SCOTT PILGRIM vs THE WORLD : VFX PRODUCTION NOTES
FRAZER CHURCHILL : VFX SUPERVISOR

My involvement in Scott Pilgrim started in Summer 2008 when we were approached by Edgar Wright with the script. Based on the cult comic book by Bryan Lee O malley the story follows Toronto based hipster Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), his band Sex bob-omb and charts his efforts to win the heart of the elusive girl of his dreams Ramona Flowers.

The story sounds straight forward enough until you get a little way into the script. Scott discovers that to win Ramonas heart he must defeat her 7 evil-ex boyfriends in combat . As the story develops Scott meets each of her Ex’s and has to engage them in a fight, each fight being more spectacular than the last.

Bryan lee O malley infuses his comic with a unique stylistic flourish, his story panels are have an aesthetic that can be best described as a mixture between 16bit videogaming and Japanese Anime. It’s this style that creates the unique voice of Scott Pilgrim, Edgar wanted to translate this unique style onto film, to quote Edgar …

"There have been lots of great comic-book adaptations recently, but I thought there was a good way – post Sin City and 300 – to bring an element of graphics and animation to the screen in a comedy film that you wouldn’t accept in something harder like The Dark Knight. __There’s also the videogame element that’s in the book. It seems to me you can do a good videogame film that isn’t an adaptation of any game. __In the same way The Matrix was a great comic-book film that wasn’t actually based on any comic book, this will have elements of gaming without being a straight adaptation of a game...”_
“On one hand it’s very faithful to the books, on the other it has become something that has the structure of a romantic comedy action film. I haven’t quite figured that out. At the moment I’m calling it an action romance, but I’m trying to think of something a bit snappier...”

During the story Scott battles a Bevy of winged Demon Hipster Chicks,
has a “Bass off” with a Levitating Vegan, battles the Katanyagi Twins and their double headed snow dragon by creating a green eyed Sound Yeti from his amplifiers. Peoples sentences are punctuated by on-screen comic book text boxes.
Peoples actions have visible sound FX Graphics which obey photographic depth of field. Musical Soundwaves are visible and sometimes turn into creatures and people have a habit of bursting into showers of coins.

Reading through the script it became evident that the film would have a significant VFX requirement.

The main task at hand was in translating Bryans’ comic panels onto film. We would have to make his graphics photographic and visualise the extremely stylised fight sequences, all of which were all based in a hyper-real altered reality. The big design question was how to keep the spirit of the comic while working with live action photography.

Edgar came in to discuss the possibility of shooting a test sequence which would act as a proof of concept for the films particular look,It was also serve to help us work out key shooting & digital techniques before principal photography began.

Edgar and his brother Oscar explained their vision for the film and showed us a whole host of references from FMV game sequences, old and new streetfighter, tekken and the like through to Japanese animation, Naruto, Fooly Cooly, Samurai jack, Afro Samurai. We reviewed many hours of footage, while they explained in detail how they saw the aesthetic of the film.

There was a delicate balance to be trodden, because while they wanted the sequences to be stylised they didn’t want them to be TOO stylised, they wanted everything to have a firm basis in reality and photography. They cited Speed Racer as an example of the aesthetic going too far for them. Live action Anime but with a firm grounding in reality & photography.

Edgar had storyboarded the entire film. Using the storyboards and detailed briefing/reference we set about putting together a small VFX test that would inform a more full bodied test shoot which was to be shot in Toronto in the Autumn of 2008.

The first VFX test was on the slightly more fantastical side of Manga design, we deliberately went a bit too far with it, knowing that it’s better to be told to come back to reality a bit rather than “you didn’t go far enough” . Having learned valuable lessons we went into the Test shoot well informed.

The test shoot proper, involved shooting a short sequence from the first fight in the script, the Matthew Patel fight. During this shoot we worked very closely with Cinematographer Bill Pope, Production Designer Marcus Rowland, Stunt Co-ordinator Brad Allen and of course Edgar. Using parallelogram rigs Rigs & harness, Bluescreen, photoflash bulbs on touch triggers, running treadmills, slow-motion photography and a variety of shooting formats VistaVision, Anamorphic, spherical & digital, we established a number of techniques that would form the basis of the methodology for the principal photography.

Post production on the test shoot lasted 3 months. The test served it’s purpose of showcasing the look of Scott Pilgrim along with establishing key production techniques.

