Led by VFX supervisor Matthew Krentz, the studio delivers 253 visual effects shots on Tim Burton’s hit ‘Beetlejuice’ sequel, including baby Beetlejuice, a stop-motion Charles Deetz being bitten by a shark, and the famed ghost’s dismembered ex-wife Delores.
There are some filmmakers known for their distinct visual language.Tim Burton is one of them, with his Gothic, macabre, and quirky sense of humor. Interestingly, when making the sequel, , his mandate was to capture the spirit of the original by mimicking what was technically and creatively achievable back in 1988. Even with the push to get as much of the effects work done in-camera, Production VFX Supervisor Angus Bickerton had to resort to many digital solutions, including the 253 shots delivered by Framestore that feature Baby Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice’s dismembered ex-wife Delores, and a stop-motion animated Charles Deetz being bitten by a shark. “A lot of the stuff that we did was seamless because we were not trying to show off the visual effects of the work,” states Matthew Krentz, VFX Supervisor, Framestore. “It was all about helping to sell the story. Our biggest helper on this was our client-side visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton. Angus had actually worked with Tim on [motion control cameraman] and [Production VFX Supervisor] so he knew the direction that Tim wanted from the beginning. Everything we were doing in visual effects was made to look like it would have been done for real if we could have done it.”
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“We looked at the original movie quite a few times for references and one of things we specifically studied was when Beetlejuice [Michael Keaton] is shrunken down in the model,” remarks Krentz.
“When he is digging into the grave, there are all these layers of Styrofoam and different practical things that made it look like a model. We tried recreating that when breaking up of the set piece when it cracks open and reveals Beetlejuice for the first time.” There were a couple of different elements that were part of the Beetlejuice reveal sequence. Krentz continues, “We did this earthquake that travels along the ground of the model, it breaks apart, and that’s when Beetlejuice comes into the attic for the first time. We had a full LiDAR scan of the practical model because we had to work with what they had shot. The model was built in two separate pieces that broke apart in the middle and separated out.The only thing that we did in the reveal was add some smoke and atmosphere. We had some uplighting to make it look more interesting. That portion of it was a lot more in-camera trickery versus the stuff we did when the camera is following along the middle of the model, which was completely digitized.” An interesting challenge was distinguishing the differences between a real and miniature house. “We had to make a miniature house look real and then dumb it down so you could see all of the subtleties that the modelmakers would have made.” Digital doubles were created for when Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) and Rory (Justin Theroux) fall through a trapdoor, tumble through a black hole, and land in the model of Winter River.“Some footage was shot of the actors standing and waving their arms around,” states Krentz. “We put them in, but it didn’t feel like they were falling. We did digital versions of them but in a way that replicated their motions as closely as possible and tried to ground everything. We looked at references like Tim Burton’s where Alice falls through the tunnel, but it felt too animated.” While finding herself inside the shrink office of Beetlejuice, Lydia becomes pregnant and gives birth to Baby Beetlejuice. “I read that section of the script probably 10 times and every time it had me in tears laughing,” Krentz notes.
“It was shot exactly how I imagined they would. In terms of Baby Beetlejuice there two sequences. One is in the shrink’s office and a post credit scene when Lydia’s daughter Astrid has a baby at the end and Baby Beetlejuice starts attacking all the doctors and nurses. Blood starts shooting everywhere and limbs are flying around.They did that as practical as possible. Because Baby Beetlejuice had so many puppeteers and took up so much space.we had to do some CG to go over those sections.
