CGW: What were you most excited about when you first signed on to the series?
Tara DeMarco: I was most excited about the script. I loved the characters so much and really wanted to know where they were going. So I was extra excited to work on a story with humans that the audience will love, that we get to mildly terrorize with creatures that VFX gets to make.
CGW: How did you set up your visual effects workflow to tackle a project of this scale?
Tara DeMarco: This project I like to call “smedium.” It's a little bigger than small, but it's a little smaller than medium. We had a somewhat limited scope of creature work compared to big, big television shows, and we knew that we wanted to feature a lot of creature in the first episode. So we started running immediately.
We had creature design that came from our creature designer, Jerad [S. Marantz]. He had worked with Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews on this many-limbed, huge-eyed, super weird monster. We took it and immediately started animation testing with an in-house animator, Steve Beck, who I used to work with at The Mill.
Quite quickly, we realized that the creature had too many limb segments. I think it had seven segments per limb for the rear six legs, and then the front two are like a mini T-Rex. So in that early animation test, we worked on just tucking the front legs in and trying to come up with a walk for the rear legs.
We watched it and everybody said, "Too much!" So we went down to five limb segments per rear leg, which is still a lot. You have to figure out: Does it work like an elbow? Does it work like a shoulder? Is it a hinge? Is it a ball joint? What is the musculature? Where does that attach? Are there tendons? What happens to the skin? There was a lot of complexity of simulated skin. Laxity, blood flow, muscle tension, to get this ancient creature feeling ancient. So there needed to be light transmission through the thin skin so you could see the blood moving. When it blinks, the blood flow changes around its eyelids. It's crazy.
It's also got one of those gecko-style third eyelids that closes because the eyes are so massive. These are the details that go into the asset so that it can do anything in the scenes, and so that even if it's a really minor detail in the shot, it will feel more real to the humans watching.
CGW: It definitely came across as very eerie. That first reveal is so unsettling!
Tara DeMarco: The ceiling? We did a lot of visual effects concept work with a concept artist called Jamie O'Hara. He helped Ben Taylor, our Episode 1 director, work out: Should the hands be in focus? Should the eyes be in focus? How dark should it be? Are the eyes glowing gold? How far should it be? It was one of the things that we played with for a while to figure out the right creep factor for show versus reveal.
CGW: How many people were on your team, and how many vendors or partners did you work with?
Tara DeMarco: We had six major vendors on the show. Our little in-house team was small. I think there were 12 of us. It is a “smedium” show, so we didn't have a whole army, but we had a really, really talented group. We had some in-house artists. We had amazing producers, PMs [production managers], coords [coordinators].
Then I had an additional visual effects supervisor who started when the shoot started, helping prep post-vis so that we could see what we would be seeing in the town and in the views. She would also do animation tests. She did work on a lot of our prosthetics that needed love. They needed to be made to look wet and enhanced slightly. That was Roxy Zuckerman. She crushed it.
CGW: How did you collaborate with the practical effects team?
Tara DeMarco: We always knew we would need lighting reference props. We were given this creature design, which we then passed along to the team at Onyx Forge. They made us hands that could be puppeteered or placed for reference. So we definitely placed a tiny hand over Grace's mouth [the previous occupant of Sam’s home, played by Dee Wallace]. We would bring a tiny hand into the scene anytime we knew we needed a creature hand. We had a little three-form proboscis for lighting reference for the scenes where we need to show it.
We had a bust created for a lighting reference that we used in the first few episodes, and then we actually made a full-sized creature so that we could have full-sized lighting reference and possibly even puppeteer it if needed. That was used in later episodes. It's massive. It takes many people to carry it. It is heavy. It is enormous.
Another facet of the creature is that it has to move with enough of a strange gate that our frail little seniors can run away. The creatures are designed to come out through the ovens. The ovens are specifically large so that they fit. Then they are designed to go up to the ceiling, across the ceiling, and drop down. So, there is architectural design that supports that path.
We called the animation style “geriatric parkour.” We looked at Alex Honnold and Free Solo and rock climbing pressure holds. We tried to figure out which limbs hold while other limbs swing, so that it could “tappy tap” across the ceiling and the spaces. But also it's ancient, so it's tired and it finds movement hard, and that's how the seniors get away. So there was a lot of thought given to the animation to enhance the storytelling.
CGW: I did not expect a Free Solo reference, but it makes a lot of sense! Were there any other references you looked to? Any other creatures from past projects?
