VFX supervisor Stuart Penn discusses the quirky, grisly mayhem, including the Niflheim ice cavern, native creatures known as Creepers, and our hero’s multiple deaths and subsequent regenerations, in Bong Joon-ho’s dark, sci-fi comedy.
While Edward Ashton’s original book was titled “Mickey 7,” 3-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon-ho decided to up the disposable clone ante by 10 for his cinematic adaptation, which suits his penchant for dark, social satire. His sci-fi comedy, Mickey 17, takes place in a dystopian world where Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) earns money by allowing his body to be duplicated an endless number of times for a series of hazardous experiments and assignments where he always dies. Taking part in the quirky grisly mayhem is Dan Glass, who previously oversaw the visual effects on Bong’s Okja; he looked to Framestore to craft 405 VFX shots involving multiple Mickey deaths, an ice cavern on the planet of Niflheim, and its native inhabitants known as Creepers.
“The most unusual thing about Mickey 17 was how clear the vision was,” states Stuart Penn, VFX Supervisor, Framestore. “Before we started shooting, Director Bong knew what he wanted. It was amazing.” Cinematically, the world building was grounded and gritty. “It wasn’t fantasy space stuff. We were matching the lovely sets that were built. The biggest scope were the Creepers and trying to find their characters. He brought concepts with him that were well worked out as ZBrush sculpts, and he wanted us to figure out how they moved. We had discussions with him about the characters and their backstories. Director Bong had an idea of why they were doing what they were doing, what they were doing behind the scenes, and what their motivations were; that helped us to drive their performances and find their characters.”
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Storyboards were central to the storytelling. “Director Bong comes to set with his storyboards and shoots them,” remarks Penn. “He has his editor onset with him doing the running edit as they go, so you can see how it all fits together, which was exciting to see.” The editorial turnover was straightforward. “Being onset, seeing what was shot and having it turned over meant that we knew what we were going to get upfront because it didn’t change that much in structure from shoot through to post,” he continues. “Some of the set extensions, like the ice cave in particular, was something we had to develop because we were trying to get the look of that real ice that you had in those caves. They sent me out to Iceland to get reference, which we then used to help inform how the set looked. That needed the most development work other than the Creepers, which went through a fair bit of development to make them move.”
The Creepers do not have the usual skeletal structure. “We developed the Baby and Mama Creepers, which have different number of legs,” reveals Penn. “We got them to work for our shots and what Director Bong needed for the film, then passed all of that information over to DNEG, including prototype rigs and examples of movements. Vice versa, DNEG passed over the Juniors.” Once motion was introduced, the overall design of the Creepers remained the same. “The details under the hood of how the legs connected, which you can’t see, changed a little bit because we figured out how the locomotion worked and how the different legs interacted,” Penn adds. “We looked at different animals to see how multiple legged creatures could move. On the Mama Creeper, we changed how close to the ground she was, which was the main difference. The designs of the Creepers were consistent from start to end.”
Complexity increased exponentially in relation to the number of legs. According to Pen, “You try to work out how legs move in sequence and avoid them colliding with each other, with themselves, and ground. If the ground is uneven, you can’t use a cycle. There is a big shot where there are 30 odd Creepers pushing Mickey out of the ice crevasse. Getting all of those legs to work took a long time. We built it up in layers. We needed ones to actually push him and then dressed in additional Creepers and added others for comedic effect. But we always made sure they were working together. Towards the end we had three animators working on it at the same time because there were so many to do.” A plate was shot of Robert Pattinson, with some stunt actors in white shoving him up and over the edge of the cavern. Penn ended up having to replace most of Pattinson’s body as he was covered in a stunt rig, but managed to keep one arm, a little bit of his chest, and head.
Another challenge was that Mama and Baby Creepers were not scaled replicas of each other. “The Babies were soft and squishy, so their dynamics system was much more like a grub or caterpillar,” remarks Penn. “Whereas the Mama has armored plates like an armadillo, so there was definitely work done on how the plates interacted. We kept the Mama much more rigid.” Different generational personalities were in play with the Creepers.
“The Creepers’ backstory is that the Babies are curious and go, ‘What are these human things?’ while Mama is the calm matriarch and goes, ‘We’re going to play it cool and watch,’” Penn explains. “What happens at the crevasse is all of the Babies are jockeying for position and end up pushing her over the edge. It collapses and they end up getting to meet Mickey.”
