Oh, the Horror! Inside the Visual Effects of Saw V and a Crop of Fall Fright Flicks
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Rocky Horror Redux

It was on the set of Saw IV that Campfens says then-director Darren Bousman started kicking around the idea for his magnum opus horror musical (think Rocky Horror), Repo: The Genetic Opera, for which Switch VFX created some of the most complex sequences in its history, including the entire opening: a two-minute CG cityscape using Maya, crafted by 3D Lead, David Alexander.

One of Repo: The Genetic Opera's breathtaking virtual cityscapes, created using Maya. Image courtesy of Lion's Gate Films and Switch VFX.

"We started with 2D concept art, simple CG drawings, and Photoshop® layouts for the cityscapes," recounts Campfens. The live sets, including a graveyard and opera house, were a combination of studio and green screen to create Repo's dystopian society in which disease has caused a global plague of organ failure. Enter GeneCo, a biotech Big Brother that finances transplants and repossesses those who pay late or default (making that 19.9% introductory APR look pretty good by comparison). 

Close Move

One of VFX Supervisor Jon Campfens' favorite sequences in Repo: The Genetic Opera is "the bug sequence," featuring an array of CG arachnids. Clip courtesy of Lion's Gate Films and Switch VFX. (Click to play. Movie will begin playing once loaded.)

Yes, this is the film you may have heard about that features Paris Hilton, and while she added a certain camp value, stage veteran and Phantom of the Opera muse Sarah Brightman stars, along with Paul Sorvino, Anthony Head, and Alexa Vega. "We spent a year working on the visual effects for this film and they are spectacular," says Campfens, who promises: "I guarantee, it's like nothing you've ever seen!" Repo: The Genetic Opera opens Friday, November 7th from Lion's Gate.

A Horror Hybrid

If "horror musical" sounds like an oxymoron, how about "Christian horror film"? While acknowledging that the Bible is something of a horror show, what with all the plagues and the locusts and the smiting, VFX Supervisor Mike Webber insists the moniker makes sense. "It simply means no gratuitous sex, violence, or profanity, but still very scary," an apt description of House opening November 7th from Roadside Attractions.

A maniac is out to get this terrified couple in the Christian horror film, House. Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

Webber first teamed up with producers Ralph Winter (X-Men, Fantastic Four) and Joe Goodman, who pioneered the hybrid genre, for The Visitation, a Christian horror film (actually, Webber prefers "supernatural thriller") in which an evil presence, uh, bedevils a small town and a stranger professing to be Jesus Christ. (Jesus is played by Edward Furlong from Terminator 2.)

In one scene, Furlong writhes and screams on a downtown street as a swarm of bugs fly out of his mouth. "We started with a simple, locked-down shot of the actor to capture the native, in-camera footage," says Webber, "then augmented Furlong's face in post and created a swarm of CG bugs using Maya."

The actor's mouth was morphed to appear wider than normal as a swarm of CG bugs fly out. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Actually, there was some discussion as to whether the bugs were actually bugs or evil particles. "I came down on the side of bugs," laughs Webber. "Like little gnats, with wings." In fact, the buzzing sound of the wings foreshadows their appearance, which Webber believes made the scene even more disturbing. "We used 2D morphing software called Combustion to make Furlong's face and mouth open wider than normal," sort of like Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" video, but more creepy than cartoonish. "Then we mapped his face and mouth to get a rough 3D model, and used dynamic simulation to track the direction of the swarm—which had to seem both purposeful and random, like a real swarm of bugs or bees—and composited the whole thing."

Incarnating Evil

The next film on which Webber worked with Goodman was THR3E, a thriller about a serial killer, for which Webber decided to test a small VFX house in Poland called Lightcraft. "Oh, they saved us," Webber remembers. "Because of our budget and short shooting schedule, several shots we got in-camera didn't quite work." For instance, in one scene a bus blows up. Trouble was, the bus shot in the live-action plate and the stunt bus didn't exactly match. "The stunt bus was a different color and it had stripes on the side," laughs Webber, "but Daniel Markovich and his team at Lightcraft did a great job augmenting the sequence using rotoscoping, 3D models, and computer tracking and compositing."

Because of the confidence Lightcraft inspired on THR3E, Webber was willing to use the VFX house for all the visual effects on House, and the film was shot on location in Poland, which stood in for rural Alabama. In the film, two couples find themselves in a fight for survival against a maniac intent on killing them. "In the initial script breakdown, there were over a hundred visual effects shots, which escalated to 150 once we wrapped principal photography," notes Webber. Ordinarily, effects of this magnitude are found on features with ten times the film's modest $3 million budget.

This is one house that takes possession of its owners, and not vice versa. Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Lightcraft.

Webber describes one "noticeable effects scene" in House (as opposed to augmentation, which simply corrects or enhances native footage). In this scene, two couples are trapped in the house that suddenly turns to ice as water pours in underneath the door and travels upward, across the ceiling. As one character frantically pounds on the floor, it turns to ice and cracks, and she falls through. "We shot the scene on a soundstage with a Plexiglas floor, the camera underneath," says Webber. "Then, using fluid dynamics and RealFlow, added the enveloping water and, later, 'breath' to frost going up the walls and on the floor."

The camera was positioned underneath a Plexiglas floor on a soundstage to capture this footage of the character falling through. Images courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Lightcraft.

Webber credits Lightcraft's coordinator, Mariola Niedzwiecka, with making the logistics work. "First, the 35mm native footage was flown to Los Angeles for DI (a digital intermediate file that gets imported into nonlinear editing software such as Final Cut or Avid), then we'd send these huge 10-bit files back and forth over the internet via .ftp." Add to that the language barrier (Webber speaks very little Polish) and the fact that while the visual effects team was in Poland, editing was done in Los Angeles, and disaster could have ensued, but didn't.

A smoky, fluid substance personifies evil in House. Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Lightcraft.

"It's funny, a language barrier even comes into play when all the creative collaborators speak English," says Webber, who describes an element in House that was open to everyone's interpretation: "Evil was foreshadowed by a smoky, fluid substance that becomes ever-present by the end of the film, oozing—or wafting—out of characters' cuts and sores with that sense of, there's really no other word for it, intention we talked about with the bugs in The Visitation." It became clear that everyone had a different idea of what evil incarnate, especially smoky, fluid evil, looks like. "I realized probably the closest thing to what we were trying to create was dry ice, so I went out with a camera and captured as much footage of dry ice as I could, which got us all on the same page." The effect took several months to create using proprietary software. "But, to see this substance, this evil spirit on screen, creeping around and emanating from open sores," says Webber, sounding like a proud parent, "well, it was a thing of beauty."