To Great Effect

(Above: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride)

Here it is, the most insipid film critique anyone can offer: “[Insert title] was OK, but the book was so much better.” C’mon now, it goes without saying that Hollywood—even if it had all the cash in the world to throw at a feature—couldn’t possibly rival the dizzying heights of a person’s untethered imagination. But that’ll never stop filmmakers from taking up the challenge of dressing fantastical thoughts in flesh and fabric. And it’ll never render the visual feats they accomplish any less spectacular. Paste speaks to three different special-effects experts who toil unrecognized behind the scenes, bottling the human imagination’s magic and offering it to breathless audiences everywhere.

Wandless Magic

The special-effects wizardry of John Richardson (Special Effects Supervisor, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

By Amanda Petrusich

Contemporary big-budget filmmaking is an undeniably knotty pursuit: evolutions in pre- and post-production have significantly altered the way movies are made and received. And now, special-effects supervisors—commanded to astound their viewers in new and unexpected ways—often inadvertently engineer a film’s entire aesthetic. British-born special-effects authority John Richardson—with a career boasting over 40 years of service (beginning with 1968’s Duffy) and four Oscar nominations (including a 1986 win for Alien)—is remarkably well-versed in the evolution of his craft. “The industry started to change dramatically after the first Star Wars. Suddenly, there was an awful lot of money available. In some ways, life is much easier now because we can do things we could never do before. But at the same time, life is more difficult, because we’re doing things we’ve never done.”

As a blanket term, “special effects” refers to effects produced on-set, and excludes enhancements added later (computer-generated supplements are left up to visual-effects technicians). “I do all of the practical or physical effects, assuring that the shot is in the camera,” Richardson says. “My team has done most of our work by the end of production. But we’ll still get called upon to provide the visual-effects side with a lot of elements that they need to put into their computers. Everything that you see onscreen, generally, is a huge mishmash of everybody’s work coming together.”

As special-effects supervisor for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth installment in the wickedly popular wizarding series, Richardson is singularly responsible for the design and implementation of plenty of bizarre (some never-before-imagined) constructions, including fire-breathing dragons, Death Eaters, zipping Quidditch brooms, giant water tanks and more. Given the staggering success of the Harry Potter novels, Richardson’s job was only compounded by the pressure of those millions of eager young (and not-so-young) minds, each overflowing with their own visual interpretation of the story. Still, Richardson appreciates the inimitability of author JK Rowling’s vision. “There’s a maze in the film—a very tall, bushy maze, which comes to life. Visual effects did a lot of that manipulation in the computer, but I still had to build a 35-foot-long section of maze that would ripple and open and close and try to crush the occupants. The maze was operated by hydraulics, and run by a computer. We could pre-program variations, make the whole maze squeeze together. Ultimately, we just had to make it look like it was alive.”

Richardson has worked on the previous Harry Potter films, and is currently knee-deep in the fifth. While impressed by the professionalism of his young subjects (“They are very, very good at what they do,” he gushes), working for and with children presents its own unique challenges to an effects team. “When you’re building mechanical rigs, or doing fires, or explosions, or all the other things we’re called on to do—it’s hard in an environment where you’re surrounded by children. It adds an intensity to the whole thing.”

Far Far and Away

The (inter)stellar visual effects of Loni Peristere (Visual Effects Supervisor, Serenity)

By James South

While many recognize the name Joss Whedon (Serenity’s writer/director) few even among Whedon fans know Loni Peristere. Yet he’s been professionally associated with him longer than anyone. Peristere began working with Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, eventually becoming visual-effects supervisor of the show, then its spin-off Angel and ultimately Firefly. Set 500 years into the future with humanity flung across the galaxy, those on the outer rim living with old technology in antiquated lifestyles, Firefly featured a unique mishmash of philosophies, cultures and technologies—part Star Wars, part Stagecoach. Though canceled after half a season, the FOX TV show was a hit with critics and developed enough of a cult following to convince Universal to revive the series as motion picture Serenity.

The transition from TV to movies was a learning experience for Peristere. Moving from his normal two-week window from script to shoot to a full twelve-week window for Serenity might appear luxurious, but Peristere felt rushed in his attempts to bring Whedon’s ideas to life. The stakes were higher and the goals loftier. The differing operating philosophies of TV and film added to the tension. In TV, Peristere was accustomed to devising ways to give a “creative yes” to the script’s needs. In this film, however, his “yes” often met a “no” from the studio, as movie veterans regularly told him and Whedon that something couldn’t be done. The ensuing back-and-forth constituted Peristere’s greatest learning experience working on the film.

