On the Road to the 98th Oscars: The Visual Effects Nominees

For almost a century, what was intended to prevent unionization, overshadow celebrity scandals, and bring together the five branches of the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences, and has turned into a prestigious stargazing event watched by billions around the globe.  The 98th Academy Awards will be taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 15, once again featuring an interesting mix of contenders for Best Visual Effects.

The superhero genre was shutout for the second year in a row; the Marvel Cinematic Universe has amassed 14 nominations since 2008 without a single win. Not as prolific, but much more victorious, is filmmaker James Cameron with Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Titanic, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water so it is not surprising that the director’s third trip to Pandora, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is considered this year’s frontrunner. But, hot on its trail is the blues infused and vampire infested Sinners, which is being praised for creating visual effects that are invisible, scary and horrific.  Waiting to blast past the leaders is F1: The Movie, which excels at the art of reskinning race cars whether they appear in actual Formula One broadcast footage or principal photography.  The environment and simulation work in The Lost Bus is remarkable, as Paradise, California is set a blaze once again. And hoping to take a bite out of the competition are the dinosaurs that come to life in Jurassic World Rebirth.                      

Here’s a closer look at the five nominees:

Avatar: Fire and Ash
Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett

Shooting Avatar: The Way of the Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash at the same time meant that the production rhythm and pipeline established by the former could be leveraged for the latter.  “Rolling into Fire and Ash allowed us to move not necessarily faster, but with more cohesiveness across the team,” notes Richard Baneham, Visual Effects Supervisor.  “We strive to make it not just visceral, but experiential for the actor; that feeds into the idea of the credibility of the performance.  The additional characters, in particular Oona Chaplin as Varang… and to watch her dynamic with Steven Lang as Miles Quaritch come to life, she truly embodies the role. There are two different things there. You become the custodian of a performance that needs to be protected all the way through from the moment that she delivers these beautifully deep character-based moments, and you have to protect it all the way and shepherd it through the process to the final image. I'd like to think in Fire and Ash, she's going to be a little special. It's a character that will connect to a lot of people.” 

The volcanic desolate environment of the Ash Clan clashes with the lush jungle portrayal of Pandora. “It’s interesting, because you would think it’s easier as we have less to deal with, but when you cover everything with ash your vistas go much further,” note Eric Saindon, Visual Effects Supervisor, Wētā FX.  “All of a sudden, you have to build much further out into the world.  Jim [James Cameron] always wants ash on everything, and everything to be moving subtly.  In those shots, if you look closely, you can see wind chimes made of the bones of the enemy. All these fun things in the background.  There's a lot more detail in those shots even though there's less visually.” 

F1: The Movie
Ryan Tudhope, Nicolas Chevallier, Robert Harrington and Keith Dawson

More than anything, the visual effects work was all about what was being driven on the racetrack. “We were there to do the cars,” states Robert Harrington, Visual Effects Supervisor, Framestore.  “There were things like crowds, but it's rare to have a shot where you were just adding crowd. You'd normally have cars and then there'd be some crowd in the background.”  Reskinning cars is an artform.  “For the Apex cars we had a beautiful CAD as a source for the competitor cars,” he continues. “Where we would have to have a Williams car and turn it into an Apex car, we had to work out accurately how big those cars were and their shape.” The cars being replaced were a key reference.  “We tried to get as close as possible as to the car that we were replacing,” says Nicolas Chevallier, Visual Effects Supervisor, Framestore.  “We had like a tire strategy. There was a database to say, ‘Ferrari needs to have the number 55.’   We had to build a comprehensive shader to be able to change the number on the car and to alter the color of the tire.  Also, McLaren doesn't have the same livery for all the racetracks. You're actually not building only 10 cars. You're building 20 cars with different states. Some had different variations of dirt and tire wear. If you multiply all these together, the number of assets [was significant].  From shot to shot, you can follow the race like a real one.”  Many production tools required modification. “We developed some bits in Shotgun so that we could control car numbers and tire colors,” explains Harrington. “It wasn't like, ‘Oh, back to animation. I'll recap this thing to get the right tags and for the shaders to work.’   It was driven entirely at render time essentially with Shotgun. That gave us a level of flexibility, which was good because there's lots of shots, and you want to have production there to help you get things through.” 

