Led by Chris McLaughlin and Greg Fisher, the studio handled 746 shots across 17 sequences, creating Eternia, Castle Grayskull, Cringer, Zoar, Roboto and Skeletor’s skull, balancing the campy, cartoon-inspired fantasy with believable, realistic characters and environments.
Embracing the campiness of its 1980s cartoon series predecessor, which thrust the famous line, ‘I have the power!’ into pop lexicon, is Mattel Films and Amazon MGM Studios’ fantasy adventure romp, Masters of the Universe. The second live-action feature film adaptation of the beloved franchise is directed by Travis Knight and stars Nicholas Galitzine, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, James Purefoy, Morena Baccarin, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Kristen Wiig, Jared Leto, and Idris Elba.
In the film, 10-year-old Prince Adam (Galitzine) crashes to Earth and is separated from his magical Sword of Power — the only link to his home on Eternia. 15 years later, he tracks it down... and is whisked away back to Eternia where he discovers his home shattered under the fiendish, evil rule of Skeletor (Leto). To save his family and his world, Adam must join forces with his closest allies, Teela (Mendes) and Duncan/Man-At-Arms (Elba), and embrace his true destiny as He-Man — the most powerful man in the universe.
Given the fantastical nature of the subject matter, the visual effects team, led by Tim Burke, David Vickery, and Rich Yeomans, brought on the expertise of DNEG to produce 746 shots across 17 sequences featuring the world of Eternia and its capital city of Eternos; Castle Grayskull; Cringer; Zoar; and Roboto and Skeletor’s skull.
“I don’t know if anyone ever called it ‘campiness’ but definitely if you look at the visual palette and read the script you could tell it’s not taking itself too seriously,” observes Chris McLaughlin, Visual Effects Supervisor, DNEG. “We were not making a dark version of the cartoon.” As always on such a VFX-heavy fantasy adventure, expectations have to be kept in mind when animating characters. “Throughout my career, I have been conscious of when you do photorealism, keep it real,” states Greg Fisher, Animation Director, DNEG. “However, it’s a film. You are playing with and pushing beyond reality. You need to give a nod to realism, in terms of what you’re trying to execute, but always keep in mind that you’re creating a character for people to enjoy.”
Logistically, the project was hard given the volume of the work and shots. “We had artists in Vancouver, Montreal, London, Europe, India and Sydney,” reveals McLaughlin. “We had a lot of help from the production team who streamlined things as much as they could and yet it was incredibly difficult. The planning starts with reading the scripts and then breaking them down. That’s constantly changing as well. You need to adapt to changes and adjust as you go.” As a successful animator himself, Knight has a deep understanding and perspective about the animation process. “You’re under more scrutiny because you are talking to someone with the same knowledge and history as yourself,” notes Fisher. “He knows how to talk to an animator. But ultimately, Travis is a director trying to direct the performance of a character. You’re mixing all of these references and it’s never coming from one source. It’s either coming from the ADR of your actor, real world reference footage, or yourself. It takes considerable artistry to understand the emotion that you’re trying to portray, extract that from your footage, and apply it to a character to create something new.”
One key consideration on the show was that Skeletor’s skull face had to respect that’s it’s built with a mass of rigid bone while also allowing the antagonist of the story to emote. “That was the challenge we danced with the most,” remarks Fisher. “I came onto the movie quite late, so I didn’t have any history of what had been tried, tested, thrown away, or enjoyed. The original brief for Skeletor was a rigid skull with a moveable mandible. I saw an early animation of a rigid skull with a flappable jaw, and you weren’t connecting to it as much as you would want to. You have to open up the theatre to experiment and push everything to 11 to see where it breaks. And we broke it! Then we dialed it back to find that sweet spot. It’s never a one size fits all kind of thing. Every shot and every scene have different executions and levels of how far you can go above or below that line. You’re trying to get a performance of a skull that an audience can relate to while not breaking or stretching or compressing textures and not making it feel like a rubbery prosthetic. It was definitely tough to test lip sync because on certain v’s, b’s and p’s you can’t get the lips to play right. The language that we came up with was to hit every syllable either in a grotesque or large way, or subtly so you could feel every articulation of the jaw, which helps reinforce every phoneme and shape that we’re trying to do. And he doesn’t even have a tongue, so that was another thing which was tricky.”