With the test shoot completed, prep began for the feature. Production offices were established at cinespace in Toronto and Marcus Rowlands Art dept began design and construction of the sets while Brad Allen began training the Actors in Martial Arts techniques and fight style as well as the general fitness training they’d need to get through such a physically demanding shoot.

I arrived in Toronto in January 2009 and began work on the VFX design. Working closely with Edgar Bill and Marcus we went through every story board to establish how we’d realise each frame, we’d identify which shots we thought would be slow-motion, phantom digital , film, vista-vision or regular spherical, how much set to bujild, how much set-extension. Which characters would be shot in –situ which would be bluescreen or digital. Each frame in SP is a marriage of Physical & Digital techniques, and we were able to lock down our approaches early on thanks to the extensive storyboarding & test shooting that had already been done.

Meanwhile back in London the pre-viz team began working on the Lucas Lee skateboard sequence and the Katanyagi fight which involves a battle between sex bob-omb and the Katanyagi twins. It’s a huge set piece that involve the bands summoning Audio demons, (2 snow dragons & A sound yeti) from their speaker stacks the two sequences being very complex CG set pieces.

Design Work was also beginning on other aspects of the film, including The CG environment for the Casa loma Skateboard sequence .

There are many different types of effect in the film:

CG ENVIRONMENTS/STYLISED EXTERIORS
It’s well known in film making circles that Toronto normally doubles for New York or some other North American city but Scott Pilgrim features Toronto and it’s landmarks in all their glory, they help form the unique identity of the film.

Bryan Lee O Malleys comic features many Toronto locations and Edgar wanted to present Bryan Lee O’Malleys stylised comic book vision of the city on film. The idea was that the look of the exteriors in the film should be somewhere between a comic book and reality, we took location photography and removed extraneous detail like road signs, electrical wires and a lot of detail from the trees while at the same time “smoothing” snow detail, the result was a “simplified” exterior shot that had something of the feel of the comic but with it’s feet firmly planted in photographic reality, this delicate balance of comic and reality (biased in favour of reality) really is the key to the look of Scott Pilgrim. These shots were completed by Mr.X inc a Toronto based FX company.

VISUALISED MUSIC
A key feature of Scott Pilgrim is the Music. written by Beck, Nigel godrich , Cornelius, Metric and various others, most of the major set pieces are set to a soundtrack. One thing Edgar wanted to achieve was that when a band are playing in the film, we should see the music as per the comic book.

All of the music was written and recorded before principal photography started, Nigel Godrich sent the separate sound stems to double negative to allow them to begin the R&D on the visualised music. The ultimate goal of this process was to create on-screen “sound arcs” that moved in time with the music. So the design effort had two strands, to find a photographic equivalent of Bryan Lee O Malleys renderings and to create a method for allowing the music to drive the Animation. Andrew Whitehurst wrote software that allowed the Audio files to generate animation curves in maya, depending on the nature of the track we would use different channels to drive the animation, if the shot in question was of someone rocking out on the guitar we would use the rhythm guitar stem to drive that particular animation, if the shot was all about the drums then we had that stem drive the movement of the arcs. If we didn’t like the shapes generated by the software then we’d alter the shapes by hand to make the most interesting and dynamic shapes for the shot. The resulting effect being a visualised burst of kinetic energy married to the soundtrack.

GRAPHICS
The SP aesthetic features many onscreen graphic sound effects which describe the action (usually in a fight) as per the 1960’s Batman TV series. Bryans comics are filled with these onomatapeaic effecics, Matthew Patel gets punched and the word “krowww” appears on screen, Scott gets flung hundreds of yards across the set and the word “Whip” appears behind him. Edgar wanted these graphics to feel integrated with the photography, so we’d take graphics directly from the comic book track them into the shots and composite them with the correct depth of field for their position in space, we’d give them a subtle translucency so the lights in the shot would shine through them, they’d have subtle coloration imperfections along their edges, a chromatic abberation just to give them photographic attributes. Oscar Wright Edgars brither and the films concept designer also designed many graphic captions for the film, we would take his graphics and add a “photographic treatment” to them.

FIGHT SEQUENCES :
THE PATEL FIGHT
The first fight in the film is the Patel fight. This was a complicated fight to plan and shoot. We had already shot a short piece of the sequence during the test shoot and this helped us establish some key techniques but there was still a lot of work to do.

