Cinefex Weekly Update | Issue 09

Some effects were added to sell the humor in shots, in particular those involving characters interacting with the film's aquatic stars -- a penguin and an enormous male walrus. "A full-grown male walrus weighs a couple of tons," remarked Duggal, "and if he gets spooked, he's going to make a run for the water. So any time the actors were in proximity to the walrus where they had to be between him and the water, we did it as a visual effect." A shot of the walrus projectile-vomiting onto Henry's assistant provided Duggal with one of her more memorable assignments. "In an ideal world, we would have gathered all kinds of reference data on the set. But on the day we were shooting, the walrus was horny; and they wouldn't let me near him because he was reacting to women. So we just shot a plate of the walrus with his mouth open. Later, we set up a bluescreen shoot with the actress in the scene, and shot this really gross mixture of dog food and water at her so we could get the interaction of the vomit hitting her. Then we composited it all together in 2D -- which wasn't as easy as it appears, because there were logistical issues in lining up the movement of the walrus' mouth."

Effects intervention also provided the humor for a scene in which Lucy's brother (Sean Astin) performs a 'pec dance,' moving his pectoral muscles in sync to music. "When we got on set," recalled Duggal, "we discovered that Sean couldn't actually do that. So we found a guy who was able to do this dance, and we filmed him on a bluescreen stage, trying to time it to the music as best we could. We scanned that into the computer, composited it onto Sean, and did a bunch of morphing and warping to make it look realistic."

Though all the live-action was shot in Hawaii, Duggal and a crew went off to Blackstone Bay in Alaska to capture the mountain vistas needed for two big rotating helicopter shots that reveal the entire landscape. "We took a Vistavision camera with us and shot maybe a 250-degree pan-and-tile of the environment," said Duggal. "Fortunately, we also chased icebergs around because I was thinking, 'I'm pretty sure they're going to ask me to put icebergs into these shots at some point.'" In postproduction, when the director saw how little snow there was, he asked for more production value. "We ended up taking the pan-and-tile, which I was hoping we could just composite in, and turning that into a matte painting so we could add more snow and detail. Surprisingly, I was able to take a lot of the 2D icebergs that we shot, roto them out of the Vistavision footage and track them into the water. We also added CG breath to a number of shots of the actors." Adding to the seamless effect was careful attention to lighting detail. "We got hold of a copy of a sun chart for Hawaii on the day that we shot the Hawaii plates, and did the same in Alaska. That way, we could look at what time of day it was in Hawaii, and what angle the sun was in the sky, and wait for the same time of day and same lighting conditions when we shot in Alaska."

"It was all great fun," Duggal concluded. "I love what I do, and I love doing invisible effects. When I get a show like this, I'm fortunate, because a lot of the types of shots I'm doing can be done in a 2D way. And since I was involved in building this department, I know all the skills of the artists. That's a great advantage to me as a visual effects supervisor."