Sometimes the legs and arms had to be digitally replaced. We did have a full CG model of Baby Beetlejuice that was animated and rigged but we didn’t do any facial animation.” Stop-motion animation was utilized to explain the death of Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones does not appear in the movie) who also appears as a live-action persona that has been disfigured by a shark attack. “We had an actor in a full blue outfit from the waist up and he had this makeup done of a shark bite that went all around his chest,” remarks Krentz. “And for the bottom half, he had whatever Charlie Deetz was wearing. We had a scan of the actor and tracked into his chest our CG gory bloody looking cavity. We would paint out and replace his blue upper half, so you get a half empty version of the character walking around trying to figure out where he is.Charles Deetz was more involved than the Headless Horseman in . What they had was almost a puppet version of Charles Deetz with the cavity there in the chest piece and would shoot reference for us whenever we needed to do that. The lighting was always crazy with blues and oranges.You knew exactly how it needed to look like. There was always something to ground us with that practical version of that puppet.” The animation test was the hardest thing to do for the character. “We had to go through multiple departments to get any sort of visual representation.
The funny thing was he had an esophagus that stuck out a little bit and based off that animation, the idea is we were shooting up blood spurts into the air. When he was really trying to get his point across more blood would start shooting up in the air. At one point we went way too far and were told to dial it down!” Dismembered body parts reassemble, with the help of a staplegun, to form Delores (Monica Bellucci), Beetlejuice’s ex-wife. “All the limbs are in boxes, electricity shoots out of this cleaning machine [like Tesla coils], the boxes get reanimated, and the limbs start coming back together and bouncing around, basically rebuilding her body,” explains Krentz. “We did a lot of fully CG limbs.Monica Bellucci was in her outfit, and they had all these body doubles but of an arm. There would be this lady in a blue leotard and would have arm dressed up as if was belonging to Monica; she would do the animation of the hand moving around on the ground. We erased her body, put in a CG stump and it would look like an armless entity moving through. That was done with legs, a piece of her face and torso. You can’t show a persona trying to animate a torso, so we did a CG version.” To complete the reassembly, the limbs get stapled together. Krentz adds, “There is a scene where Delores is half-assembled and grabs an arm; she shoves it into the stump of her shoulder. For us, it had to line up and we had to make sure that edges of the shoulder and arm stump line up together, though the skin on the skin didn’t have to meld together. The idea is that the inners stick together and once she staples it, that’s when the limbs come closer. When she was stapling herself, we would paint out some of the staples and then reveal the real ones.” The creature work included snakes that bite Deila Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) and send her to the afterlife.According to Krentz, “Snakes are incredibly hard to make realistic.
They don’t have a bone structure but there is a rigidity to them.Even when Deila is holding the snakes they don’t go limp or loose because there is still a structure to them. You have to make sure that you abide to their muscles and the tension in them. We looked at real world references, like what do the snakes look like when you hold them and when they are in a tank and are slithering around.What do you do?” The snakes were originally based on rainbow boas, which have an interesting sheen.
“You get a base color that is red and then on top of the skin it looks like a rainbow in the highlights,” says Krentz.“We went through these different variations and put forth what we thought what Tim Burton was looking for. In the end, he thought that the rainbow look was too fantastical and wanted it to be more grounded.So, the snakes became regular boas.” A significant number of shots required the environment to be augmented to look like autumn. “We had to do what was called the ‘Fall filter,’” reveals Krentz.
“They shot in the summertime for some of the work, but the outdoor trees had to have oranges and reds. We did a good chunk of those shots. Trees can be replaced but it costs a lot more money. Originally, they were planning to do most of that work in the DI, but it didn’t provide the minutia of the individual leaves. What we would do is track the camera in the environment, roto individual trees, within those individual trees we would have masks of leaves to change their individual colors and make it feel a lot more varied. It was a manual process.One artist did a good handful of those shots and if you opened up the scene he was working on, there were thousands of trees separated out into different groupings, layered separately, and different masks for leaves for each individual tree.”
“I felt lucky to go onto set and see everything in motion,” reflects Krentz. “Just being there and experiencing that. The set designs were so cool. It was everything you expected it to be.The floors were wonky. Nothing was straight in terms of the lines of the environments. All the shelves were built weirdly. Crazy costumes and puppets. They did that from the starting point and all that makes our job easier because if that’s what we get to work from then we’re just helping to finish things. In terms of worrying about making things look old or feel like they were done 30 years ago it was helped by the way the movie was shot and gave us such an advantage.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for , , and .
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