The patel fight introduces the viewer to the hyper-real Manga-esque world of Scott Pilgrim, the film up until this point has played relatively straight, at this point in the story Scott Pilgrim shows it’s true colours and takes a sharp left turn. Matthew Patel bursts through the Ceiling of the Rockit nightclub and attacks Scott while he’s playing on stage. Matthew flies through the air lands on stage, faces off with scott then charges across the stage, get’s kicked up into the ceiling of the club, whereupon Scott leaps from the stage, flies up to the ceiling catches patel with a mid-air uppercut and then lands a repeated volley of punches on him while ascending to the ceiling of the nightclub at which point he smacks him down from the ceiling to the floor.

A kung fu style battle then takes place on the nightclub floor until matthew patel levitates and begins an aerial bollywood style song and dance routine during which he summons four winged demonic hipster girls who bombard sex-bob omb with a deluge of fireballs.

The whole sequence was shot using a combination of bluescreen photpgraphy and in-situ on-set photography. Parrallelogram stunt rigs, wire work and jogging treadmills.

Matthew Patels flying pose was shot on a parallelogram rig against blue with an interactive light sequence rolling over him and wind machine to create movement . The interactive light was created by a series of programmed parcans and a rolling mirror.

For the punching and spinning, we used the phantom camera and shot at 288fps. Cera was shot on set punching 2 lighting triggers that set off four photoflash bulbs, ceras punching action was shot twice, one tight medium shot of him blocking and punching and one wide shot of the follow through KO punch, we then morph transitioned between the two shots two create a crash zoom out, this was augmented with camera shake and “colour shake” in which the image would cycle through frames of block colour which added a very stylised feeling of impact. The element of patel being punched out was shot on a P-rig, patel was manipulated by Brad Allens stunit team in blue suits while Bill Pope provided a 70kw “lightning strike” interactive light to create flashing KO light on Patel as he spun out of frame in digital slow mo.

The whole shot was composed around the “Krowww” and “kpok” sound effect graphics which we took from the comics and overlayed live on set to get good composition and line-up on the day.

In the final composite put together by Ian Copeland there are Hand drawn flash frames during the impact flashes, these were provided by Oscar Wright, the Films concept designer.

In another action shot Patel Runs across the stage at Scott during which the proportions of the room stretch and distort as they do in Manga animation, in the finished shot the camera appears locked to Patels legs as runs . To achieve this we shot patel on a blue jogging treadmill to capture a “camera locked” aspect on his running legs, we then shot scott, kim, Stephen stills and Johnny on the Rockit set with a dolly move .

CG floor was created and then animated to match patels treadmill legs, CG set wall was also added later, Anime zoom lines and lens flares were comped in to create the final look.

A dynamic low angle shot of scott kicking patel was accomplished using stuntperformers on wire rigs who later had their faces replaced. The impossible focal length change during the crash zoom was created using close and distant camera positions morphed together to create impossible

The Final Anime backgrounds for the sequence were created using a combination of plate photography and digital stills. Working with with 2nd Unit DP David franco I shot travelling plates of the Rockit set using a 50ft techno crane. Compositors worked through the material to come up with a photographic version of a “Naruto” style speedline Background.


DEMON HIPSTER CHICKS
Patels song and dance sequence was choreographed to music written by Dan Nakamura. Patel was shot in situ in the Rockit set on a fork rig performing his dance routine, photoflash bulbs were triggered at the appropriate times during the live playback to sync with the appearance of the demon hipster chicks and fireballs.

The idea for the four demon girls is that they all look identical but have slight differences in their performance, the way we acheived this was to shoot the same girl on a fork rig with a four camera array on bluescreen , this gave us a slightly different angle on each girl relative to their position in the air. We shot numerous takes of her running through her routine which enabled us to use different takes for the different girls giving us a synchronised but not identical performance from each of the girls. One girl pass was shot with a spotlight on to create a pass that we could place in the spotlit area of the hero plate. Flashbulbs were fired in time with the song playback to synchronise with the Hero Matthew Patel performance.

The Hipster chicks were given CG wings, an ethereal glow and ghostly transparency in compositing . Fireballs, flames, debris and magicdust were also added. Fireball effects were created by Aline Sudbreck using in-house software squirt. CG wings were built and animated to complement the dance routine, while Kate Porter oversaw compositing of the sequence.

