ASSEMBLING THE CYBORG KUZE

HOW CYBORG KUZE WAS CREATED USING A MIXTURE OF TECHNIQUES

A discarded cyborg portrayed by Michael Pitt serves as the film’s antagonist, and is a seamless hybrid of digital augmentation and live-action photography.

“Kuze escaped Hanka Robotics just being a skeleton and a brain; he disappeared into the underworld and reassembled himself with spare parts,” states Ghost in the Shell visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron. “Kuze has a partial face made out of different panels and his whole upper body is exposed translucent muscle with some patches of photo-real skin. We put some markers on the face of Michael and had him wear green sleeves knowing that they would be replaced later, but at least we captured the real performance. It involved precise roto animation. We kept Michael’s eyes, mouth, pieces of his nose, and sometimes used his real hair. We didn’t make our lives easier by adding panel lines on his face but ultimately, Kuze doesn’t look like a human face on a digital body.”