Making Maleficent Fly

Maleficent’s Oscar-nominated Visual Effects Supervisor Carey Villegas speaks with Creative COW about his work creating the world of the iconic Disney villain, coordinating multiple effects houses on every one of over 1500 shots, and the challenges of creating realistic effects.

I know you were the VFX supervisor on Alice in Wonderland, which was another very visually rich, world creation, and not just a movie story being told, but a world being built. How would you compare your role on those two?

I’ve collaborated with Robert Stromberg before in his role as art director, on a number of projects over the years, including Alice in Wonderland. Our challenge with that was the same as for Maleficent: how to create these magical, fanciful environments, while still making them feel kind of realistic and believable.

In the case of Alice in Wonderland, we were going for much more stylized feel. That was primarily done within a green environment with very few set pieces. In that way, the film was designed more in post-production.

This time, we wanted to ground it a little bit more in reality — still having the fanciful things that we had in Alice in Wonderland, but to also have more practical things to ground it, starting with more sets and more locations.

What’s the role of effects for a fantasy movie at the more realistic end of the spectrum? That’s a lot of different threads to try to be weaving.

I’ve done a lot of projects with invisible types of effects, for instance, Cast Away. Movies like that aren’t trying to showcase any particular visual effects. You’re just trying to extend the world, make it more believable, and also do things that may not be practical for actors to do, or locations to go to. So when you get into an Alice in Wonderland-style film, or a film like Maleficent, the great thing is that you’re really trying to say, “Wow look at me.”

We’re always striving to bring realism to some of these things that we’re creating entirely on the computer. You can do that in a number of ways, whether it’s performance capture or motion capture, or even if you’re doing traditional key frame style animation. It really depends on the characters.

The key for me on this particular show was that there are so many different characters. For example, there are 15 or 16 different types of fairies, and within each of those classes, there were variations on them. That meant creating 40 or 50 different-looking characters, and all kind of families of characters.

Creative COW | Read the Full Article