Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540269
12 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 be in the way. So there's a lot of crunching going on, and luckily the lighting helped us there. We could hide a lot of things. So in this sea- son, knowing that we can't hide anything, now we're very adamant on where we put these cordyceps and how they're not going to hin- der his movement. He needs to be able to walk and run. We started the simulation on top of him quite early. He wasn't just all cordyceps, he was muscle in there as well, and fat. So I thought we got that jiggle and volume on him working quite well. In Season 1 we had issues only because we started a little bit later. So starting early, we got to have more iterations and see things in lighting. I thought his muscle systems and his legs were working great. Nick Epstein: We had to get that balance. You want some move- ment to him, but you also don't want him to feel like he's super jiggly everywhere. They really wanted to differentiate the areas, so some of the cordyceps plates needed to be quite rigid. Then you've got these big slabs in his leg which would move up and down appropriately with his footfalls and so on. Dennis Yoo: That shot of him breaking through the wall, that was one of the shots that we planned for. The deeper you think about how wood splinters, the crazier it gets. My job was just trying to figure out how does this bloater break a log like that? In the previs he just punches, and the thing explodes. But Craig was adamant that no, he's not a superhero—he's grounded in real physics. So it was a hard process trying to find the right performance, the right energy. He was punching logs, but he couldn't blow them apart. "Our mOTiOn wAS alwayS grOUNded..." Nick Epstein: There's a nice sort of almost humanity, right? When he manages to get through, he actually has to take a pause because he's exhausted from punching through that wall. It was a really nice touch because at one point, he was human. He gets tired like the rest of us, even if it takes a bit more to get him tired. Dennis Yoo: Our motion was always grounded. We try to use as much motion capture as we can, and then enhance on top. We had Ike [Isaac] Hamon, who was our motion stunt coordinator at Wētā FX. He was a Season 1 bloater as well, so they already were at- tuned to his acting. I think we used a couple of actors, but every time I showed his motion, Craig would be like, "Yeah, that's him." So we knew exactly how he moved. It was great having him. One of the things that we were struggling with was, how does he break through the wall? Instead of me iterating on motion capture, which takes a little bit of time, I just opted to film a bunch of footage with Ike. Holding a bunch of pads and him banging on it, just to get the feel of what sort of energy he wanted. I gave Craig a bunch of takes, and he was very appreciative of that. He picked little segments that he liked, and then from there we did that acting again with the motion capture suit. So that definitely helped us find that perfor- mance.