THE LUCAS LEE FIGHT
Scott and Ramona go to Casa Loma (a famous Toronto landmark) and end up on a film set where we discover another one of Ramonas evil ex’s, Film Star Lucas Lee. Scott pretty quickly gets embroiled in a fight with Lucas Lee and his stunt team.

The Lucas lee sequence fetaures this fight plus Lucas Lee (Chris Evans) doing an impossible series of skateboard tricks whilst “grinding” down a long set of railings.

The fight begins with Scott getting punched out and thrown an impossible distance in to a castle turret. To shoot this Chris Evans picked up a dummy set of legs dressed with scotts costume to provide a realistic prop with believable weight resistance for Chris to “spin throw” across the set. The dummy was later replaced with a digital double and animated tex-avery style in a long throw up into a castle turret. CG debris was added to enhance the impact.

Scott falls from the turret, through scaffolding ending up some bags of cement.
For this we shot a stunt performer on a descender rig and then shot a partial repeat move with Michael cera doing a body roll onto the cement bags. Both elements were shot using very controlled moves with a Vistavision camera. This enabled us to achieve good line-up for the two sides of the transition but gave us the latitude to create a more organic “verite” style camera move in post. We wanted to create the impression the camera operator had struggled to catch the unpredictable stunt.

The 2 pieces were digitally stitched together using a digital double. The digital double animation created a seamless transition between the stunt man and Michael Cera giving the impression Michael Cera had just pulled off very dangerous fall.

Scott is then confronted by the five strong stunt team.. He quickly dispatches them all with quick fire kung-fu fight moves. Brad Allen designed a fight during which the action is revealed in a long tracking move. for the most part the fight moves were unachievable for an actor, so we planned to shoot the fight in 3 chunks and join them together with digital transitions. The first part was Michael Cera performing some of the easier punches and kicks, The second part features a stunt man jumping and spin kicking his way across the set, ending up with Michael Cera smashing the final assailant over the head with a skateboard. Again on-set line-up was critical in shooting the three pieces., as was continuity of action through the start and end poses. The three pieces were shot Vistavision so we could add “hand-held” camera operation and digital zooms in the final composite. Clean plates, digital stills and Michael Cera face elements were shot to help glue the 3 pieces together. CG smashing skateboard, comic book style animated impact graphics and visualised sound effects were all added in the final comp.

After defeating Lucas’ stunt team Scott and Lucas lee face off. As they run toward each other the proportions of the environment stretch as they enter “Manga World”. This was achieved by shooting tracking plates on the casa loma set. Elements of Michael and Chris were then shot using a phantom camera running at 288fp in a bluescreen studio, Chris jumping on a trampoline and Michael being yanked out of mid-air respectivelyand bluescreen close ups of Michael Cera and Chris Evans. We also shot Michael and Chris running on Blue treadmills. The final shots are vignetted with zoom lines and have a digital contra zoom applied.

The final shots are an amalgam of on-set plates, digital stills, bluescreen actors, bluescreen stuntperformers along with CG environment, 2D Graphic sound effects, hand drawn speed lines and photographic flare elements,

The design of the Anime Backgrounds is entirely based on the photography. All the colours in the speed lines are taken from the location photography, this gives the heavily stylised Backgrounds a versimilitude and a photographic realism. The speedline backgrounds are a mixture of hand-drawn lines, anamorphic lens flares elements and heavily stretched stills animated to create a travelling Background.

SKATEBOARD SEQUENCE
Scott challenges Lucas lee to show off his skateboarding skills by getting him to grind down the big staircase leading up to Casa Loma.
This sequnce sees chris evans ollying up onto the railings and grainding his way down to the street below. In the worlds of Lucas Lee“There are like 200 steps and the rails are garbage”

The sequence sees Lucas hopping from rail to rail, pulling an aerial 360 degree rail grab , a backside toeslide and other radical moves, all of this is punctuated with on screen sound effects, flurries of snow and plumes of sparks.

A previz model of the casa loma staircase environment was built using location photography as reference and the sequence was animated using a digital Lucas Lee. The sequence underwent numerous revisions in the edit suite before it was locked.

