If there is anything I’ve learned about being on film sets it’s this: You do more waiting around than anything else. Going into this set visit my goal was to get as many interviews as I could. Even if that meant grabbing interviews from set movers or craft services, of which we did. So when people integral to the production would walk to and from set, our wonderful handler Rachel, who also happens to be the Director of Marketing at American World Pictures, would grab them and away we went. A few such people included Visual Effects Supervisor Bo Opfer, Production Designer Bryan McBrien and Make-Up Artists Roxanne Pike and Josh Dunlap. Each of their parts in the production is crucial and generally happens when the cameras aren’t rolling. However, once the director yells “Action” their work is front and center.
The first of my conversations was a chat with Bo Opfer. Bo is the CEO and Creative Director for 9K9 Studios and serves as VFX Supervisor on “Mentryville.
HeyUGuys: What are some of the things audiences will get to see in the film that you are directly responsible for? Perhaps some of the aesthetics we’ll get to see on screen
Bo Opfer: A lot of the VFX work from what we are shooting now and where we’ll be in post will be greatly enhanced. The stuff we’ve contracted to do is pretty straight forward: keying and some set extension type stuff and, of course, the exploration on the actual spores. Probably the most noteworthy shot was last week. We were shooting at a historical farmhouse, which was one of the first houses built in California so we aren’t allowed to have any open flame around the premises. So we dressed it with a bunch of smoke and in post we will add flames and simulate the entire house engulfed in fire. So that’ll be a fun shot to pull off. There was another shot we pulled off Monday and Tuesday with a guy that gets a bullet entry wound to the front of his forehead and the back of his head gets blown out because he’s been infected by this biological agent. And part of the whole psychosis is that after it infects you, for a period of time, you go into this rabid rage. So the good guys come in and neutralize the subject. We are supposed to push in to the back of his head, which has been blown out, and we want to show these bacteria eating away at his brain. So, that’ll be fun. Those are two highlights for us. One in difficulty and one that is showing something that is believable.
HUG: Your FX house 9K9 has done work on some pretty big films which include “King Kong” and “The Day After Tomorrow”, how do you approach a smaller film like Mentryville, besides just budget?
BO: That’s always the trick, it doesn’t matter what the budget is, we always try to evaluate whether we can shoot something practical vs. something we can do in post. Probably the biggest challenge we run into with directors or anyone associated with any production is what their assumptions are with what we can do with CG. There’s pretty much nothing we can’t do, it’s just how much time and energy we want to spend to create something that we could have probably shot practical. We have another film right now that involves a lot of water. Water is very difficult. Yeah, we have a lot of computers and we can do a lot of stuff but it’s very time consuming. When we were originally talking to Jason about the farmhouse, it’s about finding an equal playing field where expectations are set. When he wants the house to blow up and be totally engulfed in flames, right away my head jumps into scenes that we’ve seen in movies. I can think of really great sequences like the end of “Gone with the Wind”. That’s what I have in my head when someone says I want this to be totally on fire. There is no way to really pull that off successfully in CG, we have to composite that on top of the image, so that’s big challenge for us is trying to get as close as we can with the expectations as well.
Next on the list were two interviews we did pretty much on the fly as we were walking around the set. We ran into Production Designer Bryan McBrien who was right in the middle of dressing a major set piece for the film when we walked in. He was more than happy to not only answer our questions but also give us a little tour through the process of designing this particular film. Bryan has worked on some pretty high profile films including “Star Trek”, “The Last Samurai” and “Iron Man 2” to name a few. Before I asked my few questions, Bryan basically introduced himself and then began talking about the design of the film. What resulted was an almost 8 minute long conversation with the enthusiastic designer. I decided to create an audio file of some of the conversation as opposed to writing it all out. Keep in mind that we were on a working set which was incredibly busy and loud so the audio isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be but you can get a sense of what is going on. I apologize to both our readers and to Bryan for the sound quality. In my honest defense, I was so interested in what he was saying that I forgot to hold the mic up while he was talking. Anyways, while you listen I have attached some images of the set in question so you can see a bigger picture forming.
HeyUGuys: You’ve got this set here, your working in this lab that’s actually a working lab. Does that present a challenge for you or an opportunity?
HUG: What drew you to this project?
Bryan: It was kind of a quick call really, around the 4th of July they were having some issues with the previous designer and I got a phone call during my vacation. They asked if I could come in on July 5th, I interviewed and we starting scouting on the 6th. It’s been non-stop since. I’ve been literally going 7 days a week 15 hours a day just keeping up.
