By TREVOR HOGG
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Netflix.
A major visual effects undertaking was constructing the environment and crowd at Tsinghua University watching the torture of intellectuals during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
A computational conundrum occurs when the motion of three celestial bodies mutually influences each other’s gravitation pull. This serves as the premise for the science fiction series 3 Body Problem by novelist/series writer Liu Cixin, where an alien race living on an environmentally unstable planet caught between a trio of suns sets in motion a plan to invade Earth with the assistance of human conspirators. Adapting the novels for Netflix is Game of Thrones duo, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with True Blood veteran Alexander Woo. The first season of 3 Body Problem encompasses eight episodes that feature major visual effects spanning environment builds, a multi-dimensional supercomputer compressed into a proton, a sliced and diced oil tanker, characters being rehydrated/dehydrated and a virtual reality game that literally feels real. The epic scope of the project required the creation of 2,000 shots by Scanline VFX, Pixomondo, BUF, Image Engine, Screen Scene and El Ranchito. An in-house team took care of additional cleanups, which ranged from a character blinking too much to having to paint out an unwanted background element.
Previs was an indispensable tool. “It’s a complete game-changer being able to do everything in Unreal Engine,” Visual Effects Supervisor Stefen Fangmeier states. “We did nearly no storyboarding. It was essentially camerawork. The funny thing was they were trying to get me to use a camera controller, and I said, ‘No. I’m a curve guy.’ I set a keyframe here and a keyframe there and interpolate. I even reanimated characters, which you can do in Unreal Engine in the most elegant way. You can take a couple of big performances and mix them together; it’s a fantastic tool. We worked with NVIZ in London who would prep all of these scenes, do the animation, then I would go shoot and light it; that was a great joy for me, being interactive. What was so interesting about 3 Body Problem was there is an incredible variety of work.”
Vedette Lim as Vera Ye in one of the many environments given the desired scope and vastness through digital set extensions.
A unique cinematic moment involves an oil tanker being sliced by nanowires as part of an elaborate trap to capture a hard drive belonging to a cult that supports the San-Ti invading Earth. “People get sliced every 50 cm, which we did mostly with digital doubles and a few practically built hallways and interior buildings. When you slice something that heavy vertically at 50 cm increments, the weight of what’s above it keeps it in place until the bow hits the shoreline. The dish on top of it collapses into the Panama Canal, which we created as a full CG environment,” Fangmeier states.
Opening the series is a massive crowd gathering at Tsinghua University during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to watch the torture of intellectuals, and because of the controversial nature of the subject matter shooting in Beijing was not an option. “Ultimately, we built the environment from photography and then took some liberties,” Visual Effects Producer Steve Kullback describes. “We wanted it to be realistic, but how big is the quad? What did the buildings actually look like? I don’t think anybody is tracking it quite that precisely, but what we ended up with is having 100,000 screaming students in front of us, and that was all shot quite virtually with a stage set that was built out and extended. It was an array of bluescreens on Manitous that were set up to move around and reposition behind 150 extras.” Crowd tiling was minimal. “We did one shot, which was a poor artist’s motion control. The director wanted a shot where the camera is pushing out towards the stage over the crowd, so what we did was start in the foreground pushing over it, repeat the move pushing over it and move everyone up. We put the pieces together, and it worked quite well. We didn’t have a motion control crane, just a 50-foot Technocrane and a good team that was able to repeat their moves nicely,” Kullback says.
Bai Mulin (Yang Hewen) sits alongside Young Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) who makes a fateful first contact with the San-Ti, which sets their invasion plans in motion.
A radar dish test at Red Coast Base kills a flock of birds that were entirely CG.
Sophon (Sea Shimooka) is an avatar in a VR game created by the San-Ti to illustrate the destructive environmental impact of living next to three suns.
The reflective quality of the VR headset meant that extensive photogrammetry had to be taken so each set piece could be reconstructed digitally.
One of the major environments simulated in the VR game is the observation deck of the Pleasure Dome constructed by Kublai Khan.
Another key environment build was the Red Coast Base where astrophysics prodigy Ye Wenjie makes first contact with the San-Ti in the 1960s, which sparks an invasion conspiracy. “For Red Coast Base, we had part of an observation base in Spain that was on a mountaintop, and it was a windy day with no rain, so we had some nice sunsets and great clouds,” Visual Effects Supervisor Rainer Gombos remarks. “Some of the buildings didn’t match what we wanted, and the main building was missing the large radar dish. We only had the base built for that. We had some concepts from the art department for how the extensions should work, and then we did additional concept work once we had the specific shots and knew how the sequence would play out.” The years leading up to the present day have not been kind to the Chinese national defense facility. “The roofs have collapsed, so we had to design that. It had to look like winter and cold when it was actually a hot spring day with lots of insects flying around, which had to be painted out. There is a sequence where the radar dish is being used for some test, and birds are flying from the forest and get confused by what is happening, fly close to the dish and die. There were a lot of full CG shots there and CG birds that had to be added. Also, one of the characters revisits the base to commit suicide, so we had to introduce a digital cliff that allowed her to walk up to the side of the dish and look over,” Gombos adds.
30 million Mongol soldiers appear in front of the Pleasure Dome before being lifted into the air because of the gravitational pull of the three suns.
