Many women have accused their men of lacking feelings. But when Nathan Caine’s girlfriend makes that claim, it’s not hyperbole. Nathan, played by actor Jack Quaid, suffers from a rare genetic condition that prevents him from feeling pain. While his body can’t feel physical pain, his emotional feelings are intact and plentiful. It is the feeling of love that drives him into heroic action to save his girlfriend from a band of thugs who have kidnapped her during a bank robbery. Nathan, an otherwise ordinary guy with an ordinary job, transforms into a kick-ass hero with biological superpowers. An action-packed frenzy of chases, shoot-outs, and cringe-inducing violence is delivered in a comedic wrapping that makes Nathan even more endearing to the audience.
Sandra Germain and Emilien Larazon, the show’s VFX Producer and VFX Supervisor, respectively, brought on BOT to take on numerous sequences for Novocaine. Most of the sequences BOT was assigned were so central to the storyline that shots from nearly all of them appear in the trailer for the movie. “It’s always great to see your shots on-screen in the final product, but when you see so many of your shots appear in the trailer itself, that’s the ultimate validation that your work meaningfully furthered the storytelling” commented John Britto, BOT’s Emmy Nominated VFX Supervisor. BOT delivered VFX on over 250 shots involving a range of VFX from driving comps, to atmospheric effects like steam and smoke, to CG objects like knives and stakes, to bullet hits, muzzle flashes and gore, to glass shatter and burnt and boiling skin.
Some of the more tricky shots BOT tackled were in a major fight sequence. The shots involved shattering glass, boiling skin, stab wounds, pot steam, and blood and gore.
In one part of the sequence, the bad guys slam Nathan’s body against a mirror, which then shatters into a million pieces. The challenge with these shots was that the glass break was captured in-camera as a practical effect, but it turned out to look less than dramatic. BOT was asked to augment the plate with a more dramatic and violent
shatter that was in keeping with the high-action sequence. If the mirror glass shatter effect was left purely as a CG effect, it might have been far simpler to execute. Having to build a CG shatter effect that seamlessly integrated with the practical shards and debris patterns seemed as painful an activity as being slammed against a mirror wall. To make it even more challenging, this was a slo-mo shot, so even the slightest mismatches between the practical and CG would become very evident.
In another part of the same sequence, a gun drops into a pot of boiling oil, and Nathan plunges his hand into it to retrieve it, a feat only a fool or a pain-resistant freak of nature would dare do. In these shots, the oil in the pot had to look menacingly hot, with bubbling on the surface and smoke rising around it. When Nathan’s hand goes in and comes out, the scalded hand had to look painfully burned and deformed. BOT had to leverage a combination of 2D and CG techniques to pull off these shots. The team had to make the prosthetic makeup of the burned hand look believable by augmenting it with CG overlays and movement that indicated a still sizzling hand.
The gun and his hand had to have steam and smoke emanating from them. It was tricky to ensure continuity within and across these shots amid the flurry of fighting action and heavy camera motion.
BOT’s creative goal throughout this film was to make these effects so believable yet invisible that the audience stays engaged in the frenetic pace of this action-packed story, and never once pauses to consider whether something was real or not. “If the audience questions whether visual effects were even used in the film, then BOT has done its job well” shared BOT’s VFX Executive Producer on the show, Natasha Francis.
