By Daniel Restuccio
While the visual effects on Season 1 of TNT’s The Alienist were impressive, the team took it to a new level for Season 2, The Alienist: Angel of Darkness. To illustrate Caleb Carr’s macabre and disturbing tale of a serial baby killer, the level of detail and scope of the VFX were ramped up even further this season thanks to more ambitious cinematography.
Doug Larmour
“Everyone wanted the show to look and feel as rich as, and if possible, be more plush than last year, to be grander,” says the series’ overall VFX supervisor, Doug Larmour.
The scope of the work for both seasons was to digitally extend the exterior sets and locations to make it look like 1896 and 1897 New York City. The first season of the series was mostly set in the slums of lower Manhattan, in the slums of the Bowery, but with notable landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge and the Statue of Liberty and a couple of wide aerial shots of Manhattan.
When Season 1 wrapped, all the CG building assets got moved into one library. Those models were used as a base by Montreal VFX houses Mr. X and Outpost for Season 2. They rebuilt and replaced many of them in order to meet the demands of the more ambitious cinematography and the greater scale that they were going for in the second season. “They had to get closer to them, and we had to see more of them,” notes Larmour.
Courtesy of Mr. X
Expanding on the show’s enhanced cinematography, Larmour reports the cameras were the same as Season 1’s, which was shot mostly with ARRI Alexa Minis. “However, we were shooting a wider format in Season 2. We shot 1:78 for Season 1, but DP Cathal Watters wanted a more cinematic feel for Season 2, so we shot 2:1. This meant we needed to create wider vistas from a VFX point of view.
“A bigger issue was that with the more cinematic format also came the desire to create a more cinematic feel to the establishing shots, so the camera tended to be higher and wider in Season 2. There was more ambition to create something grand in scale. This meant that we needed to create bigger environments, cover more screen space with CG as opposed to a digital matte painting, seeing further into the distance and have our CG work in more lighting setups. Season 1 had been a very dark show physically; a lot of the action happened at night, therefore a lot of the extensions were built mostly to work in a nighttime environment, which is often easier. In Season 2, on the other hand, we see more of the action during the day or at sunset, which is a lot less forgiving, but hopefully much better-looking in the end.”
Courtesy of Mr. X
As an example of the differences, last season showed the Brooklyn Bridge, but in the distance. “This year, we had to rebuild that asset in much more detail because in Episode 6 (spoiler alert), Libby stands on a Brooklyn rooftop precipice and looks up at the bridge,” explains Larmour. “Similarly, in Episode 4, when you see the big aerial fly-through of Newspaper Row, we had built some of those buildings in Season 1, but in really low detail because they were really far away. This year we fly right past them, and we can see every brick on them, up close and personal.”
For some of the mid-ground tenement buildings, Season 1 assets were recycled. “For the set extension down Hudson Street, those CGI models were mostly adapted assets from last season. However, if you’re in Newspaper Row or Chatham Street (Park Row), those are all brand new.” Some of the new locations and landmarks also included the Siegel-Cooper building on 6th Avenue, 5th Avenue by Central Park, the West Side piers, the Vanderbilt residence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Sing Sing prison. There were also some CG interior extensions, crowd replication shots, costume fixes and a CG dead baby.
Courtesy of Mr. X
Production
Larmour and the team did prep from March to May 2019 in Budapest. They started with concept drawings, got photographic reference from 1897, and “did single frame mock-ups of the type of extensions we wanted to see,” explained Larmour. “The art department had already had a concept team, Pixelloid, and they mocked up a few of the major locations, like the Siegel-Cooper Company building and West Side piers. During this process, “You want to see your choice of what type of building, how far you want to see it in the distance, whether you want to see any taller buildings peeking over the top of the row that you see.
