Sony Imageworks’ FX supervisor Mark Breakspear reveals how Enchantress’ power was visualised

Sony Imageworks contributed 300 shots to Suicide Squad. Mark Breakspear explains how the powers of cinema’s latest supervillian were created. “Enchantress has to have some kind of magic that works in the past so we hit on this idea: we started getting into 4th dimensional fractals,” says Mark. “It was one of those bizarre things where you realise that everything we do is 4D fractals. Our FX team had to get to grips with 4D because we’re representing a mathematical idea visually. Fractals aren’t spatial. When we were working out fractal stuff we worked in Mandelbulb software just to experiment and learn the mathematics involved in generating these things.”

Riffing on an idea of science fiction writer and visionary, Arthur C. Clarke, Breakspear notes of Enchantress that, “Her magic is a technology that appears to be magic to us.”

A second Enchantress-focused challenge was that the production team couldn’t decide on a costume.

“The costume that was being worked towards for principal photography needed to be “a costume that could behave, and bend light, in a different way. We filmed Cara Delevingne in a ‘bikini’ and then we added on top of that a digital costume,” says Mark. “Tracking a human body and putting all of those subtleties in is the hardest thing. We had to build a really complex rig to get those nuances and her skin had to be slightly transparent: her tattoos go down into the skin. We had to build a CG body that we could combine with her real body and this all tied into the fractal machine.”