The production VFX supervisor on Disney’s horror-comedy marshalled the work of ILM, DNEG, and OPSIS, delivering nearly 2,000 shots including a range of ghosts and otherworldly action, all designed to be scary without sending little kids crying into theater lobbies.
Following in the footsteps of The Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise Disneyland theme park rides adapted into cinematic spectacles, Haunted Mansion has made the jump to the big screen, turned by filmmaker Justin Simien into a horror comedy with a cast led by LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jared Leto. Despite the mandate to lean on practical effects, Simien’s use of digital augmentation was unavoidable in achieving the film’s necessary scope and spectral aesthetic; nearly 2,000 VFX shots were used, supervised by Edwin Rivera, produced by ILM, DNEG, and OPSIS. Rivera has a long, storied career as a VFX supervisor, including recent stints as production VFX supervisor on Uncharted, Joker, and 22 Jump Street.
Key to the film was conveying the proper tone: scary with a sense of peril, but not terrifying or gory. With humor. In the film, college history professor and supernatural enthusiast Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito) delivers one of the funnier lines, declaring, “This mansion is unhinged.” “To go one further it’s a Disney horror comedy,” observes Rivera. “Cabin in the Woods is a horror comedy, but they had a free reign to do whatever they wanted because they’re not even trying for a PG rating. The challenge is creating something that keeps you on the edge of the seat but doesn’t necessarily send kids crying. There were a couple of ghosts that we created the studio specifically said, ‘Can we make them 10 percent less scary?’. Which to us meant a lot less scary because if they’re squirming in their seats, you can imagine what a four or five-year-old might do.”
When it came to developing the ghosts and their spectral glow, Rivera explored cinematic history. “I did research on all the movies that have come before us and categorized ghosts in cinema,” he explains. “You have the Harry Potter type ghosts that look like they were filmed somewhere else and are floating around in certain ways. Then you have ghosts in The Ring or The Shining where an actual person is standing in the room and there’s that kind of creepiness. And there are more CG-like ghosts as seen in the recent Ghostbusters. What parts of which of those did we like? From the get-go Justin wanted to have it more grounded. We had our ghostly actors in makeup interact with our other actors.”
The challenge was how to make the performers look ghostly, not just like a person in make-up standing in the scene. “What we came up is when the ghosts had a key light hitting them, the lit side looked like they were standing there in the room and anywhere that fell into shadow, you start to see through the body, the skeletal structure underneath it, and know that this was just a façade,” reveals Rivera. “All the while we also had ectoplasm effervescence, which was like the bioluminescence algae that you can move your hand through. If your hand was still, nothing was going on, but as you move and agitate this medium, that is when you see the particles. As our ghosts move you can see them going through this ghostly realm. The combination of all those things felt to us as something different. It felt grounded but otherworldly as well.”
Retaining cast performances was paramount for the VFX supervisor. “When we filmed a scene with the ghostly actor in makeup with the other actors, we would almost always shoot a clean pass so we could have something to use to create transparency through the ghostly actor.”
Practical sets were constructed for the interior of the mansion. According to Rivera, “They built it and it’s amazing! On one of the ghostly effects that we see, our DP Jeffrey Waldron, used the onset lighting to create that visual change from one to the next.”
A flexible approach was adopted for motion-capture. “Because our set was a real house, we didn’t have room for all the gear that is part of a motion-capture session,” Rivera shares. “Also, they wanted the actors to be there in full costume so we couldn’t put them in a wired suit. We used witness cameras offset from each other for any ghostly scenes to make sure we captured any ghost that is moving and use that to help us after the fact for 3D tracking.”
In the film, Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) appears inside a crystal ball. “Originally, we talked about having someone in the ball, but it didn’t become practical, especially the ball itself floating around with her hair needing to have a ghostly ethereal look to it,” remarks Rivera. “She is completely CG. We shot her in a facial rig that allowed us to capture every single nuance and muscle firing that her face would have. Then we applied that performance of Jamie Lee to a 3D model of her. We put that into the ball with the smoke and lighting effects as well as the CG hair, which completed the look.
An iconic ghost from the theme park ride is the Hatbox Ghost portrayed by Jared Leto. Rivera concludes, “Any time that you’re dealing with a beloved character it’s always challenging because you want to create your own version of it but then it has to be grounded in what people recognize; that was a long road to get to where we got but is a nice combination of scary and recognizable.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
