designing an altered future
We head into the cyberpunk world of Netflix’s sci-fi hit Altered Carbon with visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell
Discover the VFX in Netflix’s sci-fi hit Altered Carbon, including the work behind creating a dystopian, futuristic city
With its new television series Altered Carbon, Netflix has brought a richly detailed world hundreds of years into the future to the screens of scifi hungry viewers.
And what a detailed world it is. Partly based on Earth near what is currently San Francisco, and also set in other solar systems, the TV adaptation of the Richard K. Morgan novel was always going to need a healthy dose of 3D and computer-generated imagery to depict a dystopian future.
That work was led by production visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell, who brought in heavyhitter VFX studio Double Negative and a raft of other vendors, including Milk VFX, Rushes, Atomic Arts, Lola VFX and Encore to design cities, holograms, VR realms, bloody scenes and scores of other effects for the show.
Bringing a Book To life
Altered Carbon tells the story of a world where human memories are stored in discs called cortical stacks implanted into a person’s vertebrae. If they die, the stacks can be re-located into the ‘sleeve’ of another person. The show follows mercenary Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman) who is brought back to life in a new sleeve 250 years after his previous ‘death’. That’s thanks to the immensely rich Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who has asked Kovacs to solve his own mysterious death.
Playing out as a noir detective drama, Altered Carbon never shies away from several homages to the distinctive design of Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner. Indeed, visual effects supervisor Burrell says the Netflix show’s production designer Carey Meyer and the entire VFX crew warmly embraced that influence.
“We knew going into it we just had to embrace the Blade Runner aspect of it and not fight it, and try to make our own as best we could,” recalls Burrell. “But at the same time we gave it our own unique little flavour. When you’ve got a dark street that’s backlit with smoke and rain, with holograms, you’re going to be compared to
Blade Runner, no matter what.” That design aesthetic began with reams of concept art, and then a decision to shoot street scenes for Bay City (the remains of San Francisco) in sound stages crafted at a defunct newspaper printing factory just outside Vancouver. Burrell says: “When Carey saw that old printery he said, ‘Well, that’s
our city street set right there.’ We built a super-long, amazing street set that we could reuse throughout the season. It had these amazingly tall ceilings and was kind of weird and skinny. Carey wanted to build that as much as possible, knowing that every time we looked up it would be visual effects.”
Still, although visual effects would become a major part of the production, Netflix did also look to film. One innovation was the printing out of digital matte paintings provided by Double Negative with special ink. When frontlit, the paintings looked like day-time scenes. Backlighting and projecting ultraviolet light onto the paintings made them appear as night-time street signs. “We tried to make this set a 360-degree all-in-camera set, and it worked out great,” says Burrell.
a City in The future
When views into the towering stories of buildings above the streets were required, visual effects then stepped into the fore. Lidar scans and photogrammetry shoots of the live-action sets helped Double Negative extend these to more than 500 stories high, or 1,000 feet above.
To get there, Burrell says that the art department and visual effects teams started with a map of San Francisco and Oakland and plotted out a rough geography. There were ultimately three levels of buildings – the ground level, the twilight middle area and then the ultra-wealthy Aerium, which included Laurens Bancroft’s tower that soars above Bay City.
“We built 30 to 40 detailed buildings that we could then repurpose by recycling designs and moving them around,” explains Burrell. “But we had to be efficient, we did not have all the money in the world. We had to really make sure we did it smartly by, say, rotating a building 90 degrees or scaling it up or stretching it so that it would look slightly different. Double Negative also had a really great system for populating buildings and randomising them without them colliding.”
One memorable digital city moment occurs when Kovacs rushes the heavily injured detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) to medical care inside a flying vehicle, whizzing past an array of buildings, structures and other flying machines. “For that,” says
“We built 30 to 40 detailed buildings that We could then re-purpose by recycling designs and moving them around” Everett Burrell, visual effects supervisor
Burrell, “we built this area we lovingly called the ‘Death Star trench’ which was a long row of buildings that let us make turns and have intersections. That scene and some others involved some pretty intense rendering and CG rain elements. And we played a lot with bokeh, that light apparition effect for when a spot of rain would hit the lens. The directors of photography were doing bokeh purposefully on the show and so we would try to replicate that in any of the CG scenes.”