HUG: Do you draw inspiration from other films when dressing a set?
Bryan: I think the funny part to this whole movie for me was, about a week in, Jason told me his big inspiration was “Minority Report.” I actually worked on “Minority Report.” The greenhouse was my set. I spent about 4½ months on that. We had no idea, so for him to tell me that that film was inspiration he was drawing for this film was great. I started laughing so hard I was like, “You gotta be kidding me, I worked on that film, I met my wife on that film.” Yeah man, we got real lucky, having worked on that and it being the inspiration we used. Alex McDowell was the designer for “Minority Report” and one of the things he did was, instead of going with everything brushed steel and very clean and very sci-fi, they stepped that back. That was sort of what inspired me pulling from that just to bring something different. So that’s when we brought in this copper patina. It’s something that I pointed out to Jason that maybe copper is the only metal that is able to withstand the evil toxicity of the spores. So that inspired this piece here.
Audio Discussion:
The last interview of the night came from two people who get to make pretty people ugly. Roxanne Pike and Josh Dunlap are the two make-up artists on Mentryville. It was interesting to meet them late in the evening as we had seen their handy work walking around the production all day. People in hospital gowns with green boils on their face and body would casually walk in and out of the lab or get in line for food at the food cart. Only in Hollywood right?
HeyUGuys: Tell us a little bit about your specific role in this production
Roxanne Pike: We get to do all the fun stuff. We get to make people sick and we are doing the symptoms of the outbreak, which can get pretty interesting.
Josh Dunlap: So basically [re: the spore] it starts out as a rash and then everyone reacts differently to it. It’s cool and unique the fact that not everyone reacts the same to the virus and how it spreads and develops. It’s definitely unpredictable.
HUG: So the scary people walking around the set are your doing?
JD: Yeah
RP: They are on their way out, knocking on deaths door. It’s really cool because since each character has a different effect with the virus, their immune system reacts differently, you get the freedom to say, “Oh, would my body react like this, or would I get those systems?” What we’re doing is being very realistic about our work here, so you can really put yourself in their shoes so you can relate to their struggle. We don’t want people to say “Oh that would never happen!”
HUG: I would imagine that the research would be a little bit gruesome?
JD: Kind of yeah. I mean you can do research as well but you can also pick from other things you done in the past as well. Things like broken capillaries or bruises, you take on your own personal history with injuries. Our ultimate goal is to try to make it real and with this, less is more. Trying to convey the effectiveness is definitely more character driven than gruesome.
RP: There are still those moments when we get that chill up our spines.
JD: it’s always a good day when someone says “Oh god, what happened there?”
RP: When anyone thinks it’s real, it’s a good thing.
HUG: How close have you been working with the visual effects team in attempting to figure out the practical vs. CG?
RP: It’s been going really well actually. We haven’t had any big issues when our work overlaps. We’ve been meshing really well. It’s definitely been interesting. In fact, we did a special piece where we had to…
JD: We sculpted a prosthetic for a character, I won’t say which character, but basically, the character gets a bullet wound to the back of the head. The exit wound flowers or explodes. So we are combing visual effects with practical stuff in that shot, so we have green screen element in the center [of the wound] and we’ll dress it and bloody it up. Then they’ll go in with the fx and add the spores and…
RP: So you’ll see our prosthetic piece on there, and in the center, you’ll get the actual visual representation and movement of the spores on the victim’s brain and stuff like that.
HUG: I assume this is the same bullet tracking shot Bo was talking to us about early to us? He mentioned that he likes to use practical elements as much as he can before resulting to visual effects. So that’s where you two come in.
JD: I really think they compliment each other. You go as far as you can with practical elements and than think, why not use the technology if it’s there. But I don’t think you should do everything digital because it’s still nice to have something …
RP: You need a good balance. It’s not one of those movies where everything is so obviously digital. No, we have good balance between practical and digital effects.
We noticed that Roxanne had what appeared to be a horrendous wound on her left forearm.
HUG: Practicing on yourself?
RP: Ha Ha. Yeah, you know when we’ve got downtime on the set we just play around.
JD: No, she’s actually profusely bleeding, she’s very method.
RP: Yeah all the chemicals in this lab are deteriorating my skin.
JD: People on set stop noticing after a while.
RP: They don’t ever believe me. I could probably actually hurt myself and no one would care.
JD: The downsides of our job.
Stay tuned for our final set-visit exclusive interview with Writer/Director Jason Dudek
All Images Courtesy of Brenden Toda
