LOOK’s concept for a cartoony heart and the final heart visual

 

Tone was a real consideration for the shots in which various zombies’ hearts began to beat again.  “I watched a lot of movies in preparation for this film, but one of the ones I really enjoyed the visual effects in was Amélie, to the point where we kind of stole the heart-beat thing from them,” Levine admits.  Schrecker then tried to find a way to adjust the idea to work for Warm Bodies.  “It’s kind-of gruesome because you’re seeing this heart but it’s also sort of an uplifting moment so it has got to have a magical quality.  We did a lot of different designs, some which were much more heart-shaped, like a Valentine’s vibe, some that were much more cartoony and some that were more photo-realistic, but not bloody because he’s a zombie and he doesn’t bleed.  I was pretty pleased with how it came out.”

The army of Boneys

The film’s villains – the grotesque Boneys – ultimately made up a fair share of the work.  “I think there were over 300 shots and about 85 of them were Boney shots,” Schrecker says of the characters Levine conceived as a tribute to the stop-motion master, Ray Harryhausen.  “I knew we’d be doing them with CG, but I was hoping we could mimic that kind of Jason and the Argonauts or Clash of the Titans look.  As it progressed it became clear to me that in a movie where tone is a difficult balance, it would be nice to have the bad guys feel threatening and feel like the stakes were real when it came to the bad guys.”  Isaac Marion’s original novel, which served as the basis for the movie, offered detailed descriptions of the creatures’ peeling skin and dusty muscles, explaining how “they were basically the next level of the zombie decomposition.  We had that framework and within that we had lots of different questions to answer: were they going to be white?  Were they going to be black?  Were they going to be oily?  Were they going to be dry?  Were they going to move with twitches or with fixed intention?  There were a lot of ways to go and we basically just tried a bunch of different ones.”

As anyone who’s danced along to “Thriller” can attest, any convincing zombie’s got to have the moves down pat.  Hoping to find inspiration, Levine watched Pan’s Labyrinth and Terminator 2 before directing his undead on-set.  “A lot of the guys who played zombies in the movie were stunt people, so we put tracking marks on them and had them do various walks and then we applied it to the digital Boneys, but it wasn’t quite working.  We had to go back to the drawing board and find the movement, and I think it was only really dialed-in about six weeks before we locked picture.  It took us a very, very long time to get to that point and we learned that we had to keep making these creatures scarier and scarier and scarier, so we did.”

The Boneys attack

Making sure they all fit in with their surroundings required Schrecker to use a method known as HDRI, or High Dynamic Range Imaging.  “What we do is we bring out the Boney maquette and put it in the light so we can see what it looks like when it’s lit with the real light.  The other thing we do is a 360-degree capture of the lighting setup using a tripod and a head mount on a tripod, called a Nodal Ninja, so you can get an exact rotation around.  When you shoot that, you shoot it with different exposures with some overexposed and some underexposed.  Instead of having one picture you have seven pictures, so you can see all the highlights and all the shadows and details, and you take those images and combine them into a single image.  This gives you a representation of the lighting on-set, so that when you’ve modeled and animated and textured your Boney you can light it in Maya, render it in V-Ray and you have accurately captured the lighting and your Boney looks like it lives in the plate.”