Tara DeMarco: We didn't look so much at past projects. We looked a lot at photographs of owls, of animal eyes at night for the retro-reflective effect of the creature eye. We looked at an older woman who was a ballerina for strength and muscle tone and skin laxity. We looked at a lot of different wounds for wound reference. Those were our main reference points for all of the creature work.
CGW: How did you approach the project’s environmental effects and set extensions?
Tara DeMarco: The set extension was super important to everyone creative on the show because all of the filmmakers, executives, everyone wanted The Boroughs to feel so real that you could move in, that you can say, “Where is that town? I want to live there.” The town is the place that the seniors have to save. So we needed the audience to love the town as much as our cast loved the town and our characters love the town.
We enlisted Romain Rico and a fantastic team at Framestore in Montreal to do this photoreal set extension from Sam's house. We spent a lot of time developing the views of the town from Sam's from both the ground plane and an aerial plane. Our in-camera set was eight houses, five around the cul-de-sac and then three on the end, and then two massive container walls that were blocking the view of Netflix Albuquerque. So we knew that we needed a really, really seamless extension to feel like you were part of this community.
Conversely, the other major view we see is the establishing of the town from the security gate. That is 180 degrees, two miles across town from Sam's house. In that map view, we placed every set that we filmed. We placed The Manor, we placed the corporate headquarters, we placed the town square, we placed the funeral home. They are all structures that are within that map so that you could have a logic to where you were going, how long it would take to get there, and know which direction you were traveling. Also it's a little Easter egg-y. If you go back and watch the show again and you stop on the one establishing aerial, you will find every building that we filmed.
There are about 1,500 homes, and there are a certain number of rings to the cul-de-sac. Jeff [Addiss] loves this idea of circles within circles. So we very intentionally made it like a map and like a maze with the town square at the center. The seniors are meant to live at the edge of the desert where it's creepy. There is a countless amount of plant life from the Southwest placed into this town. The infrastructure is real. There's the little adobe buildings and there's golf cart parking. There are walking paths because the seniors don't drive cars as much. There are special little bridges that are attached to the walking paths and green spaces built into the CG map because you need to disperse the heat. We went ahead and studied resorts in Palm Springs where seniors live, and looked at the infrastructure there. Pickleball courts, tennis courts, the lap pool, all of it. It's all in the town model, which is pretty incredible.
CGW: I can see why it felt so real! Overall, how many visual effects shots did your team work on, if you have an estimate?
Tara DeMarco: We finished just under 1,200 shots.
CGW: Can you share any software tools that were really especially helpful for the project?
Tara DeMarco: The one software tool that we used—that a lot of teams use in prep, but that isn't always discussed—is we did build a version of the town in Unreal for virtual scouting. We used it alongside the art department and the camera department to figure out how tall the wall should be behind Sam's house, because we wanted to see the desert, but we also wanted to hide the Netflix fence. We wanted to minimize the visual effects work and keep it intentional rather than just clean up. So we spent a lot of time placing our cameras in this Unreal asset that Pixomondo built, just trying to figure out: Where do we place the blue screens? How tall are the containers? How far back should they be? What amount of real access do we need? And that was massively helpful in the construction and set planning phase.
CGW: I'm sure that really gave you a lot of freedom to explore different ideas and figure things out.
Tara DeMarco: Absolutely, and also it gave us a real visual reference for the directors and the showrunners to just say: What does it look like if we make that taller? What if we make it smaller? How about if we only see it from this angle? It really brought into focus what we wanted to spend our time on and what additionally we would need to build or not build.
CGW: Were there any other tools that were especially important to your process?
Tara DeMarco: We did use a fair amount of scanning with iPads and we did photogrammetry with a little turntable booth in our office. So I definitely used Polycam and KIRI Engine to make assets for post-vis and to just test and make sure that our photogrammetry would work. We used Polycam to scan the sets for our pre-vis so that we could have the real set build and then animate our creature in it. So those tools aren't quite as common because they're like sort of cheeky fast on-set builds.
As far as the software that the vendors use, that seems pretty traditional. It is Nuke and Maya. I'm a Flame artist, so I used a Flame license at home to do a little bit of compositing on the side.
CGW: Was a large amount of pre-vis needed for the project?
