ILM created 86 vfx shots for Lady in the Water, including three terrifying creatures, the Scrunt, the Tartutics and the Great Eatlon. Lady in the Water image ™ & © 2006 Warner Bros. Ent. Inc.

After enchanting us with ghosts, superheroes, aliens and mythical creatures, master storyteller M. Night Shyamalan is back with the story of a nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) who ventures into our world, bringing terrifying creatures along with her. Typical of the director, Lady in the Water (released by Warner Bros. on July 21) features low-key vfx. For the third consecutive time, Shyamalan turned to Industrial Light & Magic to provide the more fantastic aspects of his movie. Visual effects supervisor Edward Hirsch and visual effects producer Jeanie King oversaw more than 86 vfx shots, up from an initial slate of 50 shots. “Our shots encompassed about 50 2D vfx, including sky replacements, fog addition and various enhancements; the rest was 3D creature animation,” says digital production supervisor Kevin Barnhill. “Obviously, the creatures shots were the most demanding, and they required quite a lot of R&D.”

The movie features three different types of creatures, all designed by conceptual artist Mark “Crash” McCreery (The Village). The Scrunt is a hyena-like beast that has the ability to completely blend in the lawn, due to the spiky grass-like hair that protrudes from its back. The Tartutics are simian-like creatures that camouflage themselves in trees. Finally, the Great Eatlon is a giant and majestic eagle. From early on, Shyamalan was keen on shooting practical creatures as much as possible, limiting the use of 3D animation to shots that couldn’t be captured in camera. To this purpose, he commissioned creature and make-up effects supervisor Mike Elizalde and his Spectral Motion group to fabricate the creatures. The Scrunt was built as a fully animatronic puppet, while the Tartutics were brought to life by actors wearing sophisticated suits. Although the Tartutics shots required some blue screen composites, they never necessitated the creation of digital doubles. This was not the case for the Scrunt, a beast that had to be seen running, jumping, fighting: all actions that couldn’t be performed by the puppet.

“Based on the story-boards, we decided on a shot per shot basis what could be done practically and what had to be done CG,” Barnhill explains. “During principal photography, we tried to shoot a clean plate for every creature shot, just to give Night the option of modifying the action later on. But it was not always possible. The shooting schedule was really compressed, no more than two months, I believe. So, we very seldom had the time to shoot a clean plate. As a result, we had to paint the puppet out in a number of shots in order to replace it with the CG version, mostly because Night wanted to adjust the performance. There was one shot in particular that we had to alter. It was a tight close-up on the Scrunt face. After the fact, Night decided that he wanted more emotion from the character. First, we tried to manipulate the images using Sabre, our proprietary 2D tool, trying to morph between expressions, but we didn’t quite get to what Night wanted. So, we ended up completely replacing the puppet with the CG creature, as to have complete control over the performance.”

Kevin Barnhill, digital production supervisor of Industrial Light & Magic, and his team found the creature shots to be the most demanding as they required a lot of R&D.

A Challenging Design
With grass for hair and a skin made out of twigs, the Scrunt’s morphology presented unique challenges for the modelers, riggers, and tds. Plus, the CG creature had to be an exact match of the practical puppet. To this purpose, Spectral Motion provided a full-size hairless body, all painted and textured, that was scanned in high resolution. “Since the skin surface was so complex, we decided to use an interesting approach to build the model. After getting the scan, we did a ray-trace of the creature and then use ZBrush to create a displacement map. We then took that map to bump out all the details and get a three-dimensional look on the twigs. As for the hair, we designed a shader that would give us a flat blade of grass with a deep root. We could then interpolate color from the root to the tip. On top of that, we added some fractal noise to give it a little bit of texture. In order to manipulate the grass, we had guide splines that were imbedded into the mesh, every four or five inches. We would then interpolate between those splines to create the full grass look. This approach allowed us to end up with a lot more grass. What was great about those splines was that we could ‘style’ the CG Scrunt to look exactly like the puppet. We noticed that, depending on the camera angle, we had to give it a different hairstyle to match the live-action. We ultimately created four or five different styles.”

The various textures were first created using still photographs of the puppet, which provided a good basis, but most of the details were eventually painted by hand. In the end, the match between the CG creature and the practical puppet was so perfect that Shyamalan decided to add a whole series of 3D animation shots, late in production. “As production progressed, he really started to feel more confident about CG animation. I think he was actually surprised about how good the CG creature looked…”