The filmmakers had to decide on the POV of the shamanistic sequences: subjective or objective? They elected to combine both.

The design process of the shamanistic sequences lasted for about a year, with Kounen sketching his visions on paper and Chabrier building animatics in 3D. It occurred very quickly to the latter that traditional storyboards wouldn’t suffice for this project. Chabrier explains, “During a [shamanistic] experience, you see your environment perpetually modifying itself. Since these changes sometimes occur extremely rapidly, there is not really a possibility for a freeze-frame that could be translated into storyboard form. The only way to visualize it was via 3D animation.” Later, these animatics were a valuable tool for describing the concepts to executives who had difficulty — to put it mildly — in grasping this whole shamanistic thing.

Given the changing, flowing nature of the shamanistic experiences, Mac Guff had to devise a new approach to the effects. “Since there’s no cut, there are no shots per se, but three sequences that feature non-stop 3D animation,” says Chabrier. “That’s why it’s deceiving for us to talk about shot counts. These shots are several minutes long!”

Rodolphe Chabrier, visual effects supervisor and co-founder of Mac Guff Ligne, followed director Kounen into shamanism in order to fully understand what he was trying to achieve visually.

Translating Mental Images into Film Images
The design process was followed by a year of R& D under the supervision of Francois Launay. There were many conceptual issues to address, the least of which being the point of view of the sequences. Since the shamanistic experience is what the subject sees and hears and smells and feels, should the camera take the subjective point of view of the character, showing what he sees with his own eyes, or should it take an objective point of view and show the experience from outside, visualizing the hallucinations around the character?

“It was a difficult question and we eventually opted for an approach that combined both,” comments Chabrier. “In the subjective point of view, the image was too confused and too abstract for the spectator to clearly understand what was going on. So what we did was to design the visions for a subjective approach, and then integrate the character into the imagery. Generally speaking, it’s extremely difficult to represent mental images. To start with, there is no such thing as motion blur in a trance. You see objects or creatures moving at light speed but at the same time, remaining perfectly sharp. If you put this on film, the effect will look completely artificial. The other thing is the infinite depth of field. You can simultaneously see with equal sharpness an ant walking on your eye and the stars on the horizon. Again, that’s impossible to translate on film, as, with an infinite depth of field, the images we were creating would have been a mess. In order to address this, we applied various levels of sharpness to the different layers. For example, the foreground will be in focus, while the midground will be blurred and the background in focus. It gave the images a sense of depth and a very rich look without visually overloading the viewer .”