Third Encounter: ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ VFX Supe Malcolm Humphreys on the Prequel’s Captivating Visuals

This article was written for the August '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 342).

In early summer, audiences were introduced to the initial days of A Quiet Place’s blind, predatory aliens in Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One. Michael Sarnoski (Pig) took over directorial duties from John Krasinski (IF), who helmed the first two installments. The franchise’s other newcomers include special effects supervisor Mark Holt (In the Heart of the Sea) and VFX supervisor Malcolm Humphreys (The Batman). The production also shifted from New York to the Warner Bros. Studio Leavesden in Watford, England, which doubled as Manhattan.

Moving from a rural setting to a massive urban environment allowed the storytelling to be approached from a different perspective. “The first couple of films had small budgets and were shot in one location,” explains Humphrey. “New York has lots of buildings and people, so there are huge opportunities to show the creatures more than what we had previously seen, as well as actually seeing them in herds and family units.”

From Russia with Meteorites

Humphreys says that real-life dashcam footage from Russia was indispensable in creating the meteor shower that signifies the arrival of the interstellar invaders. “There seems to be a lot of meteorites in Russia,” he notes. “The challenging thing that we had to do with the meteorites was making them visible and readable. A lot of the reference [material] is at night, so we’re trying to explore what they would look like during the day.”

Starting things off is a bus caught in the middle of meteor shower. “One of the meteors lands and you see the shockwave hit a bus,” explains Holt. “Every window gets blown out. To coordinate that, they wanted the light from the meteor in the background. We had flares on a dropping wire that would drop down to the end of the road so you could see the light shadows come across. Then we had a big explosion. It was all about timing how the shockwave runs toward the bus. As it hits the bus, we have all of these little air cannons hidden on the bus that blow out the windows like a ripple. The end of the bus opens out after being hit by this shockwave. They wanted lights to spill into the bus, so we got these black roller blinds that rolled back and suddenly you have this white light that appears at the end; that was all done in one shot.”

Whereas in the past the creatures were lurking in the shadows, this latest incarnation has them hunting in daylight in full view. “If you watch the previous performances of the creatures, I would call them ‘snatch and grabs,’” says Humphreys. “If you blink, you’ll miss it. Or they’re slow tension-building moments. This film is definitely exploring how they look like in a herd. It was quite a challenge to not make them look too goofy because of the proportions of their limbs versus their body. We did a couple of snatch and grabs. There was a lot of exploration as to where should the person get speared. Rather than pushing people, they end up pulling them, because they’re so fast you miss what is happening. You essentially see the person for a little bit longer as the creature passes, and then they whip off-screen, which essentially hits better.”

‘New York has lots of buildings and people, so there are huge opportunities to show the creatures more than what we had previously seen, as well as actually seeing them in herds and family units.’

— VFX supervisor Malcolm Humphries

Getting as much as possible done in camera was a key directorial mandate. “There is a bit where you actually see the claws of the creatures coming into the theater as they’re climbing the walls,” explains Holt. “We got the design of the claws and had them 3D printed in a heavy industrial plastic. We made these rigs on cans that would actually push the claw forward and then push it into the room — and then push down as if the creature was climbing up the building. We must have had 12 or 14 of these rigs set up around the entire room. When you went outside, you could see these rigs and pistons, but inside it was all dressed with breakaway sections. As the claw came through, it broke what looked like real brickwork, and timbre is coming through. Then we programmed a motion-control camera so it would pan around, and you see all of the claws coming in as the people were sitting in the foreground. Lots of rigs like that where we rely on visual effects to go, ‘What do you want it to look like? How is the animation going to look?’ From that information, we design our rigs to suit that.”

The bulk of the footage was actually captured in Manhattan. “I was so happy that Michael was up for shooting aerial plates,” says Humphreys. “We had a helicopter unit shoot aerial plates around New York to give more scope to the film. But that also gave us great material to work on to intermix with the backlot that we’ve done to make it feel more authentic.”

According to the supervisor, a lot of physical debris was needed. “A number of things we did later on was to actually add more belongings like bags and shirts,” he explains. “Some of our artists captured parts of their wardrobe and used them to distribute around the city.”

A tricky atmospheric element to achieve was the massive dust coating caused by meteors smashing into the buildings. “Michael would give us an image and say, ‘I want it to look like this with floating bits of black ash in the air.’ We got this black tissue paper that was so fine it would float away. We put this fine paper in a dust bin, got a nylon streamer and streamed it. It turned into this lovely, floaty black ash.”

The Lower Depths

Some of the film’s breathtaking action sequences take place in a submerged subway. “We had to make quite a large underwater gimbal that allowed us to adjust the platform,” says Holt. “As they’re getting lower and lower, we’re making the floor move down so it looks like the ceiling is coming up. We have the ceiling on a gimbal, so we can bring the ceiling down and the floor up. It made things narrow and claustrophobic. That was quite a big rig that was about 40 feet long. You’re trying to push down all of that water. You don’t want any resistance, so we made the whole top surface in this checker fiberglass mesh that you could walk on and the water would flow through the floor.”

There were 400 to 450 visual effects shots, including optical work, created over a period of a year and half, with Industrial Light & Magic as the main vendor, along with Important Looking Pirates, Proof, Cadence Effects and an in-house team. “Michael is fun to work [with],” says Humphreys. “He’ll give you a loose brief and leave it up to us to come up with creative ideas on how to make the shot cool. You see creatures jumping onto cars, and we’d throw suggestions like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if a creature was to grab the door of this car, accidentally threw it away, and that created another alarm which affects another creature?’ The shots evolved and turned into something that was better at the end of the day.”

Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One was released in theaters on June 27. The movie is currently playing in theaters worldwide.