By Randi Altman

Remember when GameStop, the aging brick-and-mortar video game retailer, caused a stir on Wall Street thanks to a stock price run-up that essentially resulted from a pump-and-dump scheme?

Director Craig Gillespie took on this crazy but true story in Dumb Money, which follows Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a normal guy with a wife and baby who starts it all by sinking his life savings into the GameStop stock. His social media posts start blowing up, and he makes millions, angering the tried-and-true Wall Street money guys who begin to fight back.Needless to say, things get ugly for both sides.

While this type of film, which has an all-star cast, doesn’t scream visual effects movie, there were 500 shots, many of which involved putting things on computer and phone screens and changing seasons. To manage this effort, Gillespie and team called on New York City-based visual effects supervisor Sam O’Hare.

We reached out to O’Hare to talk about his process on the film.

When did you first get involved on Dumb Money?
I had just finished a meeting at the Paramount lot in LA and was sitting on the Forrest Gump bench waiting for an Uber when I got a call about the project. I came back to New York and joined the crew when they started tech scouting.

So, early on in the project?
It wasn’t too early, but just early enough that I could get a grip on what we’d need to achieve for the film, VFXwise. I had to get up to speed with everything before the shoot started.

Talk about your role as VFX supervisor on the film. What were you asked to do?
The production folks understood that there was enough VFX on the film that it needed a dedicated supervisor. I was on-set for the majority of the movie, advising and gathering data, and then, after the edit came together, I continued through post. Being on-set means you can communicate with all the other departments to devise the best shoot strategy. It also means you can ensure that the footage you are getting will work as well as possible in post and minimize costs in post.

I also acted as VFX producer for the show, so I got the bids from vendors and worked out the budgets with director Craig Gillespie and producer Aaron Ryder. I then distributed and oversaw the shots, aided by my coordinator, Sara Rosenthal. I selected and booked the vendors.

Who were they, and what did they each supply?
Chicken Bone tackled the majority of the bluescreen work, along with some screens and other sequences. Powerhouse covered a lot of the screens, Pete Davidson’s car sequence, the pool in Florida and other elements. Basilic Fly handled the split screens and the majority of the paint and cleanup. HiFi 3D took on the sequences with the trees outside Keith Gill’s house.

I also worked closely with the graphics vendors since much of their work had to be run through a screen look that I designed. Since the budget was tight, I ended up executing around 100 shots myself, mostly the screen looks on the graphics.

There were 500 VFX shots? What was the variety of the VFX work?
The editor, Kirk Baxter, is amazing at timing out scenes to get the most impact from them. To that end we had a lot of split screens to adjust timing on the performances. We shot primarily in New Jersey, with a short stint in LA, but the film was set in Massachusetts and Miami, so there was also a fair amount of paint and environmental work to make that happen. In particular, there was a pool scene that needed some extensive work to make it feel like Florida.

The film took place mostly over the winter, but we shot in the fall, so we had a couple of scenes where we had to replace all of the leafy trees with bare ones. HiFi handled these, with CG trees placed referencing photogrammetry I shot on-set to help layout.

There was a fair amount of bluescreen, both in car and plane sequences and to work around actors’ schedules when we couldn’t get them in the right locations at the right times. We shot background plates and then captured the actors later with matched lighting to be assembled afterward.

Screens were a big part of the job. Can you walk us through dealing with those?
We had a variety of approaches to the screens, depending on what we needed to do. The Robinhood app features heavily in the film, and we had to ensure that the actors’ interaction with it was accurate. To that end, I built green layouts with buttons and tap/swipe sequences for them to follow, which mimicked the app accurately at the time.

For the texting sequence, we set up users on the phones, let the actors text one another and used as much of it as possible. Their natural movements and responses to texts were great. All we did was replace the bubbles at the top of the screen to make the text consistent.

For Roaring Kitty, art department graphics artists built his portfolio and the various website layouts, which were on the screens on the shoot. We used these when we could and replaced some for continuity. We also inserted footage that was shot with a GoPro on-set. This footage was then treated with rough depth matte built in Resolve to give a low-fi cut-out feel and then laid over the top of the graphics for the YouTube section.

The screen look for the close-ups was built using close-up imagery of LED screens, with different amounts of down-rez and re-up-rez to get the right amount of grid look for different screens and levels of zoom. Artists also added aberration, focus falloff, etc.

Any other challenging sequences?
We had very limited background plates for the car sequences that were shot. Many had sun when we needed overcast light, so getting those to feel consistent and without repeating took a fair bit of editing and juggling. Seamlessly merging the leafless CG trees into the real ones for the scene outside Keith Gill’s house was probably the most time-consuming section, but it came out looking great.

What tools did you use, and how did they help?
On-set, I rely on my Nikon D750 and Z6 for reference, HDRI and photogrammetry work.

I used Blackmagic Resolve for all my reviews. I wrote some Python pipeline scripts to automatically populate the timeline with trimmed plates, renders and references all in the correct color spaces from ShotGrid playlists. This sped up the review process a great deal and left me time enough to wrangle the shots I needed to work on.

I did all my compositing in Blackmagic Fusion Studio, but I believe all the vendors worked in Foundry Nuke.