The
Brief
RSP created a fly-through of a fully CG city and tunnel environment and a CG Japanese tea room background environment for a sequence involving the characters Silken Floss and The Octopus, played by Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson.
We created a highly stylized anime / manga look for several of the shots. We flung a lot of CG blood around the tea room, covering the walls. Finally, after all was said and done, we did another version of the sequence without the blood.
While every image had to look as if it could have been photographed, The Spirit was almost entirely shot on green screens and is an extremely visually stylized film. This stylized look was described by the filmmakers in a Visual Manifesto which we were given and further defined by the work of the other vendors by the time we began work. Our sequence, however, was a bit of a further departure from reality in its style, so we had some work to do establishing this initial aesthetic in our minds as a starting point and then taking it another step into abstraction. Then we had to execute and apply it consistently. |
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The
Creative Process
We had experience with this sort of thinking on Speed Racer, another highly stylised film, which assisted us in the process. Still, having been conditioned to work within the rigid constraints and requirements of more traditional films, we sometimes needed a reminder to let go of our inhibitions. VFX Supervisor Stu Maschwitz
repeatedly used an analogy of the Kirk mentality vs. the Spock mentality. If our thinking about a particular aspect of the sequence was too uptight he'd gently remind us that we were being "too Spocklike", and that we should be more like Kirk. It was a great exercise and we all enjoyed the creative freedom that came with it.
One of the technical challenges of the brief was creating gouts of CG blood spraying across a room and splatting on the walls. To meet the budget, we needed to come up with a simple and inexpensive solution that wouldn't involve fluids and would allow us to put it into a lot of shots. In the end, we used a very simple but effective texture-based approach in Houdini. The key was consistency - we found we could get away with a lot if we kept the behavior and look consistent.
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