The Orphanage adopts a creature with "The Host"

By Michael Guillen

At last year’s Cannes Film Festival — where Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host” got a big boost from the New York Times’ enthusiasm — Mike DeAngelo at Nerve wrote that “the first appearance of the monster ranks among the most thrilling and imaginative action sequences in recent memory.” DeAngelo was speaking of course about “scene RB06,” which is how The Orphanage’s Animation Supervisor Webster Colcord and Visual Effects Producer Arin Scott Finger coin the early reveal rampage on the Han riverbank. In an interview with the two of them held at The Orphanage in the Presidio last week, they advised that RB06 was one of the first scenes they worked on and, ultimately, the last: “the infamous, hardest shot, that usually takes forever,” but which they delivered to Director Bong on time and under budget.

Originally, “The Host” was to be handled by Weta Digital in New Zealand, but at the time Peter Jackson had them working full steam on “that other big beast of a movie,” King Kong, and Weta simply didn’t have the capacity to handle the work, even though the creature design and initial maquette were produced there. They had to shop elsewhere for CGI. And JaeWook Park — who worked at The Orphanage — had an indirect relationship with Director Bong through an old schoolmate. Director Bong contacted JaeWook, and soon director Bong and producer Joh Neung-Yeon visited The Orphanage to tour the facility. Three weeks later, Orphanage execs Marc Sadeghi, Executive Producer, and Stu Maschwitz, co-founder and Visual Effects Supervisor/Director flew to Korea, negotiated a price, and signed onto the film. Having worked successfully with Zhang Yimou earlier on “Hero,” The Orphanage was keen on their inroads to the Asian market.

The Orphanage in the past had been known as a “hard surfaces” shop, specializing in particle effects, virtual set extensions, and hard surface models, like the helicopters in “The Day After Tomorrow.” For their first big foray into a full-on creature show, The Orphanage needed to fabricate a character and creature animation department. Webster Colcord was brought on to be Animation Supervisor and Corey Rosen was brought on to be Creature Supervisor, not just for “The Host,” but for the whole creature department, which meant rigging, modeling, and ultimately setting up the controls that the animators use to bring the creature to life in terms of performance.

At 117 shots with a six-month animation schedule, Colcord required ten animators and a crew of five people to do rigging and set-up. Jang Hee-Chul, the Korean creature designer, actually sculpted the Weta model, working with their sculptors. Once the model was received and scanned at The Orphanage, Corey Rosen set up the different controls to move the geometry and to make it look organic. Webster Colcord and Arin Finger sat down with me to talk about the process.

SF360: Did Director Bong have an image of the creature in his mind and then The Orphanage set out to capture his image? How does that work?

Arin Finger: I believe he had a general idea of it. This movie came from a dream he had as a kid: he was fishing in the Han River and he saw this image of this creature hanging from the bridge. I think originally he had some sketches for it, but then he hired on Hee-Chul, this designer who gave him a million different varieties of what this thing looked like. The design was always evolving and changing as Colcord and Corey [Rosen and] their teams brought it to life. They were able to give it more character because of the way it walked. They did some early animatic tests in Korea just for the general kind of pacing and how this thing would look, but they didn’t really flesh out the design in terms of performance until Colcord’s and Corey’s team brought it to life.

SF360: The opening sequence is absolutely amazing. One of the best things in cinema in a long time. The weight of the creature is very notable. How do you create weight?

Webster Colcord: That first shot was one of the first ones that we got the plates in for and one of the last ones. So one of the first ones to start and one of the last ones to finish. A schedule buster. There were fewer shots on this show than a major feature show that you see in the theaters these days but the shots were really long, especially that one, which was 1,300 something odd. That was animated by Andrew Schneider who was one of two lead animators on the project and myself troubleshooting the shot. First off, what we started with was trying to figure out how this creature would motivate, how it would run or walk, so we looked at references in real life. For the weight of the tail section of the creature, we looked at an elephant seal because basically it’s just a big tube of meat and fat. For what is basically a torso with no legs walking, we looked at Johnny Eck from ‘Freaks.’ We looked at that and we found another reference for somebody walking with no legs and so we combined those two ideas to get this sort of run that will lift all that mass up off the ground but only in a full gallop. That was a real challenge because it’s an almost impossible design. We came up with this methodology or this thinking that — in terms of performance — the creature would only get its tail section up off the ground when it’s at a full run and the rest of the time it just falls flat and has to drag its big heavy back and tail around.

