For the horror/thriller One Missed Call Zoic Studios in Vancouver was charged with creating the visual effects. And then once the initial effects were down the production decided it had to go back to the drawing board to ramp up the impact of the film, leaving much of this in the hands of Zoic. We spoke with Zoic’s Patti Gannon and Randy Goux, visual effects supervisors on the film, about the creative VFX challenges on the film that had to change course late in the game with the same deadline and minimal increase in budget.

This is a remake of the Japanese movie Chakusin Ari. How did that film influence this one?
Randy Goux: The movie wasn’t a direct copy of the Japanese movie. We weren’t told to watch the original. Even the director decided not to watch the original in order to make it his own.

Initially what was the creative direction for the effects?
RG: The producers wanted to go real subtle and creepy which is a delicate thing to do when you are trying to make a movie hat scares the beejesus out of the viewer. That was the mode when we shot it: to shoot as many scenes as we can and try and think about the visual effects in a real subtle way. Of course you don’t know how that is going to turn out until you see it in the cut. Once the movie was cut for the first round with the effects, everyone agreed that we needed to have more of an impact.

A lot of the shots needed visual effects mojo. For one of the characters, Monster Ellie, they had a prosthetic on her face which looked cool but it turned out it didn’t have enough impact. So after seeing the cut everyone realized that it needed more impact and so we had to replace that with CG. So we did a lot of enhancing or replacing the prosthetics that were shot.

Patti Gannon: Sometimes it was something completely different. They did the cut of the show and then decided there wasn’t enough scare in there. Everything was too subtle. So there was a lot of going back to the creative drawing board and re-doing everything that was not scary enough. So we ramped that up a lot. It was changing creative direction after we had shot. We added a lot of CG to enhance the scary moments, amping up what was there, but all within a PG-13 goal, which can be a little difficult.

It was up to us to make things feel a lot eerier and scarier based on what was shot. Replaced prosthetic, a lot of CG faces, added a CG baby at the end, all of which came up at the end when they found that the movie wasn’t exactly what they were hoping it would be.

How different is it to have a job like this change direction so late in the process?
RG: This is something that creeps up sometimes when you are doing visual effects. It’s a different mode you have to get into. When you are requested to re-conceptualize things with a deadline looming it is a different world to design on the fly. We were given a lot of creative license by the director and producer to put on our creative hats and make something that looks really cool.

We learned a lot about reacting to these sorts of situations. The last thing you want to do is get frustrated by a change like that when you have a huge pipeline like that and a huge crew that is getting out these changes as fast as possible. It took a lot of discipline and cooperation with the producers who understood what we were going through. It could have gone really bad if one side or the other got frustrated with the changes and having to shift course on a shot with a completely different idea.

PG: But all within the same deadline, which is always problematic. It was fun because we could forth designs and ideas but the deadline made it difficult to actual realize all those changes in such a short period of time, which in the end I think we were successful in doing.

Talk about the character of Monster Ellie, how she was created and then the climatic scene in which she disintegrates.
PG: They decided that the actress originally cast to play Monster Ellie didn’t work. So all of those scenes were re-shot with another actress on greenscreen and we then had to replace the original actress in the shot plates. Then they decided that the second actress didn’t look scary enough so we had to add a CG face on the new actress to make it scarier. So that’s how things evolved.


RG: The fleshing off of the face was the real challenge. It is happening in scene where there is almost a tornado happening in a living room. It was a real messy scene to tell the story on. We went through a lot of iterations about how you actually disintegrate somebody and have it scare the crap out of people.

The disintegration was similar to sand blowing away but it would be more like pieces of her face would start to flush away in kind of like a sandman type of way. The real challenge of that scene was the camera was so frantic and there was so much movement going on with the camera, the actors and the debris. When you saw the Sandman in Spider-man 3 it’s a really graceful camera move. But this wasn’t the case. Every frame was different. There was a lot of 3D tracking, a lot of 3D tracking based on a 2D shake. We would do a pre-comp in 2D, having that shaky double image, and then that would go over to 3D where we would track what the compositor had down to then add our particles.

PG: The other thing about the monster character in the last scene is they wanted to give her surreal movement so we did a lot of 2D manipulation of the footage for speed changes, jumping forward, not-quite-real movements on the monster to make her feel more eerie. In almost all cases there is a lot of camera movement and of course there was no motion control used so there was a lot of painting out of the real actress and doing a greenscreen comp. With the new actress we did a lot of 2D manipulation of the footage to give her this surreal movement, which we then passed off to the 3D department to matchmove her face to match that staccato, double-image, warped, frenetic movement.

Then there were all the problems that cropped up when you are trying to do this on plates that were always intended to be used practically where we’d just be enhancing debris and not intended to have so much CG in it. So it was a task to matchmove all this new stuff and match the lighting to the practical plates. It was a long process.


What tools were you using for the CG and what was the system for making Monster Ellie disintegrate?
We used Maya and some custom tools that we wrote up here in computer that we wrote into the fluid system. We wrote some custom tools to get that fluid system to work faster for us. It was a real computational nightmare when you get into using fluids. So it was a combination of particles and our Zoic fluid system to get that natural flow.

We used Shake 4 on Linux for most of our compositing though a little Combustion as well, and all of our tracking is done in Boujou.


Talk about the opening sequence where the camera pulls up from the city streets, travels hundreds of miles in seconds of film time, but with the passage of three days.
RG: One of the opening shots is one the director wanted that starts with a montage of people talking on the cell phones and then the camera starts to pull out almost like it is on a helicopter, then the speed ramps up and it pulls back through about ten blocks then the outskirts of the city through suburbia and some tress to a house party. It’s also a time-lapse of three days so the sun is going up and down while the camera moves, the lights on all the buildings are going on and off. The city traffic speeds up with the time lapse as well. It’s a pretty big shot and it was a nice stylized moment the director wanted to get in there to add some flare to the beginning of the movie.

We did a handoff from a practical plate to a CG city. We didn’t do a lot of cheats. We were flying through city streets about 10 stories high so you really have to stay in the 3D realm. The usual path of having a matte painting is thrown out the window because you are doing lots of perspective changes. So we built out the buildings in 3D, had hundreds of photographs of buildings and did a lot of texture mapping, had different texture maps for day and night and did swapping of the animated textures when the lights are going on and off.


With a horror film like this, how difficult was it to maintain the PG-13 movie that was demanded by the production?
PG: All along they wanted a PG-13 rating, period. As a visual effects artist working on it that was a little unfortunately because we had to restrain ourselves a little. There’s a train sequence where the main character falls off a pedestrian overpass and gets slammed into by a moving train. And we built it out and had the impact of a CG train into a CG double. The impact was there and they had to cut it. They were going for a scary movie but some of the more impactful stuff had to be cut out due to the ratings issue. They did shoot a lot of this stuff both ways and I think the intention was to make an unrated DVD out of it. There’s a scene where one character, Brian, goes to a construction explosion and a piece of reebarb impales him in the chest. In the early cuts of the movie that moment had a lot of impact but, unfortunately, that had to go in order for the rating. In the end the producers got the PG-13 rating thy wanted but some of the impactful moments were left out.