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GHOSTBUSTERS www.postmagazine.com 23 POST AUGUST 2016 Travers: "No, not at all. We needed some kind of giant monsters in New York, and they needed to be ghosts, so they needed to exist in New York. I was like, 'What kind of giant monsters can we come up with?' And we thought, 'Oh, wait, the Macy's parade has these things floating around' and 'What did they look like back in the day?' I don't think we could have designed them any creepier." Kramer: "Paul did want to add a lot of color to it. Even though we didn't have a lot of color reference, we kind of embel- lished and gave a lot of primary colors to them to keep within the theme of the rest of the film. We used primarily Houdini to do the simulations and nCloth. Our lead effects artist, Pav Grochola, figured out how to do the finite elements simulations, which actually ripped the balloons apart which was cool and effective and, it's just one of those things where just a few years ago, we wouldn't have been able to do that. The simulation software, especially Houdini, has advanced so far that it's one of those things that the timing was just right for us to be able to do it." What were some of the other key tools used? Kramer: "We animate in Maya, use Massive for crowds and Houdini for all proton beams and particle effects. Compositing was all Nuke, for rendering we used Arnold. We have our own in- house version of Arnold. I can't speak for the other houses. "A huge theme throughout the film is, Pete and Paul wanted what they were calling 'emanations.' You can see it on Gertrude at the beginning of the film and on just about every ghost. They're ema- nating this sort of particulate light, almost bioluminescence material effect. Even Slimer is emitting that material. So, that was something that was pretty intensive because we would have to pump millions of particles into every single character to achieve that look. But it created this inter- esting, bioluminescent look — a little bit of a fluid/smoke look around them that hope- fully made them appear more ethereal." How was it working with all the VFX houses? Travers: "Part of my job is the sharing of looks and you don't want to have too many vendors on a movie, especially if you have an effect that carries on throughout the movie. Then everybody has to actually build that effect. We kept it to the right amount of vendors. We had to share some ghosts, which were developed at SPI, but the proton beams were what we had to share the most because they're in every scene, so every vendor had to pick it up. "Iloura did the rock concert scene that started out with the mannequin, which SPI did, but then the rock concert — Ozzyfest — features this big, weird demon which just shows up and it starts flying around. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about how to light the set. Probably one of the more unique things we did in this film, in needing a way to light the scene with the flying ghost, was to cover a drone with LEDs and fly it around. One of the great things about that was, you get the interactive lighting. And, it was cool because we had hun- dreds of extras, and if the ghost was flying around, you need to get a certain kind of choreography, you need to get like 200 people all looking in the right direction. The drone was perfect for that because everybody knew where that ghost was." Did you feel pressure to outdo the effects from the 1984 film? Travers: "No, there was no pressure at all (laughs). Of course, it's an iconic film! In some ways, you lose sight of the appreci- ation because you're dealing with the day to day, but then there are moments when you're like, 'We can't screw this up!'" For the complete story on Ghostbusters' visual effects, including an exclusive interview with MPC's VFX supervisor Dave Seager, a report on Iloura's 500 shots for the film, as well as our interviews with Halon Entertainment's previsualization supervisor Clint G. Reagan and Sony Pictures' Post Production Services sound team, visit us online at postmagazine.com. VFX tools includ- ed Maya, Houdini, nCloth, Massive, Nuke and Arnold.