Spoiler Alert! How Intelligent Creatures Used Blackmagic Design Fusion Studio for the Horror Film's VFX

Few popular horror movies are more severe than The Witch, a period-accurate supernatural drama that made the transition from film-festival darling to multiplex hit based on a savvy campaign by distributor A24.

The film itself is a smoldering, low-key study of life in the wilds of New England after one family is excommunicated from a 17th century Puritan plantation. Living in isolation, they are visited by evil, including the abduction and sacrifice of an infant, a demonic possession, and the presence of a very unsettling goat, Black Philip, who apparently speaks to the family's young twins.

The violent climax gives way to a haunting coda set deep in the woods where — SPOILER ALERT! — the adolescent daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, pictured above), laughs and laughs as she finally joins the witches' coven.

Toronto post house Intelligent Creatures executed the film's VFX work in Blackmagic Design Fusion Studio. Here's how the team accomplished two key shots for the film, in the words of Intelligent Creatures compositing supervisor Eric Doiron.

The Witch blue-screen work

The Witch was a fun project to work on because we got to really play up some of the spookiness. We added supernatural elements to the film to fully capture the dark spirit of witchcraft and the accompanying paranoia of the times. For example, we added levitation to a scene using Fusion Studio’s rotoscoping, paint and keying tools. With one plate shot on location and the other on a blue-screen stage, we used standard wire rigs as well as a jib rig to lift and rotate things simultaneously. We used Fusion Studio to key each of the six levitating objects and perform extensive wire- and rig-removal and blue-screen composites. In some cases, Fusion Studio’s grid warp tool was used to animate patches of skin over the rigs. — Eric Doiron

The Witch

Click the image above to load a higher-resolution version.

We also used Fusion Studio in a pivotal scene that involved an actor being hit by a cascade of logs. We started with a plate of logs falling onto a dummy, which allowed us to get a natural interaction of the logs hitting, bouncing off and coming to rest. We then filmed a clean plate of the actor leaning against the pile and reacting. Using Fusion Studio, we painstakingly rotoscoped each of the falling logs to combine the two plates. Black Phillip was in the scene as well, so we filmed a plate of the goat, whose lead and handler had to be removed, and then used Fusion Studio’s paint and roto tools to composite the goat into the final shot. Then the finishing touch was a gash and blood-trickle on the actor’s forehead to really sell the impact. — Eric Doiron