping involved was meticulous. “We paid a ton of attention to it and we heard as well that the studio was very keen on hair edges,” recalls Maury. “There were scenes with the villages where the performers were wearing a robe and a gray skull cap on with some tracking markers on it so that we could place the head, and they might walk behind Dawnwho has very curly hair. Also, because all the characters were heavily rim lit, you picked up every little bright hair. Simply, it was a ton of keying work and a ton of roto work, and, at the end of the day, painting back hair by hair if necessary.”
Then there was Garrett’s pink jacket with all of its tassels, as Maury describes. “This was the thing that kept me up at night. The jacket has got all these tassels hanging off of it and he’s flying on the greenscreens and those tassels get lost in the motion blur in an instant. Many, many times we were painting those back or we had a CG version of them, which meant we’d cut them off along the bottom of the arm and replace them with CG.”
Making Jack Black and Jason Momoa fly
While evading a group of Piglins, Steve, Garrett and Henrynarrowly escape by launching themselves off a cliff edge using elytra wingsuits. Mid-flight, they are chased through canyons by a series of flying Ghasts, which eventually meet some fiery ends.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jack BlackImageworks began its work on the flying scenes with an Unreal Engine scene and previs from production. “We had two canyons we needed to build,” outlines Maury. “Canyon A was modeled after the American Southwest and looked a little like the Grand Canyon. We found some photos of the Grand Canyon and sculpted the silhouettes of what it looked like to go down into the gorge, and we copied the staining patterns and the color banding. Then they go into Canyon B, which was much more of a limestone look. There’s some mountains in China that we used for reference there. The effects team and the environment team did an amazing job putting all that together.”
The actors were filmed on wire rigs against greenscreen. “Dan Lemmon’s view was that, if your characters are going to be anywhere foreground to midground, you want them on a plate,” states Maury. “When they’re midground to background, it’s a digi-double. What we did a lot as well, because the rigs that they were wearing were either bulky or didn’t allow them to move as if they were really flying, was limb replacement. We might cut them off at the waist and replace the legs and then do a cloth sim. One of the trickiest things there was lighting interaction. When you’re on a greenscreen, it’s hard to get all the live movement that will sell—the rolling and tumbling and all that as they’re flying—so a lot of that we did in 2D later on to give it some dynamic movement.”
The post How the crazy chicken jockey scene in ‘A Minecraft Movie’ was made appeared first on befores & afters.
#how #crazy #chicken #jockey #scene
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