By Randi Altman 

To say that Shaina Holmes is a busy lady would be an understatement. In addition to her job as an assistant professor of television, radio and film at Syracuse University (Newhouse), she is the owner of Flying Turtle Post, which provides visual effects and post for independent films.

Shaina Holmes

One of her recent projects was the film Looks That Kill from writer/director Kellen Moore. The story follows a boy named Max, who was born with the ability to kill people if he shows them his face, so he needs to spend his life with bandages around his head to save those around him. It stars Brandon Flynn, Julia Goldani Telles and the late Peter Scolari.

Holmes’ role on Looks That Kill was three-fold: lead VFX artist, VFX producer and VFX supervisor. We reached out to Holmes to talk about her process on the film, which she worked on while simultaneously providing visual effects for three other American High films — Big Time Adolescence, Banana Split and Holly Slept Over. Flying Turtle Post worked on Looks That Kill for 10 months, from the initial VFX bid in September 2018 to final delivery in June 2019.

Let’s find out more …

How many shots did you provide?
The original bid consisted of 96 shots, which got narrowed down to 69 VFX shots. Of those, my team completed 42 of the 69. Most were very intricate VFX shots and transitions that were also long durations. The rest of the 96 shots were either omitted, done in the conform or with an outside artist who took on the less technical, more creative shots, like the eye-flash death shots.

What types of visual effects did you create?
The bulk of the complex VFX dealt with transitions with lengthy camera moves. One shot was over 7,000 frames, or 4 minutes long, and full of multiple greenscreen transitions, speed ramps, artifact cleanup, shot stitching, rig removals, adjusting the performance of props sliding down a wall during a time-of-day lighting change and more.

There were also many hidden edits used throughout the film, such as when the camera was rotating around objects and people to transition to another location, or to link up two or three completely different camera moves and plates together to look seamless. The beauty of this smooth camera work really helped the audience engage with the inner thoughts of our main character as he deals with his medical condition.

We worked on a variety of shots, including a seamless greenscreen edit for a 4-minute stitched shot with multiple speed changes and cleanup; fluid morphs and artifact cleanup; wipe transitions through difficult camera moves and speed changes; the creation of distress-weathered signage for buildings; turning billboard light bulbs and creating flashing lights; adding a nosebleed; compositing multiple plates together (bus to street, fire to tree, cigarette falling through air); removing unwanted people, safety wires and a tattoo from a scene; cell phone screen replacements and graphics revisions; split screens for action/performance; TV monitor comps; lower-third graphics; dead pixel removal; stabilizations; beauty fixes; and the addition of anamorphic lens distortion to stock footage.

This film is a dark comedy. Did your VFX help amp up the funny?
The editing style used fluid morphs and split screens to compile the best performances from each character at all times. While these are invisible effects that the audience shouldn’t be able to identify, our work on these shots really helped amp up the humor in each scene.

We also worked on a scene where a character aimlessly throws a cigarette behind her without looking, and of course it lands and starts a fire near a house. Another character is then seen trying to drag this burning shrubbery into the driveway. For these shots, we needed to composite the burning tree onto a non-burning tree prop the character was dragging, and we had to change the animation of the cigarette’s trajectory to hit the correct spot to ignite the fire.

Can you talk about your process? Any challenges?
With the American High projects prior to this one, the bulk of the VFX requests were expected — screen replacements and fluid morphs — but this project had a lot of different requests. This meant each shot or small sequence needed a new plan to achieve the goals, especially since we were working internally with a larger VFX team than previous projects due to the complexity of the shots.

My company, Flying Turtle Post, is based on mentorship, meaning we have many junior artists all being trained by me until they become mid-level artists, and then they help me train the next batch of junior artists. We are a very collaborative team of remote artists and coordinators, all of whom started off with me as their professor in college. I’m now their employer.

This project provided many challenges for us since we were dealing with longer file sequences than usual for VFX shots, meaning thousand-frame shots instead of hundred-frame shots. Additionally, many of my junior artists had never worked with anamorphic aspect ratios before, so we needed to include squeezed and unsqueezed into the training as we were getting up and running. We were a fully remote, work-from-home studio before the pandemic — before the new cloud-based options became commonplace for VFX pipelines. Some of these shots were 10GB for one render, which made it difficult to transfer easily from artist to artist. We quickly had to adapt our pipeline and reinvent how we normally would work on a show together.

What tools did you call on for your work?
Blackmagic’s Fusion Studio is my company’s compositing tool of choice for our artists. I teach Fusion to them in school due to its flexibility and affordability. I have used it for the past 20 years of my VFX artist career.

If we work on CG, we use Autodesk Maya and Adobe Substance Painter. Sometimes we also use Nuke for compositing, depending on the artist. We use Adobe After Effects for motion graphics and animation.

Separate from Looks That Kill, you seem to be attracted to horror films.
Over my career, I’ve had the honor of working in many different genres and on films many people call their favorites of all time. It’s always fun when I run across a horror fan, and they inevitably ask the question, “Have you worked on anything I would have heard of?” This is probably the genre I can most easily tell what kind of horror fan they are from the spectrum of films I tell them I’ve worked on. I’ll start with the bigger ones, like The Purge: Election Year (2016), Halloween II (2009), and Halloween (2007). If they’re intrigued, then I’ll see if they go to horror festivals and I’ll add cult favorite Starry Eyes (2014) to the conversation. That’s the real test. If they’ve seen that movie, then I know how deep their love for horror films goes.

In fact, I had a conversation with one of my students a few years ago that went very similarly to that. When he professed his admiration for Starry Eyes, I introduced him to writer/director Kevin Kölsch, who, after working in the industry for years at a post house, decided to finally shoot a feature film and use his friends in post and VFX as resources to help finish the film. Starry Eyes went on to do well in festivals, and now he is attached to large-budget films and TV shows as director. This story inspired my student Matt Sampere to follow in a similar path, and now two years out of school, this person is shooting a Halloween-themed feature horror film. Naturally I am helping on the project as VFX supervisor, and my former students are providing the cinematography, post workflow and VFX.

The film is shot on Blackmagic Pocket cameras, with editing in Resolve and VFX in Fusion. Principal photography has just been completed, and I expect to start post toward the end of the year.

A horror film that I’ve worked on recently is The Night House, out in theaters this past August, for which I was the on-set VFX supervisor and plate supervisor for Crafty Apes. I tend to gravitate toward horror films that rely on on-set special effects and makeup to shoot gore and stunts as practically as possible and employ VFX only as an enhancement or for wow-factor moments instead of it being CG-heavy throughout. This was certainly true for Starry Eyes, Creeping Death and The Night House.

 The Night House was particularly interesting to work on because of how the set became a living character. I don’t want to give anything away, but the visuals are really unique for the invisible character.

What else have you worked on recently?
Mayday, which premiered at Sundance 2021. I was the VFX producer for Mayday, and with a small team we used a mix of Fusion and Foundry Nuke to complete over 400 VFX shots for the film.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 25 years.