VFX: Sucker Punch
Miguel Gonzalez spoke with US director Zack Snyder about Sucker Punch, the first film he’s conceived from beginning to end. It’s also another step in his successful relationship with Australia’s Animal Logic.
Sucker Punch is Zack Snyder’s fifth film, but only the first one not to be adapted from existing material. It’s an original script co-written with Steve Shibuya; it tells the story of Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a teenager locked up by her stepfather in a psychiatric hospital. With the help of her inmate friends (including Abbie Cornish) she’ll have to enter and conquer a series of fantasy worlds in order to escape her real life prison before being lobotomised by her captors.
Snyder admits that, being his own script, he felt more pressure working on Sucker Punch, at least in the early stages.
“But once it’s written, the script takes a life of its own, and I have to rustle with it as if it was any other project. With this story there was a great sense of freedom and visualy, we got to stretch our imagination and just do whatever the hell was cool; people are going to find a completely unrestrained, unencumbered visual feast,” he explained.
The film was 100 percent shot in a studio, and features extensive use of CGI to create the fantasy sequences: “I think I have a certified visual effects vocabulary, with all the work I’ve done recently. Making Legend of the Guardians helped me be able to work in this fully computer-generated world,” said Snyder.
Part of that VFX vocabulary Snyder learned through his collaboration with Animal Logic. Together, they created the animated Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole – the eight highest grossing Australian project of all time, with U$140m worldwide.
“With Sucker Punch, I just said ‘Animal Logic has to do a sequence, there’s no two ways about it’. That was one of the things that were not up for discussion. Having done Legend… together, I thought they’d be good for the dragon sequence.
“It was a nice sort of collaboration, from design all the way through to realising each of the VFX shots; the directive was to create a fantasy world with realistic touches but didn’t sacrifice either of these aspects,” said Snyder.
Sucker Punch, was shot in Vancouver, one of Australia’s fiercest competitors in terms of attracting runaway productions. It’s Hollywood’s favourite discount filmmaking destination, particularly for science fiction/action projects.
“The thing about Vancouver is that I know the crews so well [having shot Watchmen there, in addition to 300 and Dawn of the Dead in Montreal and Toronto, respectively]. I know the talent base is so strong and it’s an easy place for me to work,” said Snyder.
How about shooting in Australia one day?
“We’ve talked about it a bunch of times but it hasn’t worked out yet. I’m sure it will… I’ve continued to have a strong relationship with Australia; first with Animal Logic as a VFX vendor, and now with my Sucker Punch cast. With them I found that Australian ladies are really emotionally available; they are able to be strong, but they don’t shy away from those emotional moments…they really go after them with all their being.”
“I feel a really strong connection to the Australian motion picture talent pool, and it’s one that I don’t have a desire to or I see changing in the future,” he said. “I don’t know wheter Animal Logic will work on [my next project] Superman: Man of Steel, but I’d certainly be open to that.”
LIGHT MY FIRE
One of the fantasy worlds in Sucker Punch, was created by Snyder’s Australian vendor and partner of choice – Animal Logic. VFX supervisor Andy Brown discussed how the company played with fire without getting burned.
Approximately 150 Animal Logic artists worked on Sucker Punch, a project which VFX supervisor Andy Brown considers “one of the more complex film jobs” the company has ever undertaken.
Animal Logic worked on the dragon sequence; a selfcontained 12-minute quest in which the girls battle it out with orcs, knights and a fire-breathing dragon.
Sucker Punch is the third collaboration between Snyder and Animal Logic, following the stylised graphic novel adaptation 300 and the first Australian 3D CG-animated feature, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of
Ga’Hoole. For this film, the company produced a considerable amount of concept art, designing and developing the mother and baby dragons, as well as the volcanic environment and the castle.
“We did get a handover brief from the production designer Rick Carter and his team, and some development concepts from Aaron Simms, which we used as a starting point,” explained Brown. “We spent a
couple of months designing the mother dragon. Initially we started with 2D sketches and then progressed onto sculpting a prototype dragon in Z-brush, which is a real time digital sculpting tool that we used to explore
different anatomical ideas in 3D. ”
The live action was shot on a green screen stage in Vancouver and the sets formed only a small section of what the environments ultimately became. The two architectural styles used in the set builds mixed Moorish
arches and interiors with a medieval exterior.
“We wanted to build up a layered sense of history to the place with occupants leaving their mark on the building,” said Brown. “Being orcs, the more recent occupants have added their own less sophisticated additions to the castle, which we called ‘Orchitecture’.”
Where there’s dragons, there’s fire… and fire was the most complex and challenging element for Animal Logic, which used its in-house fluid simulator Snap – a tool originally developed for Legend of the Guardians.
“Sucker Punch needed fire on a much larger scale. It pushed our sim farm to the limits. Some of our fluid simulations would run for days at a time!” said Brown.
Another challenge was the creation and use of digital doubles of the five main characters throughout the dragon sequence.
“There is one shot where we see the inscription on Baby Doll’s sword; that shot uses a full CG digital double and she gets very close to camera. Our R&D department wrote a custom hair simulation tool called Alfro. This was our first foray into creating digital doubles with long hair, so Alfro was a useful tool for our production,” explained Brown.
Two CG creatures were also created: mother dragon and baby dragon.. Both represented an opportunity to build and animate complex CG creatures to a level never done before by the company.
“The scales of our dragon were important. R&D wrote a tool to rig and simulate scales that slid across the body of the dragon, without stretching,” said Brown.
Sucker Punch will be released on April 7.
that is an INSANELY amazing trailer
love it!!
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i loved this scene, the dragon was so amazing looking especally with its full wing span. i loved the movie and have seen it 6 times now and i see something new everytime.
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