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www.postmagazine.com 39 POST JANUARY 2018 (MPC), among others. Among Rodeo FX's contributions were a hungry hippo, a very focused snake and creepy crawlers. Iloura crafted a horde of albino rhinos and a complex particle effect when the players enter and exit the game (they each have three lives in the game world). Visual effects crews were given a number of tasks, including wrangling the CG animals that run amok in the movie. For Chen, whose past credits include Suicide Squad and The Amazing Spider- Man, photorealistic CG animals stretched into new territory. As Chen explains, it was necessary to have photoreal animals in order to sell other aspects of the film inspired by the video game setting. "Jake [Kasdan] really wanted to ground the effects — the movement, texture and feeling of them all had to be real. Because of that, we could push their size — the elephants and rhi- nos are one-and-a-half times the size that they are in real life," he says. "The jaguars that guard the peak at the end of the film are twice the size of normal jaguars. They are larger than life, more ferocious." MPC, in fact, completed 160 shots for the movie over a 12-month period. Bob Winter, MPC VFX supervisor, oversaw the studio's work from Montreal and interfaced with the team there as well as with those in MPC's London and Bangalore, India, locales. In fact, it was the team at MPC that created the CG jaguars, along with a CG elephant, a den of CG black mam- bas and a swarm of insects and vermin for the film's antagonist, the big-game hunter Van Pelt, who can manipulate Jumanji's animals by possessing a spe- cial jewel, the Jaguar's Eye. The teens, in their adult avatar bodies, must locate and return the jewel to an enormous jaguar statue. "Our direction was to create realistic performances for all our animals," says Winter. "They, of course, needed to hit specific performance beats to tell the story, but their motion was modeled after their real-world counterparts." The MPC artists used Autodesk's Maya to rig and animate the animals they were responsible for in the film. The skin (phys- ically accurate muscle deformation) and fur dynamics were also done using Maya as well as MPC's own proprietary tools. Creature lookdev and lighting, mean- while, were done in Foundry's Katana and rendered with Pixar's RenderMan. Meanwhile, Foundry's Nuke was used for shot compositing. As Winter explains, each animal posed its own unique creation challenges, although animating the den of black mambas was especially difficult. "The scene called for a den of a couple thousand black mambas, and we knew we could not keyframe that many snakes, and our crowd tools weren't created for the unique challeng- es of dealing with entangled creatures with long, thin anatomy," he says. To resolve this issue, the animators divided the den into smaller groups called "pods" and used keyframe ani- mation to create the complex motion and interaction of the snakes within each pod. Then they fed that into their crowd system to add variation and higher-level swarm behavior. PERFORMANCE PLUS In addition to the animals, MPC also cre- ated digital doubles for three of the main characters used in some of the intense action sequences. To highlight the charac- ters' video game powers and weaknesses, a good deal of wirework and gimbals were used on set, complemented by visual effects. For instance, when Spencer (Dwayne Johnson) punches someone, he flies 30 feet into the air; Martha (Karen Gillan) leaps 30 feet — all accomplished by practical and digital effects. But the "crown jewel" of MPC's work involved CG jungle environments for the film's finale, including a CG extension to the jaguar statue set piece. The revered jaguar statue is a hybrid comprising a practical 120-foot-high section with a CG build of the midsection to the base, which was a massive rock formation in Hawaii. The 40-foot head was a combination of sculpted foam and concrete. "We also created the CG background for all the shots of Spencer's dirt bike ride up the jaguar statue," says Winter. In addition, MPC generated the Jumanji curse effects at the start and end of the film, including transitioning Van Pelt from a human into a swarm of insects and vermin, plus the green energy effects that surround the jewel and the CG environ- ment extensions for the "cut-scene" as the players enter the game. Indeed, history often repeats itself, and to a large extent it did so here, with this latest edition. But the adventure may not be over, as there is discussion circulating about a possible "Jumanji 3." Are you ready to play again? MPC completed 160 shots, including action sequences (pictured here and above) and a CG extension to the jaguar set piece (pictured below).