SF360: Its stumbling clumsiness added so much character and personality to the creature.

Colcord: That was the idea that we pitched at Director Bong. He already had that idea. Early on in the movie we wanted the creature to be more clumsy on land and, as the film goes along, it gets its legs.

SF360: How did you create the setting of the Han riverside?

Colcord: Arin was actually there.

SF360: Is it actual footage of the area and then you’re adding in the creature?

Finger: Exactly. What they do is they shoot what they call the background plate for it. They work off of storyboards and storyboard all the key scenes, shot by shot, frame by frame, of the key poses to all the action. It starts off with a script, right? The script is all the dialogue for it. Then they take that script and they storyboard out all the shots. They envision what the angles are. [Using his fingers to simulate the square of a camera lens.] Is that a two-shot of you guys here? Is it a single close-up of you? They frame out, board out, every single part of that movie. Then what they do is they decide a shooting schedule for it and they decide which scenes they’re going to shoot on what day. When they do that, they say, ‘We’re going to shoot page 15 of the script, scene 30,’ whatever, and they’ll have the storyboards for that. They’ll post up the storyboards that they’re going to shoot for the day. They’ll go to the location that’s specified. Then they’ll start shooting it. They’ll block out the action, if there [are] characters involved or if it’s all the creature’s performance, they’ll stage out what the action is. They’ll shoot that plate, and then ultimately what happens, they get that film scanned digitally and then send it back to us. Then we go through a process called match moving, which is basically mimicking the live action camera that was shot on set into the computer and that’s where we add our creature to it.

Colcord: As a matter of fact for that shot — RB06 — the big opening shot where the creature runs along the riverbank, they had a guy on a motorcycle that they used for timing. The guy on the motorcycle would ride up the edge and go across and go down and that was what was used as a guide for the steady camera.

SF360: The film’s effects were seamless; especially with the creature running amok in between the running crowds. How did you do that?

Colcord: That was a trick. If you look carefully at that shot you’ll see that she probably goes right through some people?

SF360: I was too terrified to notice.

Colcord: A lot of that falls on our roto department. They actually go in and paint out people that need to be in front of the creature. If they need to sandwich something into the background plate, the roto department will actually paint an outline of them. Our roto department head is Aaron Rhodes. He did a great job on this film. Then other people who actually have to interact with the creature become digital doubles. There’s the fat kid who gets eaten by the creature, we made a digital double of him when he’s in the creature’s mouth. There was a kid who got tossed through the air in that shot and he was a digital double. Another thing interesting about — and Arin can speak to this — about the schedule on this movie, we were working on ‘Superman Returns’ at the same time that we were working on ‘The Host,’ and usually most of the special effects work is done in post-production on your average Hollywood film when they’re done shooting. On this film, the live-action schedule got slid and our schedule stayed locked so that we were overlapping quite a bit. They were actually shooting plates for shots that we were scheduled to work on a week before we were scheduled to work on them. Meanwhile we’re working on fully-rendered shots at the same time, so the director was able to — it’s not an ideal in terms of a producer’s schedule but artistically — I think the director was able to see the creature evolve as an actor while he’s shooting the scenes for the creature. He knew better what the creature could do and was able to feel that out. It was really rough for us and for them but ultimately it probably added to the way he staged the shots.

SF360: As you’re developing the creature and implementing your effects, how was Director Bong reacting? You were in constant communication, I assume. Was he pleased with how you were evolving the creature?