Simulating what life is like on Trisolaris is a virtual reality experience developed by the San-Ti that demonstrates the global catastrophes caused by living in close proximity to three suns. “It was described as a simple arid desert landscape,” Fangmeier explains. “The more unique aspect of that was a certain lighting change. One sun, small and in the distance, was rising, and then suddenly that goes away and it’s night again. Having the light on the actors move that quickly was tricky to achieve on set. We decided along with Jonathan Freeman, the DP for Episodes 101 and 102, to shoot that in a LED stage with a bunch of sand on the ground where we could animate hot spots and the colors of the panels even though we were going to replace all of that in CG.” Being in the realm of VR meant that the destruction could be fantastical, such as 30 million Mongol soldiers being lifted in the air because gravity no longer exists, or witnessing the entire landscape engulfed by a sea of lava. Fangmeier explains, “Then, we have some pseudoscience, like going inside of a particle accelerator. The San-Ti have sent these two supercomputers the size of a proton to stop the progress of human technology, so when they arrive 400 years later [Trisolaris is over three light years from Earth], we won’t be able to easily destroy their fleet. The proton [referred to as a sophon] unfolds into this giant two-dimensional sphere that then gets etched with computer circuitry. We talked a lot about going from 10 dimensions down to two and then going back to a 10-dimensional object. It’s stuff where you go, ‘That’s what it said in the book and script. But how do you visualize that?’”
The VR game created by the San-Ti is so sophisticated that it stimulates the five senses of users such as Jin Cheng (Jess Hong).
The VR game setting allowed for a more hyper-real visual language and the ability to defy physics, like when Sophon (Sea Shimooka) talks with Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Jack Rooney (John Bradley) in Episode 103.
The Follower (Eve Ridley) and Sophon (Sea Shimooka) are San-Ti appearing in human form to make it easier for VR users from Earth to relate to them.
Eiza González portrays Auggie Salazar, a member of the Oxford Five, which attempts to foil the invasion plans of the San-Ti.
Cinematographer Jonathan Freeman made use of complex and specific lighting panels for the VR setting shots to emulate what it would be like surrounded by three suns.
To preserve their species until the chaotic era gives way to a stable one, the San-Ti have a specific methodology that involves dehydrating and rehydrating their bodies. “It happens in two places and provided us with unique challenges and creative opportunities,” Kullback observes. “The first time we see it is when the rolled-up dehydrated bodies are being tossed into the water by the army to bring our characters back to life. The rolled-up bodies that get rehydrated were a prop that was designed by the prosthetics artists and looked quite beautiful. We go underwater and see the roll land and begin to unfold. The camera is below it and the sun is above the water, so you have these beautiful caustics and an opportunity for all kinds of subsurface scattering and light effects that make the image magical and ethereal and support the birthing process that it’s meant to represent. At the end of the experience, you have a beautiful nude woman who comes to the surface. Then, you find there are other nude folks who have been rebirthed. We shot in a tank at Pinewood to have the underwater shots and the shots of the woman, who is the final realization of this rebirthing. For the elements of the roll landing in the water, we did shoot one for real, but ultimately that was CG. Then the environment above the surface was fully CG. But then you go to the virtual reality game where Jin Cheng is walking with the Emperor and the Follower, and a chaotic era suddenly comes upon us, and there is no room to hide behind a rock from the immense forces of the sun getting ready to melt everybody. The Follower lies down on the ground in a vast desert with the pyramid off in the distance and has to dehydrate. That one presented a bit more of a challenge because you didn’t have the opportunity to travel around her and have these beautiful caustics. We heavily researched the footage of things dehydrating, like fruit left in the sun rotting, to try to get a look that was like how the body would deflate when it was completely sapped of water.”
Being able to digitally reconstruct sets and locations was made even more important by having a highly reflective VR headset. “The reflective headset required some photogrammetry type work while you were shooting because it was often in smaller places, and there’s some crew, all of the lighting equipment, and everything is dressed in one direction,” Gombos remarks. “You had to capture that three-dimensionally because as production turned around, you needed it for the paint-out from the other direction. We had HDRI panorama photography of that, but then we also had good spatial information about the room and how that would connect to the shot lighting we would do. We wanted to be precise, and on top of that, we often did a special reconstruction shoot after we were done. I would come in for a few hours and do the photography and LiDAR required for locations. These assets were created on the fly, so we had them to review our work but also to send off to the vendors, and they were using them in post. The 3D assets were helpful in quality-controlling the work and a good tool for orienting our teams. I could have this little 3D representation of the set and share and discuss that with the DP or director. I would say, ‘If they are here, it’s going to look like this.’ It wasn’t theoretical but quite precise.”
“One thing that was a bit different for me was that I did a lot of the concept work,” Gombos observes. “I enjoyed doing that for set extensions that then Stefen and the visual effects vendor working with him would execute.” Fangmeier is intrigued by what the viewer reaction will be beyond hardcore sci-fi fans of the books. “It’s not your typical sci-fi where you spend a lot of time in outer space or meet aliens, and it’s not an alien invasion per se. It’s the first season, so it’s fairly mellow and highbrow. It’s deals with concepts other than the stuff that people are usually used to when they watch sci-fi. I’m curious what the mainstream viewer will think about that.”
There is a core mandate no matter the project for Kullback. “If we are able to help tell the story visually in areas where you can’t photograph something, then that’s our dimension. We’re never creating eye candy for the sake of eye candy. We work hard to have everything that we do fit into the greater whole and to do it in a seamless and attractive way. And, most importantly, in a way that communicates and moves the story forward and realizes the vision of the filmmakers.”