WARRIORS OF VIRTUE: Discussing the Plan
Warriors of Virtue: Discussing the Plan
[jwplayer mediaid="6462"]
127 HOURS: Behind the Scenes at Alterian, Inc.
127 Hours: The Only Way Out
Behind the scenes images of the design and manufacturing of the makeup effects elements for the film "127 HOURS," with James Franco.
[jwplayer mediaid="3542"]
THREE KINGS: Behind the Scenes
Three Kings: Behind the Scenes
Access Hollywood TV show segment focusing on the realism of the makeup effects work for the feature film "Three Kings."
[jwplayer mediaid="3587"]
BEASTLY: Behind the Scenes Featurette from CBS Films
Beastly: Behind the Scenes Featurette from CBS Films
[jwplayer mediaid="3804"]
MOVIE MAKER: How They Did It: Designing the Amputee Protagonist of Ana Lily Amirpour’s Dystopian Desert Trip, The Bad Batch
How They Did It: Designing the Amputee Protagonist of Ana Lily Amirpour’s Dystopian Desert Trip, The Bad Batch
There were quite a few visual effects challenges I had to tackle in making my second feature, The Bad Batch: multiple matte paintings, a massive wall made out of shipping containers, a simulated LSD trip, sand storms, trained crows.
Once I’d written the script, though, it was clear that the first, most important question was: “How am I going to have my main character, Arlen—played by Suki Waterhouse and in pretty much every scene of the movie—lose an arm and a leg in the first 10 minutes of the film?”
Given the CG tools available, creating the effect isn’t actually that difficult—but I’m a practical-FX girl. A lot of the big-budget, FX-driven studio films we get right now have this chemical synthetic look—they’re two-hour long video games. I like the real world to be mixed organically with CG. I’m excited by filmmakers who use a mix of practical and digital FX, like Guillermo Del Toro, Darren Aronofsky, J. J. Abrams, Ridley Scott. They harness the beauty of the real world first and foremost, and then use the CG to amplify that beauty. I wanted that living, organic feeling in the frame. I wanted the tactile, tangible sense of light hitting the sets and objects and flesh. I want it to feel real. I’m a magician, after all.
The first person I talked to about the challenge of getting rid of limbs was Tony Gardner, who with his company, Alterian, Inc., is the mastermind behind things like the Chucky doll from Child’s Play, the iconic Daft Punk helmets, Darkman and the Oscar-nominated makeup (including the old-man balls) of Bad Grandpa. He is one of the greats in practical FX. Spike Jonze mentioned my film to him (they had worked together on Adaptation) and suggested we meet. Normally, Tony would be out of my reach, given my budget of only approximate $5 million, but he loved the story and world I was building, and he vibed on the fact that I was trying to get the effect without digital tools—not an approach most people take nowadays.
Ana Lily Amirpour on the set of The Bad Batch, which won the special jury prize at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Photograph by Merrick Morton
The film that Tony had worked on that was most relevant to what I wanted to do was Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. I was really impressed with how natural the arm prosthetics on James Franco, trapped under that rock, were. With hardly any digital FX, Tony created a prosthetic arm which Franco wore (his own arm was tucked behind him). That seemed like a strategy that could work for us. Tony would design a prosthetic shoulder nub for Arlen, molded from Suki’s body, that she would wear throughout the shoot, so that there would always be a real-life element on her of what she was supposed to look like. That meant that nothing was 100-percent created in CG; it was always a mix of practical and visual FX.
Which is not to say we didn’t still require extensive digital VFX work to sell that effect. We would still need to remove Suki’s actual arm from every single shot. No matter how I approached it, there would be a considerable amount of CG work. Anything we built would then need to be cleaned up and accentuated. So the next critical partner I had to find was a VFX supervisor who would come in and bring to life whatever Tony had started with his prosthetics. He would help me come up with a shooting strategy on set, for every scene, to make sure we were shooting to facilitate the ideal results in post-production.
One of the great resources for moviemakers is DVD bonus features of other films. I was checking out other directors who had removed limbs in movies. Two films in particular were my references: Rust and Bone and Soul Surfer. The bonus features of Rust and Bone—a film about a girl missing her legs—revealed what director Jacques Audiard had done with handheld camera work, elaborate CG work and a much bigger budget. In Soul Surfer, director Sean McNamara got rid of AnnaSophia Robb’s arm by creating a prosthetic nub that she wore for most of the movie—the way we wanted to go. Dan Schmit was one of the VFX supervisors on that film, so we got in touch with him and his company Engine Room. Since he’d already done the arm-removal effect before, hiring him made us ahead of the curve.