The art department had already constructed Eternos, Castle Grayskull, the rotunda, and bridge as rudimentary 3D models. “We had to up-resolution those 3D models and build in detail because we knew some areas, like the rotunda, Castle Grayskull, and palace were going to see a lot of action and be viewed up close,” states McLaughlin. “We added foliage, plants and moss to give it believable at human scale. That’s just the pristine version of Eternos that you see at the beginning of the film. Later we needed to take all of that and essentially destroy and age it. Keep in mind that some of that destruction is continuity related to things that happened previously in the film, like the head being blown off of the statue and landing in the middle of the rotunda. Then we had to build the version of Eternos that you see at the end of the film where it’s been partially rebuilt and regrown. It was a mammoth undertaking.”
In the film, Castle Grayskull is an iconic landmark. “It was important to everyone and was under a lot of scrutiny,” remarks McLaughlin. “A lot of work was done before Travis was happy with it. It’s such a sculptural piece. There was an idea that at some point this had been carved out of a piece of stone centuries ago and over time weather and wind had worn it down, making it look old. You find little bits of moss and ivy to give it some age and character.”
Interactions between the live-action cast and CG characters get complicated when Cringer goes into Battle Cat mode. “We knew from the beginning that Cringer was going to carry Adam and Teela on his back and gallop across the bridge,” states McLaughlin. “We couldn’t use a regular tiger because it would look like someone is trying to ride a dog. We had to scale Cringer up massively, put a CG Adam and Teela on his back, and get it to look right. David signed off on it, then they built the creature’s head from those dimensions and brought it on set.” A practical gimbal was constructed for the scenes. “The lighting is critical when we shoot on-set in terms of the element and the buck that you put them on to generate their motion; everything is fighting against you to make it look convincing and real,” notes Fisher. “You end up replacing as much as you can get away with to get the performance that you need. You keep the faces and heads and go full CG for the rest of it! Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes were placed upon a horse buck. It’s rigid in the spine and gallops like a horse. As we know, a tiger or carnivore has a much more subtle and bendable spine. That ripple you get through a spine on an herbivore is more rigid, so you don’t quite get what it should be. As always, when you shoot anything on a ride or buck, what it should be in terms of what you’ve done in animation to supply the data to drive this thing will end up killing someone!”
How the lights and visor on Roboto’s face interacted with each other influenced what were perceived as the eyes and mouth. “You needed something to communicate the face,” remarks McLaughlin. “We did numerous tests and it seemed no matter what we did with the visor along the front, which were her eyes, always read as a mouth. That was because we were always trying to connect it up with the dialogue or emoting. Something much more simplified was needed.” The language for how Roboto talks was reset. “The visor was designed not to be too visually noisy, so it didn’t confuse anyone when she was talking,” remarks Fisher. “We kept the two bottom lights predominantly for language, so you have a visor for an eye that is higher than a mouth. The top two lights were left mostly quiet and dim. We only fully lit them up when Roboto was saying something emphatic. That was how we reset how to bring that to life.”
Roboto also had to move robotically. “She had to be able to do things that a human couldn’t in the way she moves her limbs, like her biceps and thighs, so she could twist her legs around,” notes McLaughlin. “In the final shots, Roboto isn’t as fully articulated as she could be but there was a big design process that went into the build of the rig and overall design.” Roboto was a tough one to get the weight working on so it didn’t feel human. “She’s got two ankles, two knees, and a fully 360-degree twistable spine so she has got some cool stuff in her arsenal,” observes Fisher. “But it’s always a challenge to give her that weight which feels connected to what is a two ton being.”
Anything that moves needs to be animated, such as the spacecraft. “We did the Fright Fighters, Rotons, big dropships, and Skeletor’s ship,” states Fisher. “There’s a lot of animation for all of the ships and how those mechanics move, including the thrusters, flight angles, and choreography of multiple ships flying through dynamic cameras trying to make these sequences feel cool. You have to make sure that you’re fitting into the camera language that has already been established with the live-action pieces but at the same time keep it engaging. Cameras are difficult. It’s as much a character as any other character and you need a specific animator who can do good cameras. It’s a dance between the camera and action. You set the action, film it and adjust the animation to do the cameras. It’s a bit of both the whole time. You go back and forth to get the feeling that everyone wants it to have.”
In the film, there are plenty of moments and elements to look forward to seeing. “Anytime Skeletor shows up or when Cringer or Castle Grayskull appears for the first time onscreen, those are always big moments and have been well received” remarks McLaughlin. “Those are moments that hark back to the cartoon. There are lots of references to the cartoon as well. The final shot of the film before the credits roll, with He-Man galloping up on the back of Battle Cat, who rears up in front of Eternos, was a big one that took a lot of work and is entirely CG even though they shot a plate for it. All of that magical stuff, like the Havoc Staff beams and Sorceress transformation are subjective and took a lot of work and different iterations.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