Image Courtesy of Outpost VFX
“I was there working with production designer Ruth Ammon to organize what would go beyond her sets,” continues Larmour. “What bluescreens would need to be set up, organizing the rigging team and going through scripts. We made sure that everyone agreed on what type of shot was going to be in each different sequence. We’d budget out and work with the DP and director to work out how many shots we’d have per sequence and what style of shots they would be.”
At the end of October, the crew finished principal photography, and the entire post team moved to London. “So the edit team had been in Budapest,” explains Larmour, “and trying to do assembly edits in Budapest at Colorfront. Then at the end of principal photography, we all moved — the edit team, VFX team, me and producer Jessica Smith — to London.”
Images Courtesy of Outpost VFX
They worked until December 2019, when the edits were primarily locked, turning over shots to the vendors in Montreal, having daily Zoom calls with them, looking at their previz and getting back final shots. Around Christmas, Episode 1 was pretty much done.
Then executive producer Ben Rosenblatt and post producer Kari Hobson moved back to Los Angeles. When COVID hit in March 2020, everyone was already working remotely; now they worked from home. Post continued on Episodes 2 through 8 — remotely while at home — between London, LA, Montreal and Budapest.
“Basically, Ben, Kari and I were always on a Zoom call every day with Mr. X, working through all the shots and trying to get studio approval for those shots,” says Larmour. “So it was kind of a fairly convoluted setup, but at the same time, it obviously worked quite well.”
Editorial was officially completed in July 2020.
Challenges
Larmour says one of the challenges for Season 2 was that the scale was bigger than last year. The number of different locations was much greater than Season 1. There were 883 VFX shots in Season 2. Even though the style of visual effects was traditional,” he continued, “the sheer number of setups we had to do was fairly challenging, and the amount of detail we had to put into the environments was substantial.”
One of the more challenging scenes was creating Central Park outside the Spanish Consulate. “That was an entirely CG Central Park that you saw until you see Bruna Cusi (Senora Linares) walking into the park, which is actually a park in Budapest. When she walks out of the Spanish Consulate, that’s entirely bluescreen and CG trees that you see.”
Larmour’s team digitally hand-crafted 17 different types of trees to make that work. “To make sure that we had all the different textures, all the different colors, all different shapes. That was on a level with any of the toughest environments that we’ve done.”
Newspaper Row was also really complex. They had to build a lot more custom buildings so you “see almost the entire of the south of Manhattan island in quite a lot of detail. The sheer scale of that was very hard too.”
Unexpectedly, the VFX team was also called on to do CG costumes. Two different sequences were meant to be on different story days. They were shot with the same people in the same location, but in different costumes. “We used a small visual effects house in Budapest called Front as well as Outpost for this,” says Larmour. “We did a 2D fix for John Moore’s waistcoat when he’s at the New York Times. There are also two sequences from the Lying-In Hospital where we had to make a fully CG digital double of Sara Howard and clothe her in a jacket and dress and make those match other shots.”
Larmour doesn’t know whether or not there will be a Season 3. As of this writing, The Alienist has not been renewed or cancelled. Then again, Caleb Carr does need to actually finish Book 3, on which the season would be based. “The story is set in 1915 for Series 3,” mused Larmour. “So obviously they could do it, age people a little bit. But it would be completely different skylines in New York as well, because it’d be 1915. A lot of the skyscrapers would have been built by then.”
Tools
According to Larmour, both of the main vendors used a combination of Autodesk Maya, Side Effects Houdini, SpeedTree and Photoshop to create the CG aspects of the show, such as the buildings, water surfaces, trees and DMPs. It was composited using Foundry Nuke on Linux.
“Most remote reviewing was via CineSync, which allowed for the multiple teams involved in London, Montreal and LA to watch and make comments at the same time, while all high-res reviewing happened using RV,” concludes Larmour.
Dan Restuccio is a writer/director with Realwork Entertainment and part of the Visual Arts faculty at California Lutheran University. He is a former Disney Imagineer. You can reach him at dansweb451@gmail.com.
