Category: FEATURED WORK

BOT heated up the 2021 summer streaming season with VFX work on the Netflix Fear Street trilogy:  Part One – 1994, Part Two – 1978, and Part Three – 1666.  The trilogy is inspired by the teenage horror fiction series written by American author R. L. Stine. 

Creative inspiration for the trilogy came from director Leigh Janiak, a longtime Fear Street fan.  She tapped BOT’s deep bench for not just the basic VFX tasks, but also complex challenges like “can’t do that on set” fixes, and “wouldn’t that be cool” enhancements to the raw footage. 

“When we started with Fear Street, we were expecting maybe 50 shots, but by the time we were done, it had exploded to over 700!  So you could say we had a blast working on this show,” quipped Hetal Jain, BOT VFX Executive Producer.  “The creative needs ended up being much more technically complex than we had anticipated, and some of the deadlines were really tough – especially with having to work from home – but our team loved stepping up to these challenges.  Working so closely with Leigh and her team was scary fun.” 

Our team of artists was led by Sean Pollack, VFX Supervisor for BOT’s work on Fear Street. “Leigh had a big vision for these stories. It pushed our artists to tap into their deepest wells of creativity and capacity.”   

First we cleaned things up:  ‘whoops’ removals, day-for-night, adding shadows, and the like. Then BOT used CG dazzle to craft a lot of things that look real, but in real life, you just can’t do during filming.  We directed smoke to follow the direction of an invisible wind. We turned floppy rubber prop knives to glinting steel. We added a menacing CG lobster. We set a wall full of 20+ clocks to identical times.  We made intact arms, hands, and legs look like they had been severed … obviously, you can’t do that on set! 

But we didn’t stop there. Lastly, as the final icing on the freaky cake, the team created “wouldn’t it be cool” drama-enhancing tweaks:  adding damage to dummies and doors, making explosions bigger, and layering more signs of struggle onto unfortunate victims who didn’t look dead enough. We tied people up with CG coiled phone cords. We added a lot of CG blood (bleeding noses, pools of blood, blood splatters … you get the idea). Deeper shadows and lightning flashes also amped up the creepy factor. 

“Our paint and comp team ‘killed it’ with extensive set cleanup and impossible super slow mos that required us to stretch the character motion from a few frames into seconds-long shots.  The team’s patience and attention to detail is unmatched, and it shows in the work,” confirms Pollack. “We found a way to handle everything the director’s creative mind thought up. We thoroughly enjoyed everyone involved and can’t wait to do the next project with Leigh and her team!” 

 

When Australian writer/director Luke Sparke needed to infuse aliens into his rollicking post-apocalyptic storyline in the film “Occupation: Rainfall”, his team turned to BOT VFX.  The storyline required numerous bi-ped alien creatures that were interspersed across many scenes throughout the film.  The project was demanding because the CG creatures had to hold up to a wide variety of action-packed and drama sequences, often with heavy interactions with human characters, and some of the creatures had speaking roles.  

In signing on to bring these alien creatures to life, BOT accepted a set of challenges that covered the full range of involvement from concept art to shot finaling, testing the team’s creativity and stamina, and pushing BOT’s CG pipeline to full capacity. 

Giving Birth to Aliens

First, the production team provided some high level concept art and asked the BOT team to run from there.  Given the tight deadlines, the BOT team wasted no time in brainstorming detailed character concepts, textures, and looks, providing the client with many references to quickly converge to some locked creature models.  Decisions ranging from skin color, texture, subsurface scattering, bone structure, and muscle systems were considered as part of the creature birthing.  Once Luke and his team approved the numerous creature characters, the project moved into execution hyperdrive. 

Then the crafting began in earnest.  There were nine characters in all; each character was sculpted with Zbrush, then pushed into Maya for retopology.  Zbrush was also used to create displacement and normal maps for skin details.  While texturing was happening, the character models were set up with rigging.   

Stand-ins Alienated

Each shot involving the alien creatures was filmed with stand-in actors with green suits.  Some shots had as many as 6 different alien creatures.  That meant that each shot, and each creature in the shot, required a series of prep steps to integrate the CG creature, including roto and paint-out of parts of the stand-in actor, rotomation of the stand-in actor’s actions, and camera tracking.  

The lighting team jumped onto creating proper lighting rigs for each shot and scene.  Look-dev was achieved in Maya Arnold, with detailed texturing and ACES color space maintenance done in Mari and Substance software.  BOT’s comp team masterfully brought together all of the pieces, by first delivering master shots and then cranking through about 226 shots in all.  

Rising to All Challenges

BOT relished all of the challenges of this show — the rapid pace, the creativity demanded, and the technical hurdles put in front of them.  “The early involvement in conceiving the characters was exciting, even with the tight timelines.  And managing the large number of shots, and the hundreds of terabytes of data, forced us to work smarter – leveraging tools and techniques like using surface normals to manage lighting adjustments to avoid full re-renders,” said Zameer Hussain, BOT’s VFX Supervisor on the show. 

“Then there was the fun of coordinating the work across three continents: North America, Australia, and Asia,” Zameer added with a chuckle. “But it was such a rewarding experience, we’d do it all over again without hesitation.”