Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1081428
www.postmagazine.com 34 POST JAN/FEB 2019 WELCOME TO MARWEN KEVIN BAILLIE — VISUAL EFFECTS Baillie addressed the unique look of lead character Mark Hogancamp's imagination sequences, which start right with the film's opening scene. In fact, if viewers weren't already familiar with what the film was about prior to seeing it, the scene would have them a little confused. In fact, responding to whether or not that was intentionally, Baillie says, "It was indeed! Bob [Zemekis] wanted the audience to be eased into realizing that they were witnessing a window into Mark Hogancamp's imagination. The same techniques that were used in the rest of the film's imaginary scenes, but the level of 'plasticizing' we did to Steve Carell's likeness as Hogie was dialed back. If you look carefully, you'll see the over-scaled threading on his costume, doll joints almost hidden by jacket cuffs, etc. It was really quite fun to play with scale in the way that Bob encouraged us to do!" According to Baillie, it was intimidating to think about bringing dolls to life for the film. "Bob wanted the dolls to be the 'heroic doll version' of each actor, and wanted them to bear a resemblance to the actor that was just slight- ly caricaturized. Traditionally, that's a one-way ticket into the uncanny valley: the zone where a digital creation looks close enough to a human where our brains expect it to be a human, but doesn't quite get all the way there. A digital character that falls into the uncanny valley triggers off a self-protection mechanism that screams 'that's creepy!' Scientists think it's our built-in survival instinct that helps us to avoid sick people in the real world. The dolls in Marwen needed to be relatable as alter-egos of people from Mark's real life, so it was critical that we crossed the uncanny valley, and delivered char- acters whose souls were alive; that were relatable as characters and conveyed every nuance of the actors' performances despite being a plastic figure. Cue brain exploding here! It took a lot of testing to find the right recipe for bringing the dolls to the screen." As Baillie explains, the imagination sequences were all digitally rendered. The town of Marwen itself was a recreation of the 1/6th scale miniature designed by production designer Stefan Dechant, built by Dave Asling's team at Creation Consultants, and lit by cinematographer C. Kim Miles. "The doll bodies were digital, having been obses- sively matched to handcrafted physical dolls and their costumes (designed by Joanna Johnston)," he explains. "Their movement was driven by motion capture data from the real actors, who effectively 'puppeteered' their dolls. The faces of the dolls were 'projected' beauty-lit footage of the real actors, filmed simultaneously with the motion capture of their body performances." Going further into how the faces of the actors were applied to the dolls, Baillie says that that was one of the biggest creative and technical in- novations in the film. "When we filmed our motion capture scenes, we captured the body motion of the actors and the position and lenses of the cam- eras," he says. "It's important to note that Bob and our DP were designing and operating shots like a normal live action film, using all of the traditional tools like Technocranes and Steadicams, and care- fully beauty-lighting every setup. Once we had the digital scene set up in post production, the footage of the actors' faces was projected onto a disembodied version of the actor's head." Baillie says that the footage was then transferred onto the hero doll head through a process they in- vented for the film. Then they blended the eyes and mouths from the actors over the underlying digital TECHNICOLOR PULSE VFX editor Alison Wolf, a long-time collaborator of Robert Zemeckis, used Technicolor Pulse, a secure, Web-based platform that gives users automated processing control and access to their content, for VFX pulls on Welcome to Marwen. In total, Technicolor Pulse pulled 2,387,553 frames — with an average delivery time of just 2:37 minutes. "Pulse is fantastic; it made the experience pretty seamless and Pulse support was excellent," says Wolf. "It became part of our pipeline and an uninterrupted workflow, and the automated features made pulls as smooth, fast and effective as can be." Marwen was shot on Arri Alexa 65. The film features 655 VFX shots.