In the end, Whedon’s team achieved what it set out to do. Peristere is particularly excited about the climactic battle scene in Serenity, which consumed a third of its digital-effects budget. “It’s different from other space movies,” he says, “because the style, pace and construction are uniquely ours.” The style is unusual because the battle’s villains—the dreaded Reavers—all pilot unique spacecrafts. Conceived along the lines of “muscle cars that look like Leatherface,” each ship represents a mask the Reavers wear, designed to communicate something about the culture of rage they inhabit. The film’s pacing is also unique. In place of the usual cutaways from spacecraft to spacecraft, Whedon stays with Serenity throughout the battle. Shot documentary-style with hand-held cameras, the scene firmly places the viewer alongside the crew. Peristere can’t help but enthuse, “It will knock fans’ socks off.”

Describing his nine years working with Whedon as “going to Whedon University,” Peristere says he learned one principle lesson: special effects need to “serve character, story and tension.” Indeed, the climactic battle scene is a textbook case of Peristere’s design serving Whedon’s storytelling and characters.

Stepfather of the Bride

The frighteningly realistic stop-mojo of Mike Johnson (Co-director/Animator, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride)

By Jay Sweet

Macabre filmmaker Tim Burton continually manifests his creepy, spectral visions in an innovative fashion. His latest offering, Corpse Bride, strides out from under the exemplary shadow of his The Nightmare Before Christmas by setting a new benchmark for stop-motion animation. While Burton oversaw the new film’s look and feel, it was frequent collaborator/co-director Mike Johnson (animator on Nightmare and James and the Giant Peach) who put the pieces together.

In speaking with Johnson it’s clear that few realize the task and toil of capturing Burton’s morbid muse. Like musicians who doggedly insist on recording analog, Burton and Johnson have long been proponents of the seemingly outdated stop-motion medium. I ask if he and Burton carry a sense of preferred nostalgia working with the technique rather than straight digital animation.

“I think so,” he answers. “There’s a sense of tradition and mystery associated with stop-mo. It’s a textural thing. When it’s just you and a puppet behind the black curtain for days on end, you get into a zone. It takes sweat, stamina and concentration to create a good performance and you can’t erase your mistakes, so I think there’s a pressure there that doesn’t exist with other forms of animation, and stop-mo animators, being masochistic by nature, feed on that pressure.”

It’s been over a decade since Nightmare, which has given Johnson and Burton some time to experiment with available technology. While Disney and Pixar focus on pushing the boundaries of digital animation, Johnson’s masochism has forged advances in his technique that rival any animated medium.

“The main differences, technically speaking, between Corpse Bride and Nightmare are digital cameras, advances in frame-grabbers and advances in puppet fabrication and design,” he says. “Ian MacKinnon and Pete Saunders are the folks responsible for creating the puppets. They built the body armatures with the assistance of Merrick Cheney, a brilliant machinist from San Francisco who worked on Nightmare and James. Pete Saunders is the madman who came up with the facial mechanics. Peel the skin back and it’s like looking inside a Swiss watch—tiny little gears and pulleys and paddles. Insane. Basically, these puppets are much more detailed and animatable than any I’ve seen before.”

In pushing the medium to be less antiquated, the overall effect is so seamless and expressive it’s easy to forget that it’s not digitally “drawn.” This raises concerns that due to its fluidity, the film will appear purely animated, and thus not internalized by the viewer as the extraordinarily difficult feat of filmmaking it is. Johnson shrugs this off. He sees these new challenges as just another problem to solve.

“Because of all the amazing [computer-generated] animation that’s come out in the past few years, audiences expect animated characters to be elastic and expressive. I wanted our puppets to be just as expressive, especially in close-up, so we tried to push things in that respect. We also wanted to show that stop-mo can be as graceful as anything done on a computer. Jerkiness isn’t what makes stop-motion appealing. Back in [stop-motion pioneer Ray] Harryhausen’s day, nobody was charmed by the fact that his work had the occasional pop. They were charmed by the fact that it conveyed emotion and looked alive. There are times when a loose, rough style is the way to go, but for Corpse Bride, I wanted the best of both worlds. A textural, hand-crafted feel combined with smooth, expressive motion. I think to intentionally do sloppy animation and call it naive charm is a cop-out. If I wanted naive charm I’d use sock-puppets.”

For more on Corpse Bride, click here to read Paste's interview with visual-effects supervisor Jess Norman.