'Breaking Dawn Part 2' VFX Interviews

Here's an oldie but a goodie. Art of VFX posted up interviews (from 2012, FYI) with two guys who worked on the special effects for Breaking Dawn Part 1 and 2.

Eric Leven, the VFX Supervisor from Tippett Studio, worked on the wolves.

How was the collaboration with director Bill Condon?

It was the best part of the film; Bill was incredibly collaborative and really allowed us to take the wolf scenes where we wanted to go with them. He also treated the wolves as characters, and not props or “assets”. His direction was “Jacob seems sad, but should be concerned” instead of “Jacob’s head is too low”. This is absolutely the best way to work with a director and I think made the scenes with the wolves as good as they could be.

What have you done on this show?

We created the all digital wolves for both BREAKING DAWN 1 and 2.

Can you tell us more about the snowflakes creation?

The snowflakes we generated for only for sticking in the wolves’ fur, and our effects animation team expanded on the work they first did in ECLIPSE.

How did you create the various digital doubles?

There were scans made of all the actors on the set, and we used those as the basis for our digital doubles. For one reason or another, the scans end up never working 100% correctly, so we also have lots of reference pictures of the actors. Then our sculptors use the difference references to create the final digital doubles.

Laurent Spillemaecker, Compositing Supervisor from Rodeo FX, worked on some external scenes.

What have you done on this show?

We did a Medieval Russian village set extension as well as a pretty gruesome beheading scene in the village. We also created an illusion of a Brazilian forest, a set extension for the main character’s dream house and an establishing shot for Cairo, Egypt.

How did you create the jungle environment?

We used a variety of techniques to create the jungle scene: our live VFX crew actually flew down to Costa Rica to gather practical elements for us. We used a combination of these and matte painting techniques to create the scene. We then added some particles and motion graphics to make it look more alive.

What references and indications did you received from the production to create the old village?

They gave us a lot of creative freedom throughout the whole process. Our only directive was that we had to instantly recognize that we were in Russian by looking at the castle.

Full interviews here and here.

via ArtOfVFX