Method Studios: VFX for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

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| June 25, 2012 | 9:38 pm or 9:38 pm GMT

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from the Creative COW article:

Randy Goux, Visual Effects Supervisor at Method Studios in Vancouver most recently supervised the VFX company's work on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, directed by Timur Bekmambetox. Goux's other supervisor credits at Method include Contagion, Red, G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra and Tooth Fairy. Cult TV hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer marked the start of Goux's career in visual effects. His extensive film experience include supervisory roles on The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, Invictus, Get Smart, Pathfinder, Constantine and Serenity. He has previously worked at WETA, ESC and POP.

Randy Goux shared his experiences on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter with Creative COW.

Method Studios was approached by Fox's visual effects team to work on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. They had a pretty ambitious part of the movie they were looking to solve. It was very tasty stuff - a train sequence with burning bridges, full CG fire, all in stereo. As CG artists, this is the kind of meaty work you really want to go after.

Three major houses worked on the VFX for Abraham Lincoln. WETA had a pretty substantial sequence, dealing with a stampede and Spin in Toronto dealt with the Civil War sequences. We worked on this 8-minute train sequence, during which Lincoln and his partner Will are battling vampires on top of a moving train boxcar. In the second half of that sequence, the train goes over a trestle bridge that has been sabotaged and set afire. We also created five or six large CG environment shots, including a digital crowd of 5,000 people listening to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Before we were awarded the job, we flew down to New Orleans and had a dinner with [director] Timur [Bekmambetov]. The dinner was amazing. It was a half social/half technical dinner. He talked to us about how he makes movies and how he likes to constantly explore things creatively. It can be a bit nerve-wracking when the director wants to leave all options on the table, but that's what made it exciting to us. He wanted to know a lot about what we were doing, to make sure that he wasn't going to ask us to do something that wasn't realistic and whether he could push us somewhere that we could actually achieve.

That's exactly what happened. We were pushed very far but he wasn't asking for anything impossible. We did lots of look-dev all last summer, honing the effects before editorial got the sequence together. By then, he had an idea of what we were capable of and pushed us even more.

We started serious look-development just as they finished shooting, so Timur could really focus on what we were doing. As visual effects supervisor for Method, I faced going down a creative path while making sure that we don't promise a technique that'll break the bank. There were numerous factors that made the battle sequence on top of the boxcar challenging. The sequence takes place at night, so there's a nighttime grade on top of it. Smoke is another major component. Smoke is constantly barreling through the scene, and the humans and vampires are constantly going in and out of it. We knew we couldn't shoot with smoke; when you do, you usually end up replacing it with CG smoke. The train is also going through a forest, and moonlight casts shadows of all the branches and foliage of the forest onto the smoke, vampires and people. Plus there are the burning embers from the locomotive. All these factors combine to create a really tense, really dramatic feel with a handheld camera and hand-to-hand combat.

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Categories:

• Visual Effects

Tags:

• abraham lincoln: vampire hunter
• method studios
• randy goux