Mike Hudack

adamngoodshot:

FX Guide has an exhaustive look at the visual fx work on District 9, including these great before and after stills from several vfx shots in the film. It also gives insight into director Neill Blomkamp’s style for running a set, which I admire.

“He also didn’t want to have a typical video village on set with the sound guy and script supervisor,” continued Muzyers. “They had to be remotely located so he could shoot 360 degrees without having to ask the crew to get out of the way. For a film of that nature and size, the shooting schedule was actually quite short because of the budget constraints on the movie. So he went fast and hard and the pace was relentless.”

It’s amazing how animators were able to put so much emotion and believability into the shots, with so little information at hand from the reference frames.

On set, actor Jason Cope donned a 50% grey suit with markers and worked as a stand-in for the aliens. “Neill was fairly specific about wanting to have someone on set who the actors could interact with,” noted Kaufman. “It helped the other actors, particularly Sharlto Copley in the emotional scenes with Christopher Johnson, but of course it meant we had to paint it out later and restore pieces of the background.”

“The grey suit also gave us a good lighting reference,” observed Muzyers. “It wasn’t as neat as the grey ball you often see, but it gave a fairly good reference as to where light was coming from and how the shadows played on his body.”

Muzyers supervised the shooting of clean plates where possible, although again this proved difficult with the very active camera movement. “Luckily, Neill’s background in visual effects meant that he knew importance of capturing HDRI data. I can never take enough HDRI, so I kind of keep going until they usher me off the set!”

The movie is basically a textbook of how to shoot a heavily improvisational film with visual effects in mind in the modern age of CG animation. Go read it.