Keep in mind, Soul Surfer too was made on a bigger budget, with more than 700 VFX shots. I had to get the same effect with around 150 shots on my budget. Dan pointed out that we would also need Tony to build one complete prosthetic arm and bust of Arlen, just for shooting photos for 3-D rebuilding. This would serve as a model of what she was supposed to look like and Dan’s team could use this to recreate her body from side angles, when the viewer would see everything.
The Bad Batch was shot around Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea in California. Photograph by Merrick Morton
So we began, building one prosthetic nub for Suki’s front-facing shots and a different one when I was shooting her from the back, and sometimes a “double nub” with prosthetics on both sides. Her own arm was always somewhere behind or in front of her, painted green. Dan would remove that real arm for all of the shots, and sometimes animate the nub to give it life. And when there was not enough information for Dan to recreate the CG, he could use the bust of her body to fill in those gaps.
With just 150 shots, I had to figure out when it was essential for you to see Arlen as an amputee. I had to decide when I wanted to put the camera wider, in angles that really showed her body, and create shots that would require more elaborate CG work to sell the effect. Dan and I went through the script and figured out the scenes where we really wanted to do some fancier CG work, like animate the nub, really show it, and see it interacting with her and her environment. In the story of The Bad Batch, the fact that Arlen’s an amputee is almost a side-note—I just needed to show her physicality a few key times and get you to believe in who this character is, and then move on to so many other things. Any time we shot her nub, we were creating a CG shot, and even if it was an easy one, it costs money. My rule: Don’t shoot the nub if the scene doesn’t benefit from showing it. Most scenes in movies are anchored on close-ups of actors’ faces, so that’s where you invest your emotion. I’m not selling a freak show; I’m telling a story about human emotion. And that lives in the actor’s eyes.
That said, a big part of Suki’s job were the physical challenges all the FX required. This role wasn’t just hard on her as an actress; it was hard on her as a stunt person. She would have to wear heavy plastic prosthetics in a hot desert for the entire shoot and learn how to move and react with them in a way that felt natural. It was an exhausting role for an actress. She jumped right into the technical work, over many weeks of prep, casting molds of her body and testing them for camera. The tests were critical—you always wish you had more time, but any time you get is incredibly valuable. I spent many afternoons with Suki, her crawling around on the floor using only one arm and leg, trying to understand how to use her body the way this character would. I take my hat off to her and the gladiator work she put in, because she makes it look easy, and that’s why she’s remarkable.
Jason Momoa and Suki Waterhouse enter an unconventional romance as part of The Bad Batch’s wasteland community. Courtesy of Neon
The next important element for me was storyboards. I like to do them myself because I have specific ideas for framing and camera angles, and I like to over-prepare, especially for scenes that require elaborate camera movements, lighting or stunts. I often deviate from the storyboards, but with prosthetics and CG, you need everyone to have a clear plan. These blueprints were also important for my costume designer, Natalie O’Brien, who was working closely with Tony on designing Arlen’s outfits to work with the prosthetics.
I went through those storyboards with my camera team—a trifecta made up of me, my DP Lyle Vincent (who also shot my first feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) and our Steadicam operator, Scotty Dropkin, who also did a few scenes on Girl Walks. We three already have a shorthand, and we found a way to stay efficient and avoid creating more post work than I could afford. We also shot camera tests in all the locations so they knew the lay of the land in the extreme desert conditions. All of this preparation is so useful for showing up relaxed and ready.
Suddenly it was the first day of production, and we showed up on set. Even as prepared as you might be, your true approach reveals itself when you start shooting. We had the rare privilege of shooting this film almost in chronological order, and that helped enormously. Shooting was insane, the schedule was impossibly tight, with lots of surprises, changes, action sequences and fight scenes every other day. We had a kid and animals on set, and the desert is wild and unpredictable. All of the tricks we had devised played out in different ways depending on the scene: Sometimes we buried Suki’s leg in the sand, sometimes we cut a hole in a mattress, sometimes her real arm was in the back, sometimes in the front, and sometimes we just shot it not knowing how we were going to get rid of an arm or leg but we had to finish the scene so we had no choice. During her escape scene in the beginning, she’s in bandages, so that was an easier time in some ways. But bandages turned out to be more difficult to recreate and modify realistically in CG. That’s something we discovered months later when I was in post—cloth, it turns out, is trickier to animate. Things change on the day, the sun is hot, the latex is melting, the clock is ticking, and that’s the nature of this beast.
A few weeks in, we found our rhythm. It was a wonderful feeling: when everyone knew exactly how we were making this movie; everyone was suddenly an expert at how to shoot a girl missing an arm and leg. At the end of finishing any movie you become an expert at that particular movie. I’m now an expert on limb removal.