Outside of the multiple legs, there was the matter of the Creepers’ facial features. “The Creepers have tentacles and a couple of eyes but no other real feature points that we would recognize in a human face to get emotion across,” notes Penn. “The challenge was trying to use the features they did have to get across that curiosity and cuteness. The Creepers go from being quite scary to cute with very few changes to their performance. You start waving the tentacles around and they begin to get scary. You can also play with the eyes with more subtle movements to keep them cute.”
Snow was an important character in the film. “When the Babies throw Mickey out and they roll down the hill towards him, that was a set dressed with salt,” Penn describes. “We simulated that with a particle system to get the Baby interaction.” Ice proved to be harder than snow. “The is in the ice cave is quite clear, so we went to one of the Iceland glaciers to see what it really looks like,” he continues. “Ray tracing stuff with that level of depth to it, an internal structure, and scatter… that’s expensive to render. We had to build an internal structure within the ice to give it a correct refractive quality. We had to be quite careful what we rendered full frame range, even on the crevasse, because of scattering. We didn’t render entire sequences but could get away with rendering a single frame and reprojecting it if that was going to work for the shot.” Cracks had to be incorporated into the ice. “We had to build an internal volume that would help with the lighting, and construct facets inside the ice so it would actually have that feeling,” says Penn. Though an entire set was built, Penn admits it’s hard to build something that looks photographically the same as ice, noting they ultimately kept the ground but replaced all the ice structures in the cave and similarly for the crevasse.
The Mickey clones get killed in various, usually humorous ways. “There’s a whole run of stuff like the montage of Mickey getting dumped into the lava multiple times,” Penn says. “Consistency was key. We had to take over the body bag he was in because on set, it was dropped into a much shorter hole. An entirely different death was depicted outside the spaceship where there’s radiation damage and his hand gets knocked off. Basically, we shot him in the spacesuit, and we retimed him bending his arm and at the impact point, painted out the hand and put a CG hand spinning off into the distance. When something gets hit like that it’s a linear motion with a linear spin so it’s quite easy to stick to reality.”
Generally, the visors of the space helmets were off unless situated close to a set piece where they could reflect the proper lighting. “The spherical nature of the visor means that you can pickup the stage ceiling, camera, and any crew,” states Penn. “To try to paint stuff off of an actor’s face is too painful. It’s much easier to take a glass and create all the reflections. We’ve done it so many times now. You get a much better finish. The actor’s performance is the most important thing in the shot, so you don’t want to mess with that.”
One of the film’s signature elements is a human printer inside the spacecraft used to create new cloned bodies. “We did the shot where Kenneth Marshall [Mark Ruffalo] is being printed,” remarks Penn. “The structure of the actual device was practical onset; however, there were no moving arms, so we designed those and the movement to try to make that interesting. It was like a 3D printer but more precise. We played with a number of different types of actions and various number of arms. My technical background [as a physicist] came in handy. We looked at references of car manufacturing and medical robots to see how they’re jointed and might move. We had to put little bits of movement in there to help sell that the arms are doing something quickly.”
There is a key point in the film where two Mickey clones have to interact and share the screen together. “We shot two plates,” Penn details. “One with Robert Pattinson as Mickey 17 and the stand-in doing the performance of Mickey 18, which we then switched. A lot of the time, we could take the two plates and use bits from both. It came down to having good, repeated motions.”
Framestore was also responsible for some of the scenes that take place on Earth. “We did a few bits and pieces on Earth,” states Penn. “Like when Mickey gets captured by Darius Blank [Ian Hanmore] and there are some top-down shots where balls [which are CG] bounce down the alleyway. They knock Mickey out and chop his leg off. We added the chainsaws for that. It was quite amusing. We had to do a few chainsaws throughout the film. There are a couple of throwaway shots with high motion blur and spinning blades which are always entertaining. You didn’t actually see the leg being severed. It required in-camera blood effects, so we didn’t have to worry about recreating that. They pick up the leg and we did a little twitch on the toes to add to the moment.” Penn adds, “You have to treat every shot on its own and make sure that you’re raising it to the right level.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
