Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1547068
just don't exist, that are completely fantasy environments. Again, you will see that as we progress into the story, the real world becomes stranger and stranger. By the end of the movie, we're in this strange no man's land where it's no longer New Zealand or Alaska. It's another place. It's a place between life and death. It's a place that is populated by spirit animals. What I really love about the project is that it's not in your face at all. It's not Lord of the Rings, but there's a way of taking you on a journey with the character from the real world into something that is really like a dreamscape. For me, as a visual effects person, it's really very exciting to do. Which VFX studios did you partner with during this project, and how did you divide the work? François Dumoulin: The main vendor obviously was Framestore, and I was loaned from Framestore to Paramount Studio for a year and a half. Framestore was chosen for everything that was creature effects. I also chose Framestore to do the tree bridge crossing se- quence because I knew that the sequence would involve a digidog on top of the CG environment, and I wanted the vendor to be able to handle both things at the same time. I wanted to avoid doing shared shots as much as possible. I knew that our post schedule was going to be very compressed, and I didn't want to have one vendor doing the environment and one vendor doing the dog. Another big sequence was the plane crash at the opening of the movie. I knew there would also be some more fantasy environment work to create, like the swamp at the end of the movie that is kind of this land between life and death. So for the plane crash and the swamp, the first vendor that came to my mind was Rodeo FX in Montreal. The main reason being I worked at Rodeo for 10 years, so it's a company that I know really well. I think they're really strong at doing environment work and effect stimulation, so I tasked them with the plane crash. They did so much amazing work. There are many shots where the plane is CG, the entire environment, the trees, and everything is CG, and no one can tell. It's cut between live-action shots in New Zealand of a real plane with real trees, and then it cuts to a full CG version from Rodeo and it's completely seamless. Cray Apes in Montreal took care of invisible digital makeup work. We ended up adding a lot of wounds to James throughout the mov- ie. He's getting beaten up and his condition gets worse and worse in every sequence. There's a lot of digital makeup involved where we added some really gruesome wounds in post, and Cray Apes' took care of a long stand alone scene that had a lot of that. We also had BOT in India taking care of a large volume of comp work. I would say that 80% of the shots with the dog are with the real dog, but there's many times where there would be a dog trainer in the frame or an animal wrangler, or some kind of rigging or marks for the dog that needed to be removed. So that was all on BOT's plate. There were also a lot of retimes or split comps, because some- times we would get a fantastic moment with the dog, but Brad's performance was better just a second earlier. So we would do a split comp to marry both things. The scope of work was really, really broad. Soho VFX took care of some invisible matte painting work and a CG salmon. REBELS was our in-house team to handle and take care of developing the look