Hi guys what’s up?
I’m really excited right now because I’m hanging out with director JA Bayona
who was nice enough to give me some of his time.
So this is a very impromptu Talkin Tech.
And
let me see I’m going to set this up right here so I can talk to you.
Awesome.
Well how are you
today?
Very good thank you.
Thank you so much for meeting with me.
This is such an honor.
I
got a chance to see your movie just a couple days ago and I think my direct quote after
I left the
theater was “I cried out of every hole in my body.”
So it was amazing it was awesome it was so
incredibly moving.
Huge congratulations to you on that.
And I really wanted to talk with you
today about some of the tech behind how you created the character The Monster.
How did that
come about?
I mean you started with this novel and created this wonderful very emotional very
human character.
Please tell me a little bit about that.
Well the novel is an illustrated book so
there were illustrations from Jim K that I love.
And then for me it’s kind of impossible to separate
Patrick Ness story from the Drones because we’re part of the same thing.
When we started to
develop the monster we did a lot of science but the more we were adding to the original
drawing
I think the less powerful it was the monster.
So there was a moment that we went back to the
illustrations and we started from there.
It had to be like a grounded creature because we’re
mixing reality and a fantasy in a way that you cannot separate one from each other.
So it had to
be grounded very simple.
And of course it had to be digital because you cannot recreate a 40ft
tall creature in a set.
We built up the real head of the monster a real life sized head.
And we also
had both arms one foot.
Louie the kid he always performed in front of something.
Acting in front
of the monster on the set.
Okay so you said the head you had arms and a foot that were all
practical effects.
So you actually built those and they were enhanced digitally?
Yes what we
have is that those real pieces that they gave us the textures to work on the CGI character.
The
CGI character it was the basis for the motion capture we did with Liam Neeson.
And two weeks
shooting motion capture Liam was always the kid had the monster in front of him Liam did
the
whole performance in front of Louis.
And that was the first two weeks of shooting that we spent
in Oxford in a soundstage recreating the whole film with a motion capture suit.
Getting the whole
thing was to capture all the performance and put it on the digital character.
Well Liam Neeson
does an amazing job voicing this monster when you guys go see the film you’ll know what
I’m
talking about.
But to do the motion capture too must make it so much more real too.
And the
practical effects certainly lent to the realism.
And there’s actually another character in this film or
I’m going to address it as a character in the film that I think probably required a
lot of technical
after effects and that would be the graveyard.
Could you tell me a little bit about how you guys
put together both practical and CGI to make the graveyard look realistic?
The book from the
original book had a very specific location where you could see the house of corner backyard
a
hell and on top of the hill you have a graveyard with a tree and a church.
We couldn’t find that
precise location.
I can’t imagine that would be easy to find.
It didn’t exist but we found what
actually was a pretty good house and we used it as a reference and then we recreated the
backyard on a soundstage we had the hill in another place and then we have the graveyard
in
another place.
In that scene in the nightmare we are using four different locations.
We have the
hill then we have the graveyard a real graveyard in Manchester around Manchester.
Then we
had a huge massive set that we built in Barcelona and then we have a scale model.
We
recreated when the church and the cemetery collapses that was a scale model we did with
a
company called Magic Cone from Germany.
Awesome.
So that was a scale model that was
then raised so you could collapse it in?
Yeah it is a very important scene in the film we call it the
Nightmare so all the stuff before the nightmare we shot in Manchester in the real graveyard
and
then once the nightmare starts then we went to the to the set in Barcelona.
And what collapses
is the scale model is the church collapsing is the scale model.
Well the nightmare is definitely
nightmare esque.
You do an amazing job of making it look incredibly real.
Guys I encourage
everyone to check out A Monster Calls.
Not only is it a moving film but if you happen to be a
tech junkie you’re going to love the mixture of the practical effects real sets and the
CGI just to
make it look beautiful and seamless so thank you so much for your time today Talkin Tech
with
me!
Thank you.