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eyeon speaks with Gudrun Heinze, of Switch VFX, about their
work on the SAW Series
SAW is an American horror
franchise that currently consists of six films. The franchise
began with the 2003 short film, which was created by director
James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell to potentially pitch
it as a feature film—which was successfully done in 2004 with
the first feature film being released at the Sundance Film
Festival and released theatrically the following October. The
sequels have been released subsequently every October, the
Friday before Halloween.
The franchise revolves around
the fictional character of John Kramer, also called the
'JigSAW Killer', introduced briefly in SAW and in more detail
in SAW II, who would rather than kill his victims outright,
traps them in situations, which he calls 'tests' or 'games',
to test their will to live via physical or psychological
torture. Despite the fact that John was murdered in SAW III,
the films continue to focus on the posthumous effects of the
JigSAW Killer and his apprentices while showing more of John's
character via flashbacks. |
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This is Switch's story...
SwitchVFX has been pleased to work on SAW III, SAW IV, SAW
V and most recently on SAW VI. On SAW VI we completed about
190 shots, about half of the shots completed with Fusion.
The SAW franchise is about invisibly integrating the
visual effects with the on set "traps" and prosthetics, to
help with continuity, provide seamless transitions from scene
to scene and lopping off a multitude of body parts.
The Fusion work on SAW VI was done by Gudrun Heinze, Jef
Lon, Jason Kozsurek, Jeff Bruneel, Barb Benoit and Joel
Skeete, The VFX Supervisor was Jon Campfens.
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The SAW Titles were
done completely in Fusion, based on an After Effects mock-up
provided by the director, Kevin Greutert. After the basic
titles cards were created & weathered in Adobe Photoshop
they were imported into Fusion. The director wanted a manic
twitch to affect certain letters in the titles. After trying
different automated jitter techniques we settled on hand
animating the individual letters with the transform tools. We
used Fusion's 3d environment to put the titles over the
background, which always gives a more interesting feel with
the lights & camera moves. The Coordinate Space tool (in
the Warp section) gave the titles a neat lens baby effect. The
combination of the Grid Warp tool with the Displace tool was
an easy-to-use technique to warp the titles to give them
organic movement.
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Some of
the juicier effects were a series of shots making it look like
the Simone character's arm had cut her arm off. The actress
had a blue screen sock on the portion of the arm that needed
to be removed and replaced with a bloody stump, and later in
the film with a bandage
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In the first
arm removal shot, we had to clean up the background to remove
her blue screened arm. We created a clean plate with the Paint
Tool, tracked it and rotoed her and the foreground table back
on top minus the blue screened arm. The Rotoscoping tools are
great in v5 & 6 of Fusion. They're intuitive to use and
flexible especially with the outer polyline option for
sections of your roto that need a softer edge. Production (or
Jon?) had shot a series of stills of arm stumps from different
positions and angles. We chose the best one for the shot, did
some paintwork with the Paint tool, colour corrected it, and
added a dangling bit of animated flesh from our inhouse
library of shot stock. We then manually tracked the new arm
stump to her waving arm. Using the RealSmartMotion Blur tool
gave it the right motion blurred look and adding grain made if
fit into the shot. Blood spray coming off her bloody stump was
a combination of an element made in maya blended with a live
action blood spray. In other shots from this scene we used the
Fusion particles to add blood drops falling from the stump.
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In the same scene
the bolts screwing into the characters heads had to be made
more disturbing - we gave the bolts the look of penetrating
deeper into their skulls, with more blood welling up and
giving the prosthetic head a more realistic look. Sometimes
the bolts needed to turn in the opposite direction. The shots
on SAW are often about taking a live action plate and making
it better and the bolt shots are an appropriate example of
this. It's the perfect vehicle for Fusion and doesn't need
fancy plugins or tools. In this case it was about finding gory
bloody images, many which had been shot on set, and
manipulating them with colour correct, displacement, blurs,
and masks.
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The Acid Room Trap
shows a man injected with acid and its fatal outcome. The acid
is eating him from the inside out, exposing his newly
uncovered and melting organs as his shirt is bloodied and also
eaten away. This series of shots required us to add steam from
the burning acid. Blood had to be added to his shirt and extra
shirt deterioraton was necessary as the scene progresses.
Since the man is behind bars in this scene, there was lots of
roto, again using the outer polyline feature. Stock smoke we
had on hand (purchased and inhouse stock) was keyed, colour
corrected, resized and tracked. The man's body and shirt were
painted to show the effect of the acid and tracked to the
shot, with a bit more Grid Warping thrown in to show the
interior organs slowly oozing towards the floor.
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In the Breathing
Room trap we had to make it look like the pads that were
squeezing the man were closer together then shot, hard enough
to squish him fatally. Fusion was used on some of the shots,
and After Effects on others in this scene. The Grid Warp tool
was used predominantly, it's incredibly quick and easy to use
compared to warpers in other compositing packages. To quote
artist Jason Kozsurek: It got the job done.
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In the final Jaw Trap, we had to remove the
rubber prosthetic bit in the Hoffmann's mouth to show that he
would have to physically tear apart his mouth to escape the
trap. First we removed the rubber prongs which were shaking
and not sitting straight, and rebuilt the mouth since the new
Maya generated 3d prongs were going to be placed differently.
Rebuilding the mouth involved painting frames with Fusion's
paint tool and tracking them to the mouth. Facial tears, extra
stock blood and 3d generated prongs were added afterwards.
Again we used onset stills of gore, painted and tracked the
new elements in. We used the Grid Warp tool extensively in
these shots because we wanted the 3d prongs look like they
were interacting with Hoffmann's mouth, pulling it in
unnatural, about to be torn shapes.
The final jaw shot needed a new mouth interior
so we could see right into his jaw as he screams in pain. The
gory prosthetic applied to the actor started us off, but
obviously we couldn't see through the nonexistent tears into
his mouth so a 3d mouth interior was created by Maya artist
David Alexander. We added a ReelSmart motion blur tool to the
3d element to give it the needed motion blur - it's faster
often for the fusioneers to add motion blur then 3d - it gives
us the flexibility to control motion blur ourselves. We
attached two meaty bits from the onset stills to the top and
bottom of his mouth at the torn area to show that he had
serrated the edge of his flesh. Those bits were tracked to his
face, colour corrected to match, and a displacement tool added
so that any movements the character made with his real face
could be transmitted to the patch to make it look more
organic.
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There are lots of great features in Fusion to
make the workflow fast and easy: the Add Favorites is a great
shortcut when you're jumping from comp to comp,and the sobel
tool in the filters that is an edge detection filter very
useful with greenscreen comps and creating light wraps. It's
the little tools that help like the Sticky Notes tool. One of
the artists had to leave before some shots were approved and
it was a nice and easy way to note different aspects of the
work-flow so if revisions were needed it was obvious for the
next artist to pick up on the fly. We love running Fusion X64
6.0. Since we added extra ram last year we can work at 2k and
HD resolution projects without resorting to using lower res
proxies for speed. |
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| Make sure to check out the Switch VFX
website for more information. |
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