Finger: Absolutely. This was an interesting process as well because — as Webster was saying — we were in production here while the film was being shot so we had our CG supervisor, Shadi Almassizadeh, back here in San Francisco while Kevin Rafferty, the visual effects supervisor, was there shooting the plates with Director Bong and the film crew there. While we were in two different places, we were sending shots. Usually Kevin Rafferty sees everything that goes out of the studio before it gets to Director Bong because he’s the ultimate sign-off on this is okay to show him now. While Kevin and Shadi were sending the files back and forth to each other via FTP, your standard file transfer protocol, Kevin would review the shots and would actually take the shots on his laptop to Director Bong and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this? We’re working on this. We’re blocking this out.’ That was ultimately the best written review because Kevin would be right there, and Director Bong would be pointing at things and whatnot. It started out initially with just getting notes back to re-review the stuff but then it ultimately evolved to the director actually projecting our shot at the studio called HFR (Hollywood Film Recorder) in Korea. They would project out our daily shots in 2K resolution on this big projection screen and then we would have Director Bong looking at the shot projected, pointing out [comments] in an interactive session while the shot’s playing. The international liaison, the guy I was mostly working with throughout the entire project, Louis Kim, he would be translating what Director Bong was saying. We would get that file, as there is a 16-hour difference, when we woke up in the morning here we’d have that file sitting on our FTP set-up, a QuickTime movie that they just recorded going through this whole session. We would download that file, which would take hours because it was so large, and then we had a translator here — before Louis was actually translating in English — it used to be all in Korean and they would translate it and transcribe all the notes and whatnot. It was a great process. It worked out well. It felt like we were always in the same room.

Colcord: He’s really an actor’s director. So much of the creature performance was about acting and he knew to communicate that with gestures. So we really needed to see the video reference of him. He’d give a mini-performance on his own. That was really key to understanding what he wanted on the shot. Also, Kevin Rafferty would initially have the director’s vision and communicate it to us. It was really much more difficult getting started with the shot. We’d have to get that vision from Kevin and the director. Once we got the key to what were the basic beats that we had to hit and the basic staging, then it was just a matter of refining based on what the director was acting out. Also, he came here for a week and sat with us and gave us very specific notes, very interactive. Another thing about this show compared to a normal Hollywood production, we had a lot more direct feedback from the director as opposed to going through many layers of supervision that you’d see on a Hollywood movie.

SF360: Returning to the creature, she’s scary but also quite comic and oddly loveable. Was that Director Bong’s profile of the creature? Do you understand what I’m saying?

Colcord: We know. We love her. [Laughs.] She’s endearing. You can’t help it. She’s just big and clumsy.

Finger: She’s just hungry. This is her coming out of the river and wanting to get food, y’know? This is what she does. She’s been hibernating for so long and now it’s time to evolve and feed so we sort of sympathize with her in some ways and in other ways, yes, terrified because you’re dealing with little children that this creature is ultimately capturing and a family trying to get the children back. You feel this emotion with the creature as well as with the [human] characters. [Director Bong] does a very good job because he does bring that suspense and scariness to a lot of the shots where you’re not expecting them, the everyday quiet moment, and then the creature’s in your face.

SF360: Director Bong achieves a genre hybrid with ‘The Host,’ but I feel that, in your effects, The Orphanage likewise achieved a genre hybrid in the creature, making her terrifying but loveable all at the same time.

Finger: There’s shots — I think it’s GS06, where she’s coming out, this is after that big chase in the sewer sequence — and she prances up like a dog with her little tail.

Colcord: Did that make it in the final movie? I think that got cut.

Finger: Did that one get cut? Well, there are shots like that.

Colcord: There were a lot of dog analogies. There was a [scene] where she’s eating the boy in close-up, she’s sucking him in, Makoto Koyama was the animator on that, and we were talking about it. We decided, what does a dog do when it’s eating? Sometimes a big dog just gets tired and stops. So that’s what we did. While she’s pulling him in, she just kind of stops and then goes again. We helped give birth to her so we couldn’t help but love her. We could have gone a lot further with making her cute.

SF360: Will those edited outtakes be on the DVD?

Finger: It’s all on it, yeah. We got a couple of copies of it and all of our outtake work is on there, which is great. You have her doing the backstroke in the Han River. She’s running on a treadmill on fire. There’s some great stuff on that DVD.

03.05.2007