Goodbye Kansas Studios has shared with AWN and VFXWorld their VFX work on Prime Video’s Carnival Row Season 2, an American neo-noir fantasy collection that premiered in 2019. The present stars Cara Delevigne and Orlando Bloom as the principle characters in a world the place mystical creatures are refugees in human society.
The Goodbye Kansas workforce’s work ranged from fairytale digital characters and monstrous transformation sequences to crowd simulations and full CG environments. The studio delivered 123 photographs and over 50 character and surroundings property, created by a workforce of greater than 100 VFX artists and technicians, with VFX supervisor Joel Lindman and animation lead Staffan Linder supervising the VFX, with work completed throughout COVID.
A lot of the work concerned incorporating the component of fantasy into the Steampunk-style world, digitally remodeling characters into their fairytale counterparts, making ample use of motion-capture. As well as, the studio’s workforce ensured the digital characters match seamlessly with the scene’s visible look whereas preserving the actors’ performances.
“What was fairly attention-grabbing on this present is that we obtained the plates the place that they had filmed the human characters after which roto-animated the digital character in the direction of these authentic photographs,” famous Lindman. “We made a mannequin that strikes in the identical method because the actor in a 3D area.”
Lindman described monitoring the digital camera’s conduct, which fed into the motion-capture studio’s monitor, including, “Within the mocap studio, we might see every little thing on the monitor whereas watching the mocap actor strolling round in real-time. We might direct the digital character to behave in opposition to the opposing ‘real-life’ character from the unique capturing, all in real-time.”
The method was instrumental in a sequence the place Philo (Bloom’s character) faces a nine-foot troll. “That was difficult as we needed to contemplate Orlando [Bloom]’s appearing,” famous Linder. “All of it needed to match as carefully as attainable, particularly the timing, which is hard in movement seize because the actor must work alongside one thing that they will solely see on the monitor.”
The workforce introduced in different actors to duplicate Bloom’s placement and motion.
Added Linder “In fact, we then wanted to make the connection between the digital and the true by tweaking positions, as we didn’t have an actual map of the area to work in the direction of.”
One of many challenges confronted by the workforce was working with many alternative digital characters with many alternative actions, forcing them to discover the boundaries of their creativeness throughout the confines of real-world physics.
Goodbye Kansas launched a brand new type of mocap rig to create extra realism within the flying actions; the forked rig connected to the mocap actors hips, permitting motion on all axes as they flew round.
“We had one shot with fairies that flew round with wings, which was filmed on the shopper’s aspect with actual folks within the studio,” mentioned Lindman. “After they shot it, they have been hanging on wires and appearing like they have been flying. However the physics of that might truly be completely different: hanging on a wire shouldn’t be the identical as having the wings in your again, which might pull you up as you fly.”
Try the Carnival Row S2 – VFX Breakdown by Goodbye Kansas:
The second season of Carnival Row is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Supply: Goodbye Kansas
Debbie Diamond Sarto is information editor at Animation World Community.
