RE VOLT
Trevor Hogg steps out into the real world with Jay Worth and DNEG providing a guided tour of the visual effects for Season 3 of Westworld…
An android jailbreak occurs in Westworld at the end of Season 2 as Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) escapes the confines of the theme park with the intention of taking the battle directly to her human creators in the real world. The visual effects for all three seasons of the HBO adaptation created by Jonathan Nolan (Person Of Interest) and Lisa Joy (Burn Notice) have been supervised by Jay Worth (Fringe) who has received a Primetime Emmy Award for his efforts. “One of the fun things about working with Jonah and Lisa is that they’re never content to tell the same story again,” notes Worth, who produced 3,500 shots for the eight episodes of Season 3 with DNEG, Pixomondo, Crafty Apes, COSA VFX, Important Looking Pirates, RISE FX, Profile Studios,
Deep Water FX and El Ranchito; 1,500 shots had to be completed remotely because of the pandemic.
LED screens were strictly used for environmental backgrounds. “In Episode 303 when Charlotte Hale [Tessa Thompson] is in her office, there was too much page count and too many moving parts to be able to figure out how to shoot at the City of Arts and Sciences [in Valencia, Spain],” explains Worth. “We scouted after we had shot there. We were able to shoot plates as well as do scanning. El Ranchito built some CG assets in Unreal that we were able to bring onto our stage. Transferring all of these different pipelines into a film pipeline was another huge challenge. Because it was of the medium, we were able to move the sun wherever we wanted to, shoot different times of day, and have it all be consistent.” The
methodology excelled with the personal drone flying shots. “It doesn’t have to be built in Unreal because it’s flying past your window and the camera can’t move too much when you’re inside a cockpit. We went up multiple times to shoot different helicopter plates throughout Los Angeles and then build out the environments to our specifications. Mark Byers [Ford v Ferrari] and his special effects team built a gimbal rig that could rock and sway, pitch and yaw so it feels like our actors are flying through LA. All of the reflections and interactive light ends up making it feel so much more real.”
Nolan took advantage of his friendship with world-famous Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to construct Los Angeles in 2058. “The buildings that we have throughout Los Angeles are actual buildings, prototypes and different things that Bjarke Ingels has already designed,” notes Worth. “Sometimes we’ve made them taller but the vibe and aesthetic were taken straight from him. Jonah was thinking about the robots going into the real world when he saw Her [2013] and said, ‘That’s how you do it. You go to Singapore and shoot it for Los Angeles.’ It was a constant dance back and forth figuring out, ‘How can we get these different pieces into the visual language of the show?’” A vertical approach was adopted for the cityscape. “All over these different cities, specifically New York, are pencil buildings. There isn’t a whole lot of sprawl. The biggest thing we found when adding these buildings was moving away from glass and steel. What was so striking when we were in Singapore was how many buildings have greenery on the top and sides. It adds this lush richness that you don’t see in a lot of cities.”
Following in the park tradition of Westworld, Shogunworld, and The Raj is Warworld, which recreates Italy during World War II. “The fun thing about Warworld was because we were able to shoot in Spain, that was mostly clean-up of antennas and modern things that were there,” reveals Worth. “We had to add some banners. That was normal world building for us which is painting out contrails to make it feel more immersive from a park standpoint. We had some interiors and scenes that we couldn’t pick up all of the material on that were shot on greenscreen.” The virtual version of the afterlife for androids known as the Sublime (aka the Valley Beyond) reappears in Season 3. “It’s Engerraund Serac’s [Vincent Cassel] version of the Sublime. We still used the same place but had more freedom to shoot it like we normally do, which is put the sun where we want it. That one was challenging because we wanted to shoot the Sublime with a beautiful backlight and got stuck with a cloudy day when we shot it. We were able to use the same material from the season finale last year for the Sublime in the scene between Maeve and Serac in the fields.”
The Man in Black (Ed Harris) fighting himself did not utilise motion control cameras, explains Worth. “It was a lot of brute-force comp work to tie plates together that were shot with poor man’s motion control and full CG heads as well.” Autonomous vehicles have a prominent role in futuristic Los Angeles. “We tried to figure out if we could build our own personal flying craft but did construct our Rideshare vehicles. There is a stunt driver in the front of that thing with full engine and capabilities to drive. For the stunt sequence, we
“FOR LA WE USED BUILDINGS AND PROTOTYPES THAT BJARKE INGELS HAS ALREADY DESIGNED” Jay Worth, production VFX supervisor, Westworld
built an exact replica that just had a roll cage with witness cameras around it. We were able to capture all of the reflections and use the wheels. Anything touching the ground and the spinning was kept and then we added the Rideshare vehicle on top of it with digital doubles inside.”
Certain things have remained the same. “It’s a hard-surface object that we have to build and model, light, shade and composite; the tools we have to do that are always getting better,” observes Worth. “For Dolores, in the finale, the main thing that we did was change the aesthetic of her endoskeleton. The model from Season 1 was slighter and not about her being heroic and ready to conquer the world. It was her waking up for the first time. When we put that model into Season 3 it didn’t quite tell the story and also didn’t make sense to be exactly the same body. We changed the model based on the angles of the cameras and added more infrastructure to the insides of it.” The philosophy towards visual and special effects has stayed constant throughout the three seasons of Westworld. “Being able to look at all of the different pieces and use the correct tool to make sure that we got the desired result is important to us. We are always constructing things that can be built upon in a unique way and feel cohesive in the world that we’re building.”