For Dale Duguid of Photon VFX, the goal was to find a balance between practical special effects and post-production visual effects and to interface the two. Photo courtesy of Photon VFX.

“Our first commandment in visual effects is to not notice the effect in this kind of genre,” he continues. “The film has a contemporary setting and you want everything to be believable, real, so transparency is the core of everything. We had to go in and do lots of things to make it feel natural. John was joined at the hip with visual effects producer, Elizabeth Synes. They were a very capable dynamic duo. Under them, there was an army of model makers and miniature- builders. There was a motion-control department, who filmed both the miniatures and operated the motion-control marionettes of the miniatures. There was a full digital and editorial team. It was pretty much a Maya and RenderMan world in 3D for us, but there were spots in the 2D world that did some nice things too. I guess there were about 100 people working on the film, creating approximately between 200 and 300 shots.”

Yet even with such a complex mixture of technologies, Duguid admits, as is typical in their work, the seemingly easiest effects were really the hardest to create. In this case, the filmmakers needed to melt tons of wax. “The singular, most evident challenge was that we all have an abstraction in our mind about what melting wax looks like. When you actually look at it, it’s pretty boring,” he laughs. “It’s like someone tipping a glass of water down the side of something… really, really boring. What the abstraction that we all carry in our minds is born of is seeing those wonderful phallic-types of wax on the sides of candles once they harden. Without thinking about it too much, we all assume melting wax should be interesting and it’s not! The challenge was from the visualization point of view. We all had to work very closely to try every avenue in order to reinvent what melting wax should look like, so it satisfies the abstraction everybody has in their mind, but also to credibly make it look like it could be melting wax. You appreciate that it’s a philosophical, as well as, a practical [challenge]. If I told you how the special effects department and the visual effects department made that happen, I’d have to kill you,” he jokes.

Offering some proprietary tidbits, Duguid adds, “The ultimate illusion of melting is a combination of high technology, robotic-controlled houses and digital effects, including particle animation for synthetic wax-melts, composited practical elements, fire and cinder storms that were shot as elements or synthetically generated as particle animations. Those were the more complex shots. As the look evolved and became much stronger, we found ourselves going back and retrofitting conventional shots with additional effects, like fire and melting or jeopardy. What that retrofitting did was give the film an escalation of danger and the proximity of the melting process.”

Photon is most proud of the vfx in a scene with an angry heroine, a baseball bat and retribution on a bad guy. It’s a very R-rated moment, but possesses a clever piece of seamless visual effects work. Photo credit: Vince Valitutti.

The climactic fire at the end of the film that lights up the entire wax town also provided more challenges. “Melting houses is the very difficult because once things melt, the edges go soft and the architectural features loose their crispness,” he explains. “Traditionally, that makes things feel like miniatures. When you lose that crisp detail, you think you are looking at a miniature. We had to have a miniature house look like a full size melting house, when it had all the features of a miniature, so that was really, really difficult. We had to use lost of devices to reinforce the correct scale. It was quite a conundrum in how to achieve it without the audience howling and saying, “They’ve melted the size of a shoe box!” In fact, the miniatures were huge, a third full-size, but I think the end result speaks for itself.”

Reflecting on the scenes that Photon was most satisfied in creating, Duguid says, “I think that whole last reel of the film is a tour de force of melting and horror and we are very, very proud of that. Along the way, there are some very interesting horror moments. There is a particular scene involving an angry heroine and a baseball bat and bit of retribution on a bad guy. It’s a clever piece of seamless visual effects work. Its one of those things that you would never really think as an audience, ‘How the hell was that done?’ You are just carried away with the moment. This was something the director firmly had in his mind that he wanted to achieve and vfx supervisor, John Breslin, listened carefully, looked at the reference the director supplied and then came up with a workable solution that is a very elegant piece of visual effects work. It’s a very R-rated moment, but the majority of the violence of it was implied, which is why I think it was so elegant.