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DEPARTMENT www.postmagazine.com 18 POST NOVEMBER 2017 FLYING HORSES When asked about a beautiful scene involving Valkyrie (actress Tessa Thompson) joined by her Valkyrior warriors riding winged horses, Thor: Ragnarok VFX supervisor Jake Morrison admits, "The Valkyrie scene is very pretty!" He explains, to pull it off, "We used a [special] light rig — 145 strobe lights mounted on a circular track. The whole system shoots at almost 1,000 frames per second, so time slows to a crawl, but with the light moving at impossible speed around the actors — kind of a new type of visual story- telling. I think it's 2017's answer to Bullet Time! Shooting 15 different passes of stunt-rider Valkyries on a stage, on galloping horses, with the camera at different heights and angles for the big composite where they're all attack- ing Hela was one for the books!" For more on the Hulk's transformation back to Bruce Banner, see sidebar, page 19. puzzle, because he was made of rocks, we would run into this specific problem where, imagine a situation where you sort of twisted the waist or bend over and raise your knee, if any of the stretching we do as humans and if you map that to a creature that's made of rocks, the first thing that looks like, it looks like it's latex because those rocks, instead of just staying the same size and moving around each other, the first thing the computer wants to do is make sure they squash and stretch, to maintain that overall volume. To a modern audience, that looks immediately like we've gone back to the '80s and put somebody in a latex suit. People are far more sophisticated now. My nieces and nephews would tell me it looked fake, so we couldn't do that. So the two teams we had at Luma Pictures and Framestore built basically the most complicated moving jigsaw puzzle I think you can get anywhere, where we built three layers and as those movements happened, each rock moved against each oth- er as if they were sort of tectonic plates. That's easy when they're stretching out, you can make spaces, but if there are holes in there, it looks like he has weird gangrene appearing all of a sudden because he has these dark sections. So, there's another layer of subcutaneous rock, if you will, that's in there that covers it up. The other chal- lenge is, if you lean back again and the rocks start meeting each other, how do you have them not compress and move over each other? That's a challenge enough for the body but for the facial stuff, it was an amazing feat. There was literally a moment where you'll see Taika deliver a line, but you see Korg the entire time and the only thing moving is his face, mostly just his mouth. The fact that you can see all of these rocks in the face, the facial structure is moving around against each other and not actually smashing into each other or stretching — I think Luma deserves some sort of an award for that one! I think it's the most com- plicated piece of understated character animation that has been done." THOR VS. HULK While both Korg and the fire demon Surtur (a complete CG creation) were brought to life by Morrison's digital team, the fight between Hulk and Thor was technically impossible to stage as a real fight because of the physical discrepan- cy between Thor and Hulk. "Hulk's eight-foot-six," explains Morrison. "He's also about one and a half times the width of a normal human, even someone as muscular as Chris. "So early on in pre-production, even as the script was being written, we needed to address how to stage this epic battle and make it feel realistic and not like it's over-animated," Morrison adds. "Make you feel like every punch really lands and all the reactions are appropriate and genuine. To do that, we cast a much shorter stunt double, who's actually four-foot-two, to mocap the role of Thor for the fight sequence. "Because you can't get somebody who's eight-foot-six, we found a way to have a Hulk double who's about six-foot-six (superimposed) with the other shorter stunt double," Morrison continues. "We were able to stage the entire fight using two people who have the correct height dimension relationship between them. We shot the entire fight from a mocap point-of-view, not using our normal Alexa digital movie cameras. The plan then was to have Chris learn the Thor part of the fight. We shot Chris on the arena blue-screen set behaving as if Hulk were there. We already had the motion-cap- ture data from the fight that we did in miniature, as it were, on the motion-capture volume. We re-targeted that and put Hulk on-screen. And those two elements then dovetail. Now we have a realistic fight that couldn't have been staged in the real world but still happens on this gargantuan scale." VFX supervisor Jake Morrison Well over a dozen studios contributed VFX for the film.