Bringing a bunch of colourful characters to life in Paul Weitz’s Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant was the job of Rhythm & Hues. Visual effects supervisor Todd Shifflett tells fxguide how his studio approached the diverse range of Freak Show performers in the film.
fxg: What were Rhythm & Hues’ main tasks on Cirque du Freak?
Shifflett: We basically made all the freaks a little extra freakish. For example, we had Alexander Ribs, played by Orlando Jones, a character we had to emaciate and augment to the point that he was incredibly skinny and you could see all of his organs and bone structure. We’d do a 3D scan of Orlando’s body and then blend from his upper torso and chest area down into his hips. We separated out his whole mid-section, in along the rib cage to give him an entire new body. Another character was Rhamus Twobellies. He was essentially made up of a lot of costume make-up effects that we added on top of in order to help sell the effect. He eats all these metal pieces and then reassembles them into a bicycle in his stomachs.
We also did a number of set extensions and matte paintings. Overall, Paul Weitz was very insistent on making sure there was a really colourful nature to a lot of the show. There’s a vibrancy to a lot of the characters that we tried to press through in all of our work. Some of these didn’t actually make it into the finished film just because of the demands of the story, but hopefully they’ll show up at some point on the DVD.
fxg: How did you approach Madam Octa, the spider?
Shifflett: Octa went through a lot of character design until she finally became the spider she is. We went through all different sorts of designs, from spindly legs to non-spindly legs to hairy and non-hairy spiders. We had to give her a sweet quality to her animation even though she’s this incredibly poisonous dangerous spider.
The animators did a really wonderful job with Octa. When we usually do character animation, we often rely on the eyes to help show how the character is feeling. That can involve a lot of things like eye darts. It gives the character the impression of inner thought. But when we’re working with a spider, we can’t move the eyes because there’s a whole bunch of them set on the head, so we didn’t have the ability to move the eyes. Instead we had the animators make sure the spider’s way of seeing is through its legs, through vibrations. Where we’d ordinarily have an eye dart movement, we’d instead move the legs to feel the surrounding area. So the motion of the spider’s legs helps us to feel for the character because it’s really the only thing we can animate to show emotion.
fxg: What were some of the challenges for the Harkat character?
Shifflett: Harkat was fully animated. In addition to all the animation that goes into him, there’s a lot of rigging and procedural animation that goes on top of that to make him feel real, especially for his robe. There’s a scene where Harcat goes to bite Darren Shan’s hand. On set, we filmed the actor, Chris Massoglia, with me giving his hand a little tug. When we brought it back here, they removed me – because no one wants to see me in the picture – and put in Harkat, making sure to cover up where my fingers were. By having me tugging on Chris’ hand it gave him something more to work with instead of just pretending that someone was tugging his arm.
fxg: What were some of the tools you used for the visual effects?
Shifflett: We use Houdini for a lot of effects work at Rhythm, so any of the smoke or swirling effectsy things are done with that package. Then we have our own package called Voodoo and our renderer for doing the choreography and animation. Our internal compositing software, called IC, is similar to Shake.
fxg: Any final thoughts?
Shifflett: Working with Paul was a pretty great experience. He’s very empathetic with not only the characters, but also the actors. He’d work with each actor individually. It was helpful for me to watch that process through Paul and then come back to Rhythm and use that methodology with our CG characters, in terms of: these are things that Paul cares about, these are the things that he’s asking his actors to think about. Trying to relate those moments to our crew I think only comes from being on set and working with the director for a period of time.
what about Larten
i want to know about larten he is so amazingly cool.