Wētā has done a lot of different motion capture and creature performances since the days of Andy Serkis flailing over the rocks of New Zealand in a blue suit. But in “Predator: Badlands,” the storied visual effects house faced a change that was an entirely different beast.
Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) may be the runt of his family, exiled to the deadly planet Genna by his murderous father (also Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, calm down Freudians) until he can kill the unkillable Kalisk, but he is the film’s protagonist. Director Dan Trachtenberg has playfully expanded the world of the “Predator” franchise in “Prey” and “Predator: Killer of Killers” but the thrilling adventures of Dek and damaged Weyland-Yutani synth Thia (Elle Fanning) demanded the kind of detailed, emotive work that rarely, if ever, gets done for a horror creature, especially one that has so much nonhuman anatomy.
In other words, “Predator: Badlands” lives or dies by how much audiences can connect with fang-filled lizard face.
“It’s a much deeper, more emotional level of expression and journey that you need to go on with Dek,” VFX supervisor Sheldon Stopsack told IndieWire. “That really warranted us being involved and striking a sort of hybrid where [we’re working with] practical costumes, Dimitrius being in a full-on suit, that our workshop here in Wellington had built, but then obviously the face became our domain.”
The animation team always started with and continued to go back to Schuster-Koloamatangi’s performance, but they then had to translate some of those emotions onto a face that can never close its mouth. They had to find other nodes of expression, and calibrate them to the right range in order to convey Dek’s determination, strength, and cleverness in the face of a world that very actively wants him dead.
“You can do anything in CG, so finding your boundaries and trying to limit yourself to those things is important,” animation supervisor Karl Rapley told IndieWire. “It’s finding the analogs from Demetrius that’ll translate to Dek and trying to keep those consistent. Mandible shapes, even — we were looking at the angles of the mandibles and finding what was pleasing, and we had our own bible, almost, of rules that we would follow.”
Some of those rules? Never form an ‘X’ with the mandibles, never overstimulate the trills and rills of the Yautja species, keep the animation subtle and to small muscles, so that it never looks overanimated or too performative. As with naturalistic human acting, so with predators: Less is often more.
Although that did not mean less work. There’s no way to automate expression onto something so anatomically distinct, and every bit of Dek’s expression was keyframed off of Schuster-Koloamatangi’s performance, which both Stopsack and Rapley cited as being physically rich and inspiring. It was really all about translating his intentions. “ As much as we work in computers, it is still handcrafted. It’s still observation. It’s still an artist’s interpretation of that [performance]. It’s really care and observation that makes it work,” Rapley said.
There’s care and observation all over “Predator: Badlands,” from obvious (and almost total-CG) builds for the violent showdown between the Kalisk and the Weyland-Yutani power loader, the climactic confrontation between father and son on Yautja Prime, or the mayhem that sweet girl Bud, who has never done anything wrong, gets up to in the Weyland-Yutani camp — of the last example, Rapley and Stopsack told IndieWire they thought of Bud as a little psychopath (affectionate) and had a lot of fun heightening to black comedy moments where Bud is getting fluids everywhere, or romping with the limbs of defeated synths.
“ Everyone added to it and embraced it. We were doing keyframe shots but we were also on the stage. People were acting Bud out, we had stunt performers acting Bud out, and taking that back. It was a lot of fun,” Rapley said.
There is also a lot of visual finesse from the Wētā FX team in moments that are meant to be completely invisible in the film. They had some lovely night shoot footage to work with from the Weyland-Yutani camp, which both needed digital extensions from the practical builds and to work as a fully-CG environment for some of the bigger moments that happen there, which were shot on bluescreen on a stage. There are also time-of-day changes, as the sun rises over the eventual showdown between the Kalisk, Dek, Thia, and her sister Tessa (also Elle Fanning).
Making the environment look consistent, with so many different demands and kinds of lighting, was a monster challenge in its own right. “You go from this full nighttime setting into the early morning, and the sun is starting to rise and there’s a bit of a shift in mood,” Stopsack said. “It was a tricky exercise, as trivial as it may sound. You map it out and you work shot by shot, and then you look at it all — does it look like a sunrise? Do all the clouds make sense here? Is too much light on the horizon? You spend days and weeks and months, really, almost, on mapping this out, and then the common audience is just watching it, accepting it.”
By the end of “Predator: Badlands,” Dek has certainly been through enough to appreciate a sunrise. But hopefully some viewers will appreciate all the invisible work the VFX team put into it, too, and not just all the monster parts.