Tara DeMarco: We pre-vised every shot with the creatures, except for the finale. For the finale, we focused on pre-vis of the explosion moment with Blaine and Anneliese [the CEO of The Boroughs and his wife, played by Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg]. And then we pre-vised a little bit of the shadow work with the creature just to test what shadow we should make and where it should cast. That shadow was actually a 3D-printed miniature of our creature model that was then mini-puppeteered to create the cast shadow on the wall. Another unlikely great use of a technology that was once a dream and is now a reality.
CGW: Were there any other unexpected practical elements or special effects in your VFX workflow?
Tara DeMarco: We wanted the fluid that gets drained from the back of Sam's throat to be real. So our special effects department 3D-printed a tiny little bulb that could hold fluid, and put it on the end of a plunger so that the liquid draw is real. Then we replaced the bulb with the needle.
My favorite practical element is that we flung the car off the cliff with a dummy [of Hank Williams, head of security at The Boroughs], and then that dummy definitely looked like a dummy, so we had to replace it with a plate of the actor. We did a 2D trick of 3D tracking the motion of both the cameras and the car to negate that motion, so we could use a motion control camera rig to film an element of the actor in a static car on the back lot.
So we filmed the practical car launch, edited that scene, had our favorite, let's say “take” because it was one take with seven cameras. But of the seven, I think we had five in the cut and then figured out which ones would require a Hank replacement. And then we brought the wonderful actor Eric [Edelstein] back and he did a blue screen motion control day with us where we placed the car, set the cameras, and made sure that we could get elements to composite back in later.
CGW: Were there any other scenes or sequences that you really enjoyed working on?
Tara DeMarco: I love the sequence with the crows, and I love the cast shadows of the crows on Art's truck [Sam's neighbor, played by Clarke Peters]. I think it's such a beautiful interactive piece.
I also love that final shot of Wally [Sam's neighbor, played by Denis O'Hare] and Sam in the end of Episode 102, where you can see the little bit of magic in Wally's eye.
CGW: That's a beautiful moment. Going back to the creatures, were there any other unexpected challenges that came up in terms of figuring out the movements?
Tara DeMarco: The creatures have to start scary and end sympathetic. So we were mindful of that the whole time. It was really about approaching each scene and figuring out how scary it is and what emotions we want to evoke. They become more emotional and almost like puppies by the end. They have those big eyes, and we wanted you to feel sympathy for them.
Knowing that the creature work starts with them moving quite quickly and having these violent actions, and then ends with this very elegant lowering to cradle their mother. That's its own version of a challenge because you're changing the style of animation and then the nature of what you're trying to convey.
CGW: It’s such an unexpected change. There’s that shot when you see the injured one in the tunnel and realize, “Oh wait, this is an actual living creature!”
Tara DeMarco: I think that the creature dying on the floor of the train tracks might be the Duffer Brothers' favorite shots. You can ask them.
CGW: How did you collaborate with the Duffer Brothers?
Tara DeMarco: Well, Matt and Ross Duffer were a
little busy finishing a small show you may have heard of called
Stranger Things…They were working down the hall from us. But once we were happy with an effect with something magical or scary or spooky or weird, they would come down the hall and sit with us, give us a bit of their time, and give us their thoughts—and their thoughts always made it better.
CGW: How did you work with the showrunners? What was the communication like on a daily basis?
Tara DeMarco: We talk all the time. I love Will Matthews and Jeffrey Addiss. They are genius showrunners. They are passionate about character and passionate about visual effects, and they understand that intentional visual effects mean that we really get time to craft our images. So they would let me occasionally say, “I'm sorry, this is too much. Can we please do XYZ and try it together?” They were always down to try something new, and to test an approach or to pivot if it wasn't working and find something that the audience would really believe. Because you want to fall in love with the characters and not be bumped in any other way.
CGW: Do you have any advice you would like to share with up-and-coming visual effects artists or students?
Tara DeMarco: My advice to all visual effects humans is to keep learning and to not be afraid to fail. I think that the thing that you can always say is, “Give me a minute, let me try,” rather than a definite “yes” or a definite “no,” and then go back to your network of people and ask, “Has anyone done this weird thing that they wanna do?” Sometimes your network will say “no,” and sometimes you'll have to come up with an idea on your own. But I would say there are so many tools and techniques that constantly evolve, and we all specialize in different areas. We're all strong in different ways. So you lean into your network and your other artists, be they junior or senior, because people are learning new tips and new tools all the time.