Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/371911
j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 4 c g w 5 7 V I S U A L E F F E C T S retained the background, the water dripping from the actor's mouth, and occasional parts of limbs during the sequence. For that behavior and facial expressions, Animation Supervi- sor Jakub Pistecky referenced videos of monkey behavior. "The character had to look thin but not starving, so it was a diffi cult model," says CG Super- visor Daniel Ferreira. "The hair was also diffi cult because we had to match the wet hair in the plate." The artists created the hair with proprietary grooming and simulation tools. Most of the eff ects in the fi lm, however, are more abstract, and o en developed with particle simulations. The artists creating the shots typically worked out- side the usual ILM pipeline and used tools more o en found in the "generalist" department. "We did things we're not used to doing here," Ferreira says. A S T H E W O R L D T U R N S The drug leaking into Lucy's body kicks in quickly, and she uses her newfound strength to escape from the Taiwanese hotel. Outside, the world she sees across the street becomes strangely colored. Yellow and green stripes move up the trunk of a tree and burst into a fi reworks display of small bits in greens and yellows. ILM artists did look develop- ment for the shot in Autodesk's 3ds Max, created the tree in SpeedTree, and used Side Eff ects' Houdini to send particle streams up splines along the tree trunk. "We subdivided the splines into points and moved the parti- cles from one point to the next," Ferreira says. When the camera points back to Lucy, her eyes change into something more animal than human. "Tami Carter, our com- positing supervisor, created eye replacement shots using eyes from a fi sh, gecko, python, and lizard, and one based on a Perry Hall fi lm of fl uid paint." Hall paints through real-time improvisation by using various substances and stimuli to move the paint. In 1997, John Gaeta, who received an Oscar for The Matrix and who is now at ILM, had hired Hall to do studies of moving paint as reference for sequences in What Dreams May Come. That work, according to an article on Hall's website "lovebrain.net," inspired Hall to create "Live- paintings" and "Sound Drawings" (sound waves from an electric bass channeled through a vessel of paint). At one point in the fi lm, Lucy enters a drug lord's brain to call forth his memories, and ILM art- ists textured the inside walls of his brain with elements Hall provided. To give the images a stylized look and feel representing a memory, the team used timing changes and chromatic aberration. To show the drug's impact inside Lucy's body, the artists based their work on simulations by Matthias Müller, a German artist who works with 3ds Max; Orbaz Technologies' Particle Flow; Thinkbox So ware's Krakatoa, Stoke, and Frost; and Sitni Sati's FumeFX; for render- ing, Chaos Group's V-Ray. "Luc [Besson] wanted a styl-