Amirpour with her crew on the set of The Bad Batch. Photograph by Merrick Morton
I like creating fairy tales. I like fantasy, and surrealism, and world-building, which always involved technical craftsmanship. For me, making a movie is creating a world of problems I then have to solve. And each project is a set of completely new problems, mediums, tricks, genres and techniques, but I know I’ll find a solution. It’s part of the high for me. I once did a stop-motion film called “A Little Suicide,” about a cockroach who is depressed because everyone hates him and he goes out and decides to kill himself. It was funded by the Berlinale, so I shot it in Berlin. It was six weeks of prep and a 21-day shoot to make a 10-minute-long film that was a mix of live action and stop motion. I had no actual stop motion experience before that (though I did have an arts background in sculpture and illustration). So I had to figure out how to animate. And I did.
What matters is that you have smart, solution-oriented collaborators and problem-solvers sitting next to you, helping you get where you’re going. It’s a lot like Apollo 13: that scene where they have to figure out how to get the carbon dioxide levels down in the spaceship, and there are only a certain number of tools to do it with. That was Tony and Dan and their teams: Here’s what they have available on the spaceship, and we have to figure out some way to make this happen with just those tools, and get home safely. MM
The Bad Batch opens in theaters June 23, 2017, courtesy of Neon.
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: "127 HOURS," What James Franco's Severed Arm Taught Me
What James Franco’s Severed Arm Taught Me
Tony Gardner, special effects artist, on how his “127 Hours” handiwork is saving sick babies.
I thought some of the stories were hyped about people fainting during 127 Hours. Then one producer called me and said, “I went to the movies last night to check out your work, and it was quite an experience.” It turned out that somebody had passed out. I felt proud and then really guilty.
We designed about 10 different arms, each one worth about $10,000. We also designed bloodshot contact lenses and dental “plumpers” for James Franco’s face because he had lost all the weight before filming — we had to do something so his face could change. Before anything, we did a body cast and then built a couple different harnesses and could attach any of the multitude of arms to the shoulder depending on the scene. He actually had on a three-sleeve shirt because the fake arm had to come out in front of his real arm.
The main surgery arm [for the amputation scene] was loose-jointed and the one that had all the blood in it — different muscle groups and everything. It was made of aluminum and steel, then there’s foam, latex and silicone muscles. It had fibers embedded in the silicone so it would cut like muscle tissue, instead of cutting into other stuff that looks like Jell-O. It’s an arm, so you know where the veins and arteries are and where the blood will come through. Aron Ralston was so dehydrated, his blood was thicker — so it was a fairly clean process.
I got a lot of great feedback from doctors about my work in the film. So I started a business making neonatal training aids for intensive care doctors. Some kids are born with their intestines inside of their umbilical cord … and all other sorts of issues. We made a kit where you can put these prosthetic pieces on medical dummies, so doctors in training can practice in a real-life scenario. It feels good to be doing something helpful other than just entertainment.
STRAIGHT.COM l 127 Hours makeup and special effects artist Tony Gardner makes Alex Pettyfer Beastly
127 Hours makeup and special effects artist Tony Gardner makes Alex Pettyfer Beastly
If you were wincing during the moments when James Franco’s character Aron Ralston was cutting into his arm in 127 Hours, you have makeup and special effects artist Tony Gardner to thank—or blame.
“Everybody knows the story. Everybody knows how it ends. Everybody knows what happened,” Gardner told the Straight during a phone interview. “So the goal is to be as real as possible so that you don’t lose the audience with shoddy work and have the audience fall out of the story.”
Gardner—who also worked on Beastly, which opens in theatres on Friday (March 4)—got his first taste of the film industry by making movies around his neighbourhood in Cleveland, Ohio, as a child. After entering college as a theatre major, he transferred to the University of Southern California as an arts major and used the school paper to meet veteran movie makeup artist Rick Baker.
It wasn’t before long that Baker invited Gardner onto the set of one of his projects so that he could see if a career in the film industry was something he was interested in. That project happened to be Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
“I dropped out of school,” Gardner said. “For me, it was sort of that defining moment where I thought, ”˜I’m still involved in the filmmaking process but I’m making stuff, I’m building stuff, and it’s part of the creative process.’”
Gardner continued to work with Baker for four years and picked up freelance projects along the side. Early credits included Aliens, Harry and the Hendersons, Dark Angel, and Sleepwalkers. But it wasn’t just monsters that Gardner was interested in creating.
“Over time, I wrote a short film, and we were doing helmets for Daft Punk, and they really liked the concept of my film and offered to score it for free,” Gardner said. “So I ended up writing and directing a music video for them about five years ago.”
When it comes to choosing projects, Gardner has always gone with his gut. He remembers reading the script for There’s Something About Mary and laughing out loud all four times he read it.