Jurassic World Rebirth
David Vickery, Stephen Aplin, Charmaine Chan and Neil Corbould

Hanging out with dinosaurs is something that never gets old. “The reason dinosaurs hold so much appeal is because they actually existed,” observes David Vickery, Visual Effects Supervisor.  “A big thing is that the environments have to be convincing, because if you don't believe the world, you suddenly don't believe the dinosaurs.”  Filmmaker Gareth Edwards had a specific request regarding the visual effects on the film. “When Gareth and I started on the project, he said, ‘You must find real reference of animals to base the dinosaur movement on, because I don't want them walking into the room, hitting the mark on the floor and going, ‘Raaaa.’ That's just acting.’ Gareth could change the angle that he filmed from, but we weren't letting him change the performance because it was a real-life performance. Gareth stuck to that to his credit. I do think that's what's given the dinosaurs an air of unpredictability that you get with animals. You don't know what they're going to do.”  Having proxies on-set were important. “What we have moved on to understand is that the performance of your creature is often only as good as the performance of the actor in the frame, and that the more you can give them something to work with, the better your performance is going to be.” 

The Lost Bus
Charlie Noble, David Zaretti, Russell Bowen and Brandon K. McLaughlin

“The irony is that what we planned to capture in camera ultimately couldn't be because there were [real] forest fires! [burning at that time],” reveals Russell Bowen, Visual Effects Supervisor, beloFX.  Noting the film’s use of previs, he says, “Previs is traditionally used for complicated sequences to work out the choreography. But what differed on this film is that it was also defining the look. The atmospherics, fire and smoke simulations, how dense was that at any given point of the sequence, how claustrophobic things felt and how it was kind of coming in on them?  That was a massive part of the story, and to be able to give that to Paul Greengrass and the filmmakers early defined the shape of those sequences.   But it also then helped us in the final stages of the work, because that had already been defined early on and Paul and the team were true to all that stuff.  They rarely changed that. What happened when we got to the final stages is we were essentially matching the work that we'd done in the previsualization stage, at least for the most part. Obviously, it does differ from shot to shot as you actually get the plates in.”  Lighting is central to the storytelling.  Bowen explains, “The darker it is means the further away from the fire that they actually are, and the safer they are, and the safer they feel. You feel that in the movie. You have these lulls of calm when there isn't fire, and then all of a sudden, there's a sort of eruption of light and fire, and everything turns to chaos. In classic Greengrass style, everything amps up a little bit, and everybody gets on the edge of their seat for an hour and a half and can't breathe.” 

Sinners
Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl, Guido Wolter and Donnie Dean

“Ryan Coolger [Director] is good at explaining what he wants to see visually and Autumn Durald Arkapaw [Cinematographer] is good at explaining what she is going to do technically, so between the two of them. I can tailor the shots,” states Donnie Dean, Special Effects Supervisor. He continues, “That scene at the end when Michael B. Jordan is walking towards the car shooting it, and bullets are going through the car and the people. That’s all real.  Autumn explained how she was going to shoot it, and when we were doing our testing, we tried to mimic what we thought her move would be as much as we could. That way, when we got there on the day ready to shoot it, she knew what to expect.”  Fire was a prominent on-set element.   “We now have access to materials that are more fire resistant than you might have had 10 to 15 years ago, so we can build things like the barndoor that goes up in movie in a way that you can burn it, turn it off and it’s not marred,” Dean says. The burning roof took three months to figure out.  “That was a full-sized roof, so it’s 16 x 16 feet so it’s massive,” he adds.  “To have that material burn away like that and they didn’t speed it up or slow it down. They shot it exactly as it happened.  We got that in one take.  If we had to reset it, it would have cost two or three hours just to get the smoke out of the space.”   

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.