Anatomy of a shot
Eight for silver had an incredibly hard full CG underwater transformation scene. As a brand new company at the time, the challenge here was to process the lidar, build and texture a robust digidouble, rig and animate her, include hair and creature sim, rig and animate tentacles, build a full cg environment, render water sim and bubble effects, and then light and composite a complete underwater scene - This was an enormous challenge! but we pulled if off with a small but talented crew, and a very tight turnaround time. The edit works incredibly well telling the story of a girl trashing underwater against a demon infectoing her.
The Actress was scanned in leavesden by clear angle studios. Modelled and textured in maya and zbrush, textured in mari
My personal artistic contribution was the digi and the tentacles and then futurther anim and shot sculpting. I was also the visual effects supervisor for the show.
You can see a breakdown of the underwater scene below:
Underwater Fight
Below are some stills from the underwater Fight
What made this challenging, was two fold:
1) we had to combine cloth sim, with a complex tentacle growth effects and also time pretty complex bubble effects work in houdini
2) There are simple no reflections underwater, making it often very hard to make that move from clear cg animation into believable realism. underwater shots are simple very challenging to get the look, but i think we pulled it off in the end.
Autopsy Sequence
The second major sequence we were awarded was an autopsy scene, where the same girl who has been transformed above, is captured in her werewolf form. when the corpse is discected they find the girl alive inside the werewold, as she rises, hideous tentacles creep from her body to attack any interlopers.
We had to augment this scene with addition cg tentacles, we also warped the actresses face the make it paler, and we pulld the jaw open to an unnatural angle by tracking our digi and projecting the plate back onto the cg model.
The results were hugely sucessful, with this sequence being touted by many reviewers as a stand out moment of the film, likening it to John Carpenters "The thing"
Again the Digi double and tentacles were modelled by myself, I also animated tentacles and was the overall vfx supervisor.
Additional Shot below, where Anna-lise emerges from the corpse
The Killing shot.
The final icing on the cake, was a shot to blow her head off! we worked in maya and zbrush to sculpt a brain and interior head. This was textured in Substance painter. We then added layers of effects including skull chunks, bloody, slime and smoke from the gun to create a pretty viseral final effect
