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www.postmagazine.com 17 POST NOVEMBER 2017 THOR: RAGNAROK think Paddington is an amazing film. Some of the character work in that is so amazing, and that's not to mention all of the Harry Potter films. Our third act is absolutely jam packed with character animation. Rising Sun in Adelaide did some early work for us on Hela, Cate Blanchet's character that was just so cool we had to bring them in. Method in Vancouver has been standout — the studio has done some really stunning work, everything with Cate. We wanted to maintain as much of Cate's per- formance as possible, even though her suit is digital. And through much of the fight sequences she often turns into a digital character, so Method did some incredible work there. "Digital Domain did a whole section of Aragorn planet Sakaar — what is effectively a space ship chase, Luma Pictures really helped develop Korg in the scene where Thor meets Korg — they really found the character for us and helped us find that performance. Iloura contributed quite a lot. They do great work. In a lot of the Jeff Goldblum sequences, they did a lot of really standout (dig- ital matte paintings), literally stuff that was 100 percent visual effects." The Third Floor completed the previs work on the film, led by the studio's Shannon Justison as visualization supervisor. "Because it's a Thor film, you can do anything," says Morrison. "You basically have final battles where you have two Gods battling against each other. It means you don't limit yourself to physics or sensibilities, so Shannon has really helped us. She has an immensely cinematic eye and when you're looking at fully-digital sequences, you're looking at storyboards, but that goes so far and then you go into visualization. What [The Third Floor] did on the film is absolutely killer." [See more about The Third Floor's work on the film on page 4] In what seems like a bottomless toolbox, Morrison says, "Every tool on the planet was used for this one. We used Maya and Nuke; Arnold and V-Ray for rendering; Houdini for physics. Literally, I don't think anybody left any of the tools back in the box. Plus, a lot of the studios made their own pro- prietary software for the film as well. There's a lot of stuff that goes on that we work really hard to make sure that the audience never stops and questions how we do it." KORG Director Waititi, who is well-known for casting himself in his own movies, has appeared in all four previous New Zealand-based feature films that he wrote and directed. "When we were writing the sto- ry, I asked myself, 'Who do I want to play?'" Waititi says. "What kind of character have I not done yet? What would be interesting to me? What would be fun? I like playing characters who sort of provide a little texture and make it a bit more interesting to watch. I knew I had never played a guy who was made of rocks." Korg was one of the film's bigger challenges, says Morrison. "Korg was really fun. He's a character that grew organically during the filming. We had this creature drawn in the lineup and as we were getting into pre-production in Australia, and the scripts are always an evolving thing, the Korg character started appearing in more and more storyboards. I started noticing it and asked, 'What's going on here?' I knew Taika likes to do cameos, I knew he was going to be something in the movie, but I wasn't quite sure what it was, and it became clear that he was interested in the whole motion-capture thing. "As the script continued to evolve, Korg's part got bigger and bigger. So, we ended up having the director in full motion-capture gear with the head- mounted cameras and all the dots and all the rest of it, calling 'cut,' and turning around and giving the direction to the lighters and the grips and the ac- tors, and then literally jumping back into the scene. I think it's a first (laugh). If you think finalizing the shots where the director is an actor in the movie is a challenge, try and finish shots where the director is actually a visual effect in the movie!" Another first for Morrison was how they did the motion capture for the Korg scenes. "Typically, when they do motion capture, they do it in a volume, they'll take a corner of a stage with this grey floor with grey and black walls, they'll build around 15 or 30 different cameras that are all pointing back in a central area and those actors perform in there — and it works. We thought with this one we would work with the art department to take these motion-capture cameras off the technical stage and bring them onto the actual stages where the actors would be performing. That meant that we would have, in the prison scene where we first see Korg, the whole thing built into the walls and segments, so you could actually pop sections of the wall out and the motion-capture cameras were behind them. So, if we're doing a scene with Korg, you could pop them out and you'd shoot the scene with the mo- tion-capture cameras in-camera, or if there was a scene that took place where two characters were talking, like Thor and Loki, we would just leave the sections in the wall and film as much as possible in-camera." According to Morrison, the team used the exact same approach for other scenes involving the Hulk and Thor. Hemsworth and Ruffalo were able to do their improv, and the team actually had an array of cameras around the top of the massive sets that Dan Hennah built. "That way, you got a real set that you could shoot with a standard motion-picture camera, but because all the technology was in place, there was this amazing ability for the team to overlay the CG characters. We had the virtual production team, literally around the back of the set and there were like 30 incredibly-smart [folks] there with keyboards and on the screens they would have a live version of whatever Mark Ruffalo was doing but overlaid as the Hulk. They would pipe that back into the viewfinder on the cam- era, so when the camera operator actually looked through the camera, they didn't just see Chris and Mark, they literally saw an overlay, so they could see Chris talking to Mark who was eight-foot-six and green. That's how the camera operator knew to tilt the camera up. We had the same approach across the entire production." According to Morrison, "The final piece of the Korg puzzle, which it literally was like a jigsaw Korg's mocap was performed by the director. 2,700 VFX shots make this film Marvel's most ambitious to date.