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While traveling from one hole to another on a golf course in Park City, Utah, visual effects supervisor Jay Cooper (Babylon) took the time to discuss creating the VFX for a sci-fi action thriller that was as unusual as the circumstances of the interview. The movie in question was The Creator, in which an ex-special forces agent is sent to destroy an advanced form of AI which has created a weapon of mass destruction in the form of a child.
What was especially unique about the $80 million feature made by Regency Enterprises, eOne and Bad Dreams, distributed by 20th Century Studios, is that director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla, Monsters) resorted to guerrilla filmmaking tactics to maximize its cinematic value.
An Unconventional Cameraman
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Gareth is also a camera operator on his films, which is unconventional,” says Cooper. “He shoots long takes because he wants to find framing during the course of the shot. A lot of this movie was shot in real locations in Thailand, Japan and Nepal, and those served as the spin for what we’re adding [in visual effects]. There are shots where members of the local population are on binoculars watching the filming. We kept those in because it goes with the story. Also, we’re not trying to construct a world where every single shot is at the same time of day and you’re 100 percent correct on your spatial cues.”
He adds, “It’s a lot more of old school filmmaking where we picked up one shot at 11 a.m. and another at 4 p.m. We’re rolling with that as long as it cuts into the movie.”
Cooper mentions that Apocalypse Now and Baraka were two of the major cinematic influences on the project. “They’re not necessarily what you would think of touchstones for a large sci-fi visual effects movie, but Gareth wanted that grittiness and notion of documentary filmmaking,” he explains.
‘Gareth had a specific design aesthetic and wanted things to feel future forward, but [as] if we had taken a hard right in the late 1980s … A lot of the props used in the movie, Gareth gathered them from eBay and other places.’
— VFX supervisor Jay Cooper
Before work began on the project, Edwards approached ILM about doing a visual effects test, which was supervised by Chief Creative Officer John Knoll. “Gareth asked, ‘What if I brought you footage where we didn’t necessarily have the best photogrammetry, spheres, charts and HDRIs? Could you roll with that?’ ” Knoll recalls. “So, we put together 30 or so shots that were in the style of the movie Gareth wanted, and it became the sizzle reel that he used to get The Creator greenlit.”
In addition to having Andrew Roberts as the on-set visual effects supervisor, a multitude of things were done to prepare for the shortage of set reference material. “We sent our actors to Clear Angle in London to have photogrammetry scans done there. We did iPhone scans, but we couldn’t do a proper LiDAR scan. We would send up a drone for reality capture to create set meshes.”
As expected, a wide range of visual effects shots had to be produced. “There is an all-CG space station in the third act, augmented characters like Haru [Ken Watanabe] and Alphie [Madeleine Yuna Voyles] and a number of other characters that we turned into ‘simulates,’ which are AI robots that have evolved to the same level of quality as humans. Then, we also have straight-up robots.”
Toolsets and techniques were developed to seamlessly integrate CG elements with the human actors to create the simulates. “People are squishy, and their jaws and cheeks move,” notes Cooper. “We created meshes of the CG equivalents of these characters, did a rigid body track and using our ILM tracking tools, we did secondary tracking for the soft body animations. Then there was a Nuke process where we were able to combine the motion of the CG renders with the motion that was in the plate and that was done with a combination of KeenTools tracking, Smart Vector tracking, which is inside of Nuke, and some of our own bespoke stuff.”
To portray Alphie, lower half of Voyles’ cranium, ears and back of neck had to be transformed into robotics. “We put five or six tracking dots on her face. She wasn’t working through prosthetics and spending two hours in the makeup chair. It was important to Gareth that we didn’t do so much that the audience couldn’t bond with the character. But neither did we want to do so little that there was no point in doing it.”
Cooper also mentions that the filmmakers sought a retro, analog vibe in the futuristic technology. “Gareth had a specific design aesthetic and wanted things to feel future forward, but [as] if we took a hard right in the late 1980s,” explains Cooper. “A lot of the props used in the movie, Gareth gathered them from eBay and other places. There were 1980s graphics switchers and old technology, and then we would add on top of that. We would take a Sprinter van and redesign it, make some negative space, do racetrack shapes in it, and all kinds of cool stuff that was in keeping with Gareth’s aesthetic. [Production designer] James Clyne would do a design, and then we would bring something up to 60 to 70 percent in CG and do another round of design on top of it. It was all very iterative.”
Outer space offered its own path of discovery. “There’s a visual style that we were trying to carry on as much as we could from the terrestrial part of the movie,” says the VFX supervisor. “Gareth came to ILM right after principal photography, and we had a game version of the space station and had a number of sequences set up in rough animatic form. We gave him a camera and the room to find shot composition in the same way he was doing on set.”
Grand-Scale CG to the Rescue
Practical effects were used for elements that were close in proximity. “If there was an explosion, we would try to have an air mortar or some notion of that [which] would tie into the characters,” remarks Cooper. “But a lot of the larger-scale stuff is entirely computer generated. The goal was to have a low visual effects impact on set and figure it out in postproduction. There was not a ton of bluescreen or greenscreen. More often than not, we would try to find a location. We did shoot for a week on the ILM StageCraft stage in London for the airlock and biosphere. We built those ahead of time and threw them on the LED screens so even if it didn’t survive to the final shot, there was an understanding for the actors of what the environment was and a reality that comes with shooting it together.”
The biggest challenge was making sure that the audience does not know where the practical and CG elements begin and end. “There is a version of The Creator that you could show that has almost no visual effects, and you would still understand what the movie is about. But it doesn’t get any of the world building and the scope is not as large,” observes Cooper. “We’re adding in ways that are in keeping with the same visual style [of the footage]. If there’s a tank going down a hill, we have to re-create the hill and vegetation and do explosions. It should feel like if you didn’t have these fantastic visual effects elements, that you would believe this was something shot on that day.”
The Creator is currently playing in theaters around the world. Get a sneak peek at the robots and simulates in action in this official clip:
