Always plan your VFX. There’s no magic, it’s all work.
The challenge is simple. Take a look at the GIF above and tell me which part of it is VFX.
The answer is below but promise me, you won’t peek. Pinky promise? Good.
The point of this exercise isn’t to flex my skills, hoping that you won’t be able to see where the VFX is. You will, if you look closely. In fact, if you look closely at any VFX shot, you can normally find where the effect is and that can be an excellent learning exercise. If the VFX work well, what do you think it is that makes them work? And if they don’t, what is it that’s stopping them from working well?
So back to the GIF - have you spotted where the VFX is? It isn’t the legs, they are in-camera. They don’t really feel digital, and the impact on the mouth is very believable (because it’s real!). Complex interaction between the real and the digital world is hard and should be avoided whenever possible.
So this is what I call managing the meeting point, and it’s so important. The key is that when you plan your VFX, you think about the meeting point between the two worlds, (the digital and the real) and think about how to hide that contact point
With this shot, my plan was to put some creature legs into my actor’s mouth and pull them out with string, then simply paint out the string. That’s very common - if you film any sort of puppet work, there’s always strings and rods and puppeteers to paint out. Stunt actors are very often pulled around with wires that need to be removed digitally, too.
BUT what I hadn’t anticipated was how little of the creature legs can be shoved into an actor’s mouth without his cheeks bulging! Turns out it’s… not very much. Even when we hacked off a good portion of the creature legs on set, it was still a lot for our poor actor to fit in. He couldn’t even close his mouth.
So here is what we actually shot. Just painting out the strings wouldn’t be anywhere near enough; you’d still see his cheeks were full, and that would destroy the surprise. So we took a shot of the actor without anything in his mouth and tracked (a planar track, for those of you who are already Shoot First students!) that over the hamster cheek shot. I did a little bit of painting to stitch the two together and the end result is what you’ve seen at the top.
It’s so common that filmmakers think of VFX as magic, that they never plan, and just go with their instinct on what should be VFX, which in this case would be the creature. But to do that digitally would take a LOT more work (although the creature legs did start digitally - then they were 3D printed. Bringing the digital world into the real world, or visa versa via scanning, can create GREAT opportunities to manage the meeting point!)
Here are the three key takeaways from that, and trust me following these rules will make a huge difference to your work.
1. Always plan your VFX. There’s no magic, it’s all work.
2. If you can just film a trial shot, just a simple thing on your phone, the problems will reveal themselves very quickly. I didn’t, and shooting became a lot more stressful (and delayed) when I realised that we couldn’t fit the legs into the actor’s mouth!
3. Always try and hide the meeting point between the digital world and the real world. This is like the magician’s sleight of hand. Visual effects are much easier to get away with when the audience is looking somewhere else!
If you go back to the shot above and start to analyze where the visual effects are now that you know where they are, you’re probably going to find the areas where they don’t work perfectly! In fact you could probably do that with every bit of VFX I’ve ever done.
Please don’t do that, it’ll make me feel bad.
Until next time!