With a physique as impressive as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's, you wouldn't think that it'd
be problematical, but, oddly enough, DJ's body was the biggest problem the vfx
teams on Black Adam had to overcome.
For some scenes, they actually had to slim his body down, yeah.
And for others, they had to bulk it up, in fact, if you consider scenes where he had
to be 100% CGI like the aerial fight scenes...
Others that required extensive digital painting or augmentation over his body...
Others that had to be done by a stuntman...
And others that had to transition from the real DJ to his Digidouble.
Throughout a lot of the movie, The Rock's "totally unreal" body, was precisely that...
Totally Unreal.
Oddly enough, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's impressive physique was actually one of the
biggest problems the vfx teams on Black Adam had to overcome.
You see, having such a perfect body doesn't actually mean it's going to look perfect in
every shot and there are actually many reasons why this is the case .
For example, just because of the way that some scenes were put together meant they had
to modify parts of his body in order for him to look right; in some scenes, they had to
slim his body down, for others, they actually had to bulk it up, and so actually, as you'll
find out in this video, what you may not have noticed throughout a lot of this movie, is
that parts of The Rock's "totally unreal" body, were precisely that...
Totally Unreal.
-Building Up The Rock When it comes to superhero movies, vfx teams
can normally foresee the type of VFX shots that they'll have to do.
There'll be digital environments to design and create, and futuristic vehicles to invent
There'll be CG buildings, and establishing shots
There'll be full CG shots, and digital backgrounds and there'll be simulations and augmentations
But for Black Adam, in addition to all of this (and the mandatory "Running On A Treadmill"
shot) the VFX teams knew that a large number of shots would require CGI versions of the
villains and superheroes, and to create these assets they would need 3D scans of all the
actors.
Fortunately, Weta Digital already had a high-fidelity digital Dwayne Johnson asset which they had
created and used back in 2016 for the movie Central Intelligence...
And then used again in Jumanji...
And again in 2018 for the movie Rampage...
And in Jumanji: Next level, and again in Jungle Cruise.
Unfortunately, Dwayne's physique fluctuates quite a bit.
For Black Adam, he trained so hard that he lost most of his body fat so for principal
photography that ran from April till July 2021 he was extremely lean.
But, when the reshoots came around in 2022, Digital Domain realized that his physique
during principal photography wasn't the same as it was when WETA had originally scanned
him for their asset, so they had to get a new 3D scan of the leaner Dwayne and then
retopologize their CG asset to the leaner version of him.
-Virtual Mass- Dwayne's weight change wasn't the only problem
the visual effects teams had in relation to weight, in fact, the illusion of weight and
mass is one of the hardest and most important things to achieve with a visual effect, and
(if unsuccessful) one of the biggest giveaways that what you are seeing is an effect.
Take this scene in Die Another Day for example, even though you can clearly see the difference
between the live-action footage and the CGI what actually breaks the effect is the lack
of weight when Pierce lands on the wave.
You can see it even clearer in the 1997 film Air Force One, here the Air Force One asset
is actually surprisingly realistic and the way the aircraft breaks apart is pretty convincing,
but the lack of camera movement, impact forces, water splashes, debris, and the overall sound
design all add to the feeling that the plane weighs less than a real plane does and therefore,
cannot be real.
In Black Adam, the VFX teams also had this problem of selling "weight" but in addition,
they also had to sell "strength".
Black Adam had to appear so powerful that to him everything was lightweight.
But even though he could lift a massive rock as though it weighed nothing it had to look
like a feat of strength on Black Adam's part rather than a lack of mass on the rock's part.
They achieved this by using various methods One was preestablishing the weight of the
object before the effect happens, you can see this in the hoverbike scene where, by
using a physical prop on a set, they constantly reestablish the hoverbike's weight and mass
throughout the sequence.
Here it's the physical prop on set...
And then the effect happens...
Then again the physical prop on set...
And then the effect...
And this alternating continues again and again throughout the sequence, helping maintain
the illusion that the hoverbike is always real so that later on when it crashes and
then Adam throws it into the air we still believe it's real, even though in this shot,
it's 100% CGI Another method has to do with Newton's third
law that "every action has an equal and opposite reaction".
When a racket hits a ball, its kinetic energy isn't just cleanly transferred from the racket
to the ball, the transfer of energy generates different types of actions and reactions within
the ball itself that are very difficult to recreate digitally and even though these reactions
happen so quickly and you'd think we can't perceive them, when they aren't present, the
effect looks unrealistic.
For this reason, VFX teams start an effect by giving the actor something to interact
with so this object can in turn interact with them.
For example, here, the actors are hanging on wires but Dwayne is actually pulling upwards
on them and he's doing this so that when they are released and fall down his own hand actually
goes up, giving us the impression that he was actually holding their weight.
Sculpting The Rock The scene where a powerless Adam had to escape
from the prison called for a "weaker version" of Adam to fight his way out of the secret
underwater black site.
So for this scene, Adam's body wasn't Dwayne Johnson's but that of a stand-in actor called
Benjamin Patterson.
The scene was filmed using Phantom cameras running 960 frames a second, while this super
slow-motion gave the scene a great aesthetic it also produced a few problems...
The first was transferring Dwayne's face onto the stand-in's body.
Although Dwayne's face and expressions could be scanned and superimposed onto the stand-in
by Lola VFX and their tried and tested "Egg"...
The speed and movement of the scene meant it was an incredibly time-consuming and difficult
process and so they decided to minimize the amount of work they'd have to do by having
Teth Adam wear a mask.
The second problem was that it's extremely hard to fake a punch in super slow motion.
Even though for some hits they could fool us by cutting to another camera at the moment
of impact or having something or someone covering the point of impact if they did it for every
hit it would look staged.
So for a lot of the hits, the only way they could really sell the shot was to actually
make contact.
The final, and perhaps most surprising problem they had with Dwayne's body was that, although
it looked big and powerful, just like Black Adam should be,
it wasn't agile, and it wasn't fast, so for the flight scenes, that weren't just straight
up and down, rather than have him looking clumsy whilst hanging from a wire they had
to have him lying down on a chest plate or strapped to a motion-controlled robotic arm
that could be programmed to execute any movement the animators wanted.
Or strapped onto a radio-controlled cart with omnidirectional wheels, and for the fight
scenes, they created a clever slow-motion technique and used very quick cuts to give
the illusion of speed.
And for all you superheros who have reached the end of this video, here's a little reward...
Pierce Brosnan in a mocap suit!