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j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 7 c g w 1 1 other ways – eye angles, eyelid angles." Motion-capture actors working in the kitchen wore weighted waist belts and padded costumes to give them the correct lumbering. The scale differences meant an- imators also had to add weight to help with dynamic simulations like belly jiggles. "The environments and creatures weren't too bad to build, but then imagine having to design and put together 60 unique platters of food," Stables says. "Everything had to be modeled, shaded, and rigged, and the devil was in the details." For example, some Boulan waiters walked the red carpet while carrying wobbly jelly. Animators, rather than simulation artists, jiggled the jelly for performance reasons. "Five or 10 years ago, we might not have done something this huge," Stables says, "a big crowd inside a large environment with a lot of set dressing and props, all CG, with a couple of live-action elements. But, over the past 17 or 18 years, we've built on the technical knowledge we've gained, so today, no one piece is particularly difficult. The sum, the scale, was a logistical challenge, but on the production side, we've learned how to schedule and plan. The challenge was in getting something that looked and felt like Luc [Besson] expected. That's true with any show, but it was particularly true for this show." Even down to the texture and color of a lemon slice. "You're always guaranteed to have one thing that trips you up," Stables says. "In this case, it was a lemon, a sliced lemon on a tray. Luc [Besson] didn't want it to look like an Earth lemon, but he wanted it to still be recognizable as something you could squeeze and get juice. It's the sort of thing you end up laughing about with the crew. 'OK, this is your mission: Make the best lemon.' But, I think it speaks to the level of detail and thought we put into these shots." Stables and the other visual effects supervisors on the show all state that Bes- son liked to shoot things clean. No haze. No atmosphere they could use for depth cues. That was a challenge for sequences such as those with the big Boulan in the vibrant, detailed kitchen and banquet hall. "We all loved working on the kitchen because we look past the action of the foreground characters into the background," Stables says. "The Boulan cooks are using industrial swords to prepare food, wrestling with the food. It's funny and extremely colorful. But when we have a big environ- ment, we like to put in a little atmosphere to tie everything together and give a sense of depth. So, selling the depth when Luc likes to shoot things very clean was quite a challenge. We did it purely with lighting." The 30 lighting and compositing artists on the crew kept the lighting close to the camera and established bands of darkness and patches of light into the depth for these environments and others they worked on. Weta Digital's proprietary Manuka soware rendered the intricate scenes. Casting Pearls The characters called the Pearls were oppo- site the Boulans in look, attitude, and in the role light and color played in realizing their nature and their environment. "The Pearls' planet Mül is an idyllic para- dise," Hill says. "You can see nebulas in the skies. Because the Pearls are translucent, when we lit the environment in the daytime, we used accent colors around them and punched the color of the nebula and the ocean water." To enhance the appearance of the white Pearls themselves, the crew referenced sea life. "We modeled the skin of the Pearls on squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses, looking at the chromatophores and iridophores," Hill says, referring to an overall class of pigmented, light-reflecting cells that allow the squid to change color, and the sub- class of reflective and iridescent cells. "We incorporated that with their emotions, how they feel, how they greet each other." Data captured from actors placed inside ICT's Lightstage provided displacement and specular data that Weta Digital artists aug- mented to create the Pearls' skin shading, iridescence, and translucence. "The Pearls are vital to the film," Hill says. "The whole story arc is based around the plight of the Pearls. So, it was hugely im- portant to Luc to make sure we engage with them emotionally and feel their story arc. Part of that is making them look compelling and engaging, and for these characters, it was their beauty and a digital performance that was emotionally engaging. He wanted them to be beautiful, poised, graceful, and walk with a regal air." For the Pearls, Besson put Paris fashion models/actors in motion-capture suits and acquired their body and facial per- THE PEARLS' TRANSLUCENT SKIN CHANGES ITS IRIDESCENCE TO REFLECT THE CHARACTERS' EMOTIONS.