The higher up they were, the more expensive and lavish the buildings needed to be. Even holograms tended to become more exquisite the further up they were in the stratosphere. Right above the city limits sits Bancroft’s tower, known as Suntouch House. It was a unique organic design amongst the futuristic others. “It all revolves around what we call the ‘Elder’ tech,” notes Burrell. “The Elder tech is weaved in and out of the series and you see it in buildings and in the stacks. It’s what gives human beings the next level and enabled them to build the stacks, to make cars levitate and build buildings so high. For Suntouch, the Elder tech inspiration gave it that sort of spider-web, membrane-y vibe.”
The series comes to a climax in yet another futuristic location, Head in the Clouds – a floating ship complex that caters to perverse sexual fantasies of those who can afford to pay. It was modelled on a weather vane and antennae concept and, interestingly, included hallmarks of the Vancouver sports arena BC Place. This was where Head in the Clouds scenes were originally intended to be filmed, but a clash of schedules – thanks to a corresponding U2 tour concert – meant scenes were shot elsewhere.
Says Burrell: “So we were banned from shooting at BC Place but had art designed the whole ship around the arena, so we just went with it. If you look at the design of it, basically the whole top of Head in the Clouds is BC Place with an industrial vibe underneath.”
Clones, zero-g AND Blood AND guts
Amongst the grand CG city and building visual effects shots in
Altered Carbon were a myriad of equally impressive invisible effects. Late in the series, Kovacs ‘double-sleeves’ himself, effectively
creating where two a clone. Kovacs To appeared realise scenes on screen at the same time, Burrell turned to split-screen techniques when shooting with Kinnaman. One shot involved an almost sixminute-long conversation between the two clones in which the camera moved and so did they, at one point even clinking glasses. The scene was shot with a Technodolly, making the camera movements repeatable and allowing Kinnaman and a photo double to act out both ‘sides’ of the performance that were then composited as one.
“On set we also had a QTAKE real-time compositing playback system to show the line-ups,” says Burrell. “It took us 12 takes to get to that point. Once we had take 12, that was the master take of the ‘A’ side, and then Joel switched places with his photo double and did the scene again with the take-12 master control locked in.”
Another piece of invisible visual effects work was required for an earlier is drafted zero-g into scene, a fight-to-the-death where Kovacs bout. Actors and stunt performers performed the gravity-defying choreography with wires attached in a theatre-in-the-round at the University of British Columbia.
“It’s this amazing theatre that had these three-story, tiered levels of seats that were in a complete 360,” states Burrell. “The stunt guys could rig wires and cables for our team and then we could put audience members in there. Then it was a lot of wire removal; not one CG double ever. It was all practical – it was wire removal or it was guys or actors on skate dollies or on a bouncy ball, or we had the camera floating on a teeter totter.”
Those with weak stomachs might choose to avoid watching the fight scenes, for the style of violence was intended to be bloody and visceral. That meant the visual effects team was often called on to deliver blood and gore enhancements. Burrell based much of the work on practical blood hits which tended to be dark and thick in nature. “We actually shot some specific blood elements using the same formula that special effects supervisor Joel Whist used on set,” says Burrell. “We filmed a whole lot of blood bags from every possible angle; at camera, side, three-quarter, away from camera, or on greenscreen – at 48 frames per second. So I had this amazing library of blood at 4K that I could share with the VFX vendors so it would all have a consistent look.”
fun at 4K
The visual effects teams on Altered Carbon produced more than 2,000 shots for this first series, an even more impressive feat given that the show was delivered at 4K HDR.
“Our mandate was always to be superior visually, and design-wise, and in execution,” says Everett Burrell. “We wanted this to be an amazing feature film-quality TV series, and Netflix was unwavering on those demands.” Discover Altered Carbon at bit.ly/2jqdrfr