In the George Clooney-directed The Midnight Sky, streaming on Netflix, a scientist (Clooney) travels through the Arctic Circle to warn off a returning spaceship following a global catastrophe.
The film co-stars Felicity Jones (Sully), whose pregnancy created a challenge, as she was not able to travel to the shooting location or hook up to a rig to simulate zero gravity. To solve that, the VFX team at Framestore used ILM’s Anyma performance capture to record Jones’ face, then put the facial performance on a body double.
The digital face replacements required wide and full-CG shots (30 in total). The spacewalk sequence saw incredibly high-resolution Anyma scans combined with cutting-edge proprietary shaders to create convincing high-res digital faces, which were then keyframe-animated.
For wider shots or background characters within closeups, Framestore used these CG faces, expanding the process developed for Jones to the other cast members. When comparing the resulting digital doubles to the facial capture plates in frames where the eyelines are the same, they’re almost indistinguishable.
The eyes were match-moved and animated by Framestore, allowing for subtle adjustment of eyelines to overcome the limitations of performing in a capture volume with few visual cues. This discovery also helped enormously with the zero G spacewalk. For closeup shots, cast members were shot suspended on wires, with previz by Clooney and cinematographer Martin Ruhe using a virtual camera system.
To create this sequence, Framestore assembled a sci-fi dream team to join production VFX supervisor Matt Kasmir. This included Academy Award-winning VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence (Gravity, The Martian), animation supervisor Max Solomon (Gravity), VFX supervisor Shawn Hillier (Star Wars: Episodes II and III) and Graham Page (Interstellar), delivering nearly 459 of the film’s total 615 shots across Framestore’s studios in London and Montreal. VFX house One of Us provided the remaining shots.
In addition to the high-level CG facial replacements, the team was tasked with building the Aether ship and interior as well as “Sick Earth” and its foreboding environment.
Framestore used the Nviz system for virtual camera shots. (This was before the studio’s in-house visualization team, Framestore Pre-Production Services, was set up.) Animation was done in Autodesk Maya, rendering with Freak (Framestore’s proprietary renderer) and compositing in Foundry Nuke.
Watch Framestore’s VFX reel here:
