Villainous VFX
How German VFX studio Trixter powered the twisted superhero story Brightburn
It’s a familiar comic book tale: a small spaceship, carrying an infant boy, crash-lands on a farm and a married couple raise him as their own. Then, as he grows up, the boy begins to exhibit incredible powers. Brightburn borrows these iconic narrative beats, but as he matures the confused and angry boy begins to act out and harness his powers for evil. The filmmakers behind Brightburn turned to German VFX studio Trixter to ensure that the film’s limited budget did not compromise its quality, and that viewers were sold on its dark vision.
Trixter was the primary VFX vendor on Brightburn, handling the vast majority of shots. VFX producer Christine Resch adds that the initial talks about Trixter’s involvement on the film came from a positive working relationship with producer James Gunn. “We already had a very close connection to him through working on Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2,” she says. “He approached us with Brightburn, and we worked on the entire range from set supervision all the way to VFX in post.”
With remote studios like Trixter on the rise, Gunn and director Dave Yarovesky felt confident in their choice. Tools now exist that make far-flung, real-time visual communication possible. When Resch and VFX supervisor Dietrich Hasse were on set in Atlanta, they used cinesync to keep in touch with the home team. “As the supervisor and I were working on set, we were still discussing ideas with the crew that we already had set up in Munich and presenting them to the client,” Resch adds. “cinesync was really helpful to actually share ideas as we were going on set, just on the go.”
An immense amount of look development took place on the project, for which cinesync proved a critical tool. “When we were discussing details like lighting in the background or dust particles, it was good to just really be on the same page with a tiny little spot on the image,” explains Resch. “There was a lot of destruction, dust particles and effects going on. For anything that involved a laser, the development of the effect was very intense. There’s so many
“THERE WAS A LOT OF DESTRUCTION, DUST PARTICLES AND EFFECTS GOING ON” Christine Resch, VFX producer
different ways that you can approach a laser shooting out of eyes.”
During one particularly graphic scene the viewer is shown a close-up of a woman pulling glass shards out of her eye. The team at Trixter wanted this sequence to look and feel as lifelike as possible. “There’s actually a lot of different layers put together,” says Resch, “and it was really important for us to see how we would handle it and light it, to make sure it was as realistic as possible.”
Other sequences required Trixter to develop intricate digital doubles of actors Jackson Dunn and Elizabeth Banks. They worked from scans of the actors, as well as close-up images of the boy’s mask to ensure that the digital results matched the physical sources. This ultimately allowed the studio more flexibility to deliver on Yarovesky’s vision. “We needed a lot of creativity and the freedom to work on ideas that came up in post, so we wanted to make sure we had all the possibilities that we needed afterwards for approaching these shots. You obviously can’t have a little boy smashing out of a house,” says Resch.
Brightburn proved to be a one-of-a-kind project for Trixter, and was a chance to have fun exploring some dark and thoroughly intense subject matter. “Just to see it come together from the onset, where we were sharing our first layout and concept ideas through cinesync, and then going to the final image and seeing it put all together,” recalls Resch. “Having shots like a head exploding with laser blasts or a jaw falling off, you don’t get to do that every day. Like someone drawing a little piece of flesh and someone else shouting, ‘make it extra gory!’ It was a lot of fun.”