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MEAN GIRLS www.postmagazine.com 12 POST JAN/FEB 2024 Arturo Perez Jr.: "The deep animals are VFX. And the trees are VFX." Samantha Jayne: "Yeah, gira©e wranglers in New Jersey are a little hard to find." How much of the look was captured in-camera thanks to production design versus it being applied in the color grade? Arturo Perez Jr.: "It was so hard to watch the movie in dailies, because we knew that we were going to add something in post. We shot everything to make it feel like it's shot on film. We shot it on Arri 35s. We shot deep focus, because film has a deeper focus. We kept seeing what we were seeing, and we were like, it didn't feel like the way we wanted it to feel until we were able to finish the process in post. We worked with Damien (Vandercruyssen) over at Harbor, who is the best. He killed it. He's such an artist. He did Bardo. He's done such good work. We were always going to add this look at the end — adding like the grain obviously, but also halation…Everybody kept watching it, and everybody liked it, but I was like, 'Don't like it too much because we're finishing the process at the end.' And once everybody saw what it was at the end, it was like, 'Oh my God!" Social media eects Method™Studios (www.methodstudios.com) contributed to a number of sequences in Mean Girls, specifically those that appear as social media posts representing TikTok and Instagram Reels. The studio also added graph- ics over footage and handled the main-on-end titles, which also have the look of social media user interfaces and graphics. All of the work was completed by Method artists using Adobe After Ešects. Method's filter and 2D graphic work can be seen in approximately 200 shots, including the "Sexy" Halloween song, the talent show sequence and the "World Burn" song. The studio also applied a wet-look filter that reflected Regina George's new style trend, and had a hand in the bus-hit sequence that leaves Renee Rapp's character in a neck brace. FuseFX completes 130 shots BY MARC LOFTUS FuseFX in New York City worked on 130 shots for Paramount Pictures' Mean Girls. According to VFX supervisor Ariel Altman (pictured), the studio be- gan speaking with the production team two years ago about the film's visual ešects needs and how they would be executed. Early in the film, FuseFX helped create the look of the African landscape where Cady and her mom are living. The studio licensed footage of native animals and rotoscoped them for compositing into the scene, placing a number in the distance to- wards the horizon. In the case of the flock of birds that fly overhead and into the distance, the studio created 3D elements. The studio also handled the transition from the African tent to the school yard, where Cady begins her time at North Shore High. Altman notes that one of the more challenging VFX sequences was unexpected — the one where Janis performs her solo for "I'd Rather Be Me." In the scene, actress Auli'i Cravalho, who plays Janis, exits the band room and makes her way outside. The sequence appears as one long and continuous shot. However, a weather event — light snow — kept the outdoor portion of the scene from being shot that same day, and instead, the "A shot" of her leaving the classroom was intercut with a "B shot," captured the next day. "There were a few opportunities within that choreography to have done stitches, but we end up going with when Janis exits the band room," Altman explains. "When Janis exits the band room, as she pauses in the doorway, there's a moment in which Regina and Cady pass by the camera, and then the camera whips with all of them. That's the moment that we stitch to." Without using motion control to repeat the shots, the camera was instead lined up manually, but giving the frame a little more room than the earlier shot. "We had Janis stand in so we could get a better alignment," he recalls. "And then had Cady and Regina walk by, and the camera followed them. It was kind of a combination of a wipe using the bodies of Regina and Cady, and a pan into an environment." FuseFX also worked on the bus hit, which fol- lows shortly thereafter. In it, Janis and Regina are walking from the school toward the street. When they get to the curb, a yellow school bus rushes by, striking Regina. The sequence is composed of a number of elements. "There's actually an interesting bit there," Altman recalls. "Because of the long take, it's di¬cult to get into a more simplified visual ešects solution. We have a clean pass of Regina. We have a pass of a stunt. And we have a pass of a bus." The long Steadicam shot was supposed to end with the camera coming to a stop in just the right position to capture the bus hit. "We had the camera operator come down, and there was a position that we locked into," he explains. "Ari (Robbins) is a machine! He actually hit that position really, really well, so that's the main take, and the base plate doesn't have a bus in it. Regina just stops and positions on Janis in the foreground." The production then shot a pass of the bus from a locked-oš camera, as well as another pass of the stunt performer being yanked oš her feet by a wire. Finally, they shot footage of the students reacting to the accident, with Regina missing from the frame. The viewer gets the impression that the bus is traveling at a high rate of speed, but accord- ing to Altman, it was only going 10-20 miles per hour. The framing and size of the vehicle creates the impression of it going much faster. Beyond their work on some of the film's transi- tions, FuseFX also enhanced confetti sequences by adding more elements in several shots. Rather than create CG confetti, the studio instead shot practical elements against blue and black screens. "The confetti hallway was really fun and pretty sim- ple," Altman notes. "There was the real confetti, so for the main moment, where the confetti cannons go oš, we added a little bit more to fill it out…We were actually able to leverage machine learning to extract some depth information from that shot to help layer in the confetti with the depth. It actually ended up working pretty well, because confetti is a small par- ticulate, and it's fast moving, (so) it's pretty forgiving. "Doing it as a particulate — as a CG ešect — I think the visual benefit would have been minimal," he continues. "Obviously, we'd have been able to control certain physics and behavior of it much more, but we just didn't think it was necessary." FuseFX even worked on the pimple that ruins Regina George's perfect complexion. While the blemish was actually a prosthetic that was cap- tured in-camera, the studio did some enhancement to it during post production. "It was a really-enjoyable project to work on," he reflects. "Sam and Art — they're just such wonder- ful, creative, kind people to work with, and very, very collaborative."