00:00 [MUSIC]
00:07 Hi, I'm Pierre Lefebvre. I was the VFX Super on Black Adam.
00:10 I'm Claire Colway. I was the producer on Black Adam.
00:12 Today on Breaking Down the Breakdown, we're going to talk about ancient Kandak and the modern city of Shiruta.
00:18 So, let's get into it.
00:20 [MUSIC]
00:28 We worked on the ancient city, Shiruta, which is in the ancient kingdom of Kandak.
00:33 We also did some work on the modern sequence.
00:36 We also did some modern mines and ancient mines that you guys will see a bit later.
00:41 And a ton of crowd work, an absolute ton of crowd work.
00:44 [MUSIC]
00:47 The main brief for the city was basically we had the ancient Kandak kingdom,
00:51 where it's kind of like inspired from old Middle Eastern city, like think about Cairo.
00:56 So, Rodeo was responsible more for the palace surrounding and stuff like that.
01:00 We had Yvonne and Frédéric Saint-Arnaud that tackle the biggest scope of the concept work.
01:05 So, mainly establishing areas like markets.
01:09 The early concept or reference were basically all the Brazilian mines.
01:14 There's basically like hundreds, thousands of workers working in those gold mines.
01:18 And the section of the slave falling into the pit, the old slave, was basically a CG takeover with the DG doubles.
01:23 We had like a pool of slaves, like hundreds, basically reacting to the men hitting some steps of the mine.
01:30 So, we started off with doing quite a bit of mocap in-house with two of our asset supervisors.
01:35 So, we had Daniel Lupien and Marc-André.
01:38 And they were doing all kinds of lifting rocks and digging and carrying baskets.
01:43 It was pretty fun directing them.
01:45 So, we had a good day of telling them, "Hey, it has to look heavy. It has to look painful."
01:50 Our crowd system works with clips of action that we can loop.
01:54 So, we clean them up, make sure we can repeat them.
01:57 Obviously, the guys would tell you that ladders are a pain in the ass.
02:01 So, usually our crowd would just basically go walk the ladders.
02:06 But in general, it worked pretty well.
02:14 There's a story point in the movie where Adam kind of wants to do good by stopping the king but ends up destroying the whole city.
02:21 Yeah, we had this massive explosion that sort of bridges that time period.
02:25 And we start off with sort of a big dust cloud and lightning and a sonic boom.
02:31 It was pretty epic.
02:32 To design the flyover, we did a lot of interactive sessions with the director.
02:38 So, the goal was to follow the flybikes during the chase where we land and we meet Amon.
02:43 All CG, except there was a stage in Atlanta.
02:46 So, you see when we land on the last shot, you see that first floors were pretty much all real stage with a few real cars.
02:54 And then we did CG takeovers for cars.
02:56 Buses as well.
02:57 Yeah, many buses to hide reveals and wipes and rotos.
03:02 It was a big group effort, but to be honest, the seniority of the team really helped.
03:09 Like, Olivier Goulet was an amazing supervisor.
03:13 Patrice Poitin, who has been at Rodeo forever, was a heavy lifter.
03:16 Vincent Leclerc, who took care of most of the modern city.
03:19 So, yeah, I think our environment team was super talented.
03:22 Good job, team.
03:23 [Music]
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