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VFX: Thor

Just like other drama directors before him, Kenneth Branagh faced the challenge of being an industry veteran, yet a novice in the ultra high budget, VFX intensive level of filmmaking. Miguel Gonzalez reports.

Better known for his Shakespearean work on film and on the stage, Kenneth Branagh was an inspired yet unusual choice to direct the film adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero and god of Thunder, Thor… and he didn’t hesitate when he was approached to helm this project.
“I knew Thor would be an epic on a scale that I had not worked on before, so I was excited and surprised,” admitted Branagh.
He even finds similarities between the work of Shakespeare and the world of Thor – the Norse god of thunder sent to Earth to learn humility: “They’re both about royal families, the tension between the private world of public individuals, and the jobs they have to do. The themes in the film are the kinds of things that Shakespeare was interested in; they’re popular and archetypal.”
Branagh defines the film’s process as a “pretty high-tempered affair from start to finish”: “On these films, it’s a fairly high level of intensity all the way through.”
Pre-production required the definition of the look and feel of the film – a huge task considering the more than 40 years of Thor’s visual history. The cost-intensive shoot was also stressful, because “there are so many variables, and one is prone to ill fortune sometimes, just circumstantially”.
Equally important was the post-production and VFX process: “It’s the department with whom you’re in touch from the very first minute until the very last. They’re constantly asking you about what’s important
to you in a scene, in a frame. Some of the entirely CGI shots need to fit into a pretty strong visual style, and you have to work it out as you go along. You have a massive team of pre-visualisation and postvisualisation
artists and then of course they connect to the dozens of vendors who were providing the shots for us. It’s a huge parallel industry inside a single movie on this scale, and it’s been fascinating to work with them.”
To realise the film’s complex VFX element, the director worked closely with co-producer Victoria Alonso and VFX supervisor Wesley Sewell.

“Literally on day one, they were the first two people I met, to talk about how we would approach things. They took me into pre-visualisation work immediately; they let me play with the toys and the equipment that
previously I’d only read about James Cameron using,” he said.

According to Branagh, working with several VFX vendors was well worth the complications: “It’s quite an enormous logistical exercise to make sure that all stays on song. In the VFX world you just have to be talking with as many people as you can, as often as you can so that everybody knows what the refinements are going forward, and still allowing enough room for creativity and imagination in that process as well.”
The director participated in the selection of vendors, including Australia’s Fuel VFX.

“The story to some extent required a distinction and contrast between the different worlds where it takes place, so the fact that we were working with so many vendors was a positively advantageous; you’ve got all of their imaginations focused on specialist parts of the story, and our job is to make sure that it all goes together,” he said.
“Fuel were particularly adventurous in some of the work; they helped us conceptualise strange morphings and travels through space; the kind of very particular fantastical  challenges that are in this movie. They’ve been producing excellent work,” said Branagh. “We had a terrific Australian VFX producer, Diana Giorgiutti (Australia, the Matrix trilogy, Babe); the Australian end of things worked wonderfully well and we had a very personal connection with that side of things.”
The most obvious Australian connection is, of course, the film’s protagonist, former Home and Away star Chris Hemsworth. Unlike many of his peers now working in Hollywood, Hemsworth didn’t have a film career in Australia before moving to the US, yet Branagh claims the actor surpassed his high expectations.
“We needed a 6’4” blond guy who could fight like a beast and act like a god; who could somehow be sensitive enough to find the wisdom and beauty of spirit that can be learned by a man. I wanted his acting to be fearless, real, naturalistic, but sometimes unafraid of the size of performance that is required when you rule the galaxy. Chris worked really hard to provide all of that,” said Branagh.
What did the celebrated director learn from the Hollywood blockbuster experience? “To be patient and vigilant in pursuing your creative vision, and to listen, at all times, to listen, consider, and then follow your instincts.”

OVER THE ASGARD RAINBOW

When audiences worldwide flock to watch Thor this month, Chris Hemsworth won’t be the only Australian whose work they’ll see on screen. Encore spoke with Fuel’s VFX producer Jason Bath and VFX supervisor Paul Butterworth about their participation in the Hollywood blockbuster.
Fuel VFX was involved in the initial test phase of Thor in early 2009, and subsequently worked on Iron Man 2, another Marvel Studios project.
“The great thing about working with Marvel is that they have confidence in Fuel’s ability to do lots of different types of visual effects, and they are happy to give us opportunities on a variety of work,” explained Bath. “As with any client it’s not just about doing good work but about building trust – that you can handle complicated problems without handholding; interpret the clients brief properly; workshop problems  collaboratively; and of course, that you’re cost competitive. We enjoy building these relationships with our clients, and Marvel like to get to know their vendors, so we are a good fit.”
As strong as the client-vendor relationship might be, Bath admits that last year’s lowering of the PDV offset threshold from $5m to $500,000 was essential to secure work on Thor – as well as Marvel’s next film, Captain America: The First Avenger: “We could not have been cost-competitive under the current high exchange rate without it.”
Fuel’s direct contact was with the film’s visual effects supervisor Wes Sewell, described by Butterworth as “really supportive and encouraging”.
“He did the hard work of interpreting what Kenneth wants in visual effects and then workshopped that with us,” he explained.
Fuel VFX worked on some of the Bifröst shots. The Bifröst – the rainbow bridge used to travel between worlds – was interpreted in Thor as a wormhole that traverses the universe. Other sequences included Odin’s (Anthony Hopkins) chamber, which features an energy field that the King of Asgard sleeps beneath.
“The look of both the Bifröst and Odin’s chamber was designed within Fuel, but with a lot of input from Sewell and the studio,” said Bath. “The amount of work on Thor was less than on Iron Man 2, but a few of those shots were very complex and involved a lot of simulation work, which is traditionally hard to wrangle. Our technical challenges were creating fluid simulations that could be art-directed; we used fluids for both the Bifröst and Odin’s chamber shots. Part of the difficulty with solving these is that we had to ensure they would work in stereoscopic 3D.”
According to Bath, the biggest challenge for the team of 25 working on the project was of a creative nature, visually defining something that doesn’t exist.

“You can’t Google what these things look like in the real world and then match them – you need to extract what is in the heads of the various stakeholders and reach a consensus. In terms of how the Bifröst looked that was particularly demanding.”

Thor will be released on April 21.

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