Demonic Director Neill Blomkamp
on Volumetric Capture and VFX

By Iain Blair

South African director Neill Blomkamp has always pushed the VFX envelope. After beginning his career as a visual effects artist in film and television, he charged onto the international scene with his 2009 directorial debut, the sci-fi thriller District 9. Made for just $30 million, it became a global hit, earning four Oscar nominations. Blomkamp followed that with two more VFX-heavy films — Elysium and Chappie — and has since been developing and making experimental projects for his independent company Oats Studios.

His latest film, Demonic, is a horror-thriller with a high-tech twist. It stars Carly Pope (Suits, Elysium) as Carly, a young woman whose mother has fallen into a coma. She reluctantly agrees to take part in a therapy that will allow her to tap into her mother’s still-active brain in order to communicate with her.

The Demonic team included director of photography Byron Kopman, editor Austyn Daines and additional editor Julian Clarke. Viktor Muller was the VFX supervisor, and Universal Production Partners (UPP) provided the visual effects work.

We spoke with Blomkamp about making the film, the cutting-edge VFX and the challenges involved.

You used volumetric capture to create the simulation of the mother’s mindscape. How did that work?
It’s a pretty new technology that I don’t think has been used in a film to this extent before. It’s basically 3D video, where you can turn your actors into geometry — you have about 260 4K cameras arranged in a grid or dome, so they can shoot the actors from all points of view. All of that is then turned into 3D data.

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