“I tend to gravitate towards the odd stuff, but a lot of times, we’ll get a script, and I’ll just really connect to a story or be very entertained by it,” he said. “You don’t get immersed in a story that often where you relate to it, so the scripts that you do get become part of the process for the whole project. If you’re in from the beginning, you’re part of the whole team that defines what it looks like and help shape elements of the story as a result of that. For me, it’s a personal, immediate response. I’ve been really fortunate that anything people come to me with, I’ve always really liked.”
For Danny Boyle’s award-winning 127 Hours, Gardner saw it as a technical challenge, so he contacted his friend in emergency medicine, Dr. Stephen Corbett, who had previously helped him with Three Kings. “He’s the guy who’ll take pictures inside somebody’s body if I’m really curious about something and say, ”˜This is what it looks like when they’re still alive,’” Gardner said.
Gardner and his team went on to construct the notorious arm, making two copies of the interior, complete with the skeleton, muscles, tendons, nerves, and veins pumping blood, and three arm skins for Franco to cut through. Making the arm look real was the easy part; making it feel real was a whole other story.
“The materials we use can look like real stuff, but they don’t necessarily have the same density or texture,” Gardner said. “You cut into a silicone muscle that we’d make and it would cut like a block of Jell-O, and real muscle is very fibrous. So we’d have to figure out how to literally embed fibres into a silicone muscle so that when we cast them, they would cut like real muscle.”
Another challenge was fulfilling Boyle’s request to have a shot from the inside of the arm. “He [Boyle] said, ”˜I’d love to be able to get inside his [Franco’s] arm just for a flash, just for an instance, so you can feel the pain.’ So we started researching optically clear electrical silicone at $100 a pound to try and do what the director wanted to see,” Gardner said. He notes that these shots could have more easily been achieved by using computer graphics, but that his approach has always been to do things practically.
In Beastly, he wanted to design something for Alex Pettyfer’s character Kyle that would make the movie stand out from other werewolf-centred projects out there. He started out by going to the other extreme—asking Pettyfer to go bald—and then developing an intricate swirling pattern of silver and black that looked like it was tattooed onto Pettyfer’s face and body. From there, he added stud piercings, scars, and open cuts lodged with tiny flecks of mirrors.
“The challenge was that on one hand, the character had to be monstrous and frightening, and on the other hand, you wanted people to be sympathetic and empathetic,” Gardner said.
“All of the designs really grew from one rose-bush tattoo,” he continued, referring to the ominous rose bush tattooed on Pettyfer’s forearm to constantly remind his character about time. “That sort of defined what we were going to do on his body. We wanted to do things growing and swirling and wrapping around things, and looking a little more organic. The piercings actually came from that theme. There was a conscious style that came out of having a lot of time to do research and development.”
Beastly is a modern take on the story of Beauty and the Beast and also stars Vanessa Hudgens, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Neil Patrick Harris. While it was important for Gardner to get a full grasp of Rolsten’s book for 127 Hours, he chose not rely on the book for Beastly. “I try not to read the book because I know I’m going to skew towards the book description or something. I’ll read it and I’ll literally just see it in my head,” he said. “A lot of times I just try to read things with an open mind but I’m very visual so I’ll literally see the things played out.”
Instead, Gardner prefers playing around with original ideas in Photoshop and collaborating with others on the project, even turning to his biggest critics, his two daughters, for honest feedback. “My older daughter Brianna helped balance what was ugly and what was sympathetic. It’s good to have an outside opinion that’s brutally honest because you’re their dad and they could care less,” he said. “One person isn’t going to think of everything.”
When he overheard that audience members watching 127 Hours were fainting in theatres, Gardner immediately wondered if he had gone too far. He felt responsible for creating something that looked very realistic, but then he realized that this responsibility was shared with Franco and Boyle. “James is the one presenting it as real, and we see it through his eyes and investing in him,” he said. “I’m just giving him the stuff to mess with, and Danny’s presenting it. So it always comes down to this collaborative process, whether it’s the designing of it, or filming of it, or what you experience on screen.”
Gardner’s next projects include 30 Minutes or Less with the Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg; The Motel Life starring Dakota Fanning, Emile Hirsch, and Stephen Dorff; and Jack and Jill with Adam Sandler. Whether he’s making gory open wounds feel lifelike from both sides of a camera lens, designing fantasy-driven costumes, or making someone in a fat suit actually look fat, Gardner wants audiences to believe and sees his role as someone who helps maintain the integrity of the story being told.
“When you have to go right out there and make something 100-percent believable, like 127 Hours, and you have everyone saying if the arm doesn’t work, the whole movie doesn’t work, you’re stomach’s churning, and sadly, that’s what excites me,” he said. “It’s that challenge to try and do something that will make people believe. When someone says something isn’t possible, I’m the first one in line for a project like that.”
TO GO TO THE FULL ARTICLE – CLICK HERE
