Authentic Mayhem

VFX crews set the ground rules for the firefights, weapons and supervillain antics for Warner Bros.’ most-recent DC Comics adaptation, Suicide Squad. By Bill Desowitz.

gy. “We used that as a base to form volumetrics around her, which looked like an energy field combined with black smoke,” Winter says.

However, SPI made the Mega Enchantress. “She doesn’t fly through the air or have laser beams for eyes — she has different types of magic (based on technology from 6,000 years ago, when she ruled the world),” says SPI VFX supervisor Mark Breakspear, based in Vancouver. “We started exploring Mandelbulbs (three-dimensional fractals) and we only scratched the surface from a mathematical point of view.

“So with Enchantress, other than her facial features, she’s fully CG and has tattoos going all the way inside her body, which we can see because her skin is transparent. And from those tattoos she emitted smoke that poured onto a fractal membrane. The membrane would then generate a fractal fire made up of sharp obsidian pieces, which would then float up into the air and form Mandelbulb cubes.”

As for Incubus, he’s also a CG fractal creation. The challenge was making it liquefy and form together as he takes possession of different people, combining cloth and plastic substances, which merge to- gether into an outer shell from which Incubus bursts forth.

Mega Diablo, meanwhile, becomes a formidable foe for Incubus. He heats him up, liquefies his body and burns a hole in his chest. “It was a massive Houdini project, along with Maya and Nuke,” Breakspear says. Bill Desowitz is Crafts Editor of Indiewire (www.indiewire.com) and the author of James Bond Unmasked (www.jamesbondunmasked.com).