The previz models of portions of the steps and their associated CG camera positions were placed into a maya scene of the bluescreen studio, this enabled us to create the physical layout for each of the shots. Art dept provided the practical railings., and platforms that doubled for the CG set. All the stunts were shot entirely against blue using wire work and gimbles. CG environment was created based on extensive location photography and lit using HDRI derived CG lights. Once again The Casa Loma staircase is an exaggerated version of reality, we played very fast and loose with the spatial relationships and increased all the distances and changed the layout to create the breakneck Anime flavoured action set-piece. The final sequence has matte paintings of the Toronto skyline, CG steps, CG trees, CG snow flurries, CG sparks, Lens flare elements, 2D graphics, bluescreen stunt perofmrers, bluescreen actors, CG coin explosions, CG & photographic smoke elements. Chantelle Williams created the CG environment using Maya and Renderman/Steve Tizzard oversaw the creation and compositing of the action sequence.

Only the first shot in the sequence was shot on location at Casa Loma with Chris Evans ollying up onto the railings with a wire assist, he pulled it off in two takes, that shot is completely real!

THE ROXY FIGHT
Scott & Ramona head to an after party where they encounter evil ex no 4 : Bi-Furious Roxy Richter who fights with a dangerous looking metal Razorbelt. The elaborate fight choreography was put together by Brad Allen, the fight moves were shot using a combination of the actors and stunt performers, both wielding a long ribbon to stand-in for the razor belt. This forced the correct physical exertion from the performers and gave everyone on set a visual cue and something to react to. The ribbon was removed digitally and replaced with a CG razor belt which was animated based on the path of the ribbon. An extra pass of animation was added to create dynamic compositions and make the belt appear really dangerous. Lens flares, CG smoke effects and sparks were added throughout the sequence. There are also a number of bluescreen shots in the sequence as Roxy Richter has the ability to PAF, which means she disappears and re-appears in a cloud of smoke.

The fight sequence was enhanced with a CG hammer, CG breaking disco ball shards, CG smoke. Lens flare elements and on screen graphics. Serena Lam and David Furher composited the sequence.

THE KATANYAGI FIGHT
In one of the more spectacular fight sequences Sex-bob-omb have to face off with the Katanyagi twins in a battle of the bands at huge warehouse party. Sex bob-omb start to play a track written by “beck” called threshold whereupon the Katanyagi twins fire up their synths and blast sex-bob-omb off the stage with a devastating sound wave from their huge speaker stack, the wave also blows a hole in the venues roof.

Sex-bob-omb recompose themselves and start to play again, snow is falling through the hole in the roof and as they start to play the snow dances in time to the music. The katanayagi twins summon 2 huge snow dragons from their speaker stack they coil through the air, breath snow fire on sex bob-omb blowing them off the stage.

The fight resumes with sex bob-omb summoning a sound yeti from their amplifiers, the dragons & yeti battle for supremacy in a huge aerial striuggle while sex bob-omb and the katanyagis play. The fight intensifies and finally the yeti bashes the snow dragons heads together and they fall onto the katanyagi stage destroying the twins, their synths and speaker stack in a huge explosion of coins and broken speakers.

The scene was pre-vizd at Double Negative, so the choreography & basic look of the creatures was to some extent designed prior to shooting. The scene took 2 weeks to shoot and was shot with on-set playback to sync all the elements of the peformance, using the previz we marked the position of the creature in each shot with a weather balloon, this also acted as a CG lighting reference. Bill positioned long sequences of lights which were programmed to follow the creatures movement providing interactive lighting at the correct spatial positions.

Colin Mcevoy animated the creature fight while Markus drayss and Lucy Salter designed the complex particle system that defines the snow dragons.

The dancing snow system and the Katanyagis soundwave effects were created by Alexis Hall using Houdini & Maya.

One of the features of the Sound Yeti is that it’s covered in “sound fur” which reacts to the music. CG supervisor Andrew Whitehurst wrote a piece of software called the waveform generator which converts data from the Audio files into animation data which drives the amplitude and frequency of each spike of the sound fur. The end result is a relentless bristling movement on the yeti which is driven by the Music.

Ultimately the look of the yeti harks back to hand drawn animation, one of the first briefs for the creature was to make it like the “creature from the ID” from the film Forbidden Planet. The final Yeti look is a combination of hand animation, complex particle system dynamics and audio driven animation.

In the fights big finale the dragons fall onto the katanyagi twins demolishing their stage in a spectacular explosion enhanced with a scott pilgrim signature shower of coins. The basis of the explosion was a practical gag rigged by Laird McMurry with pyrotechnics provided by Arthur Langevin. The explosion was enhanced with Rigid body dynamics using in-house software “Dynamite” and coin particle simulations, provided by Chris Thomas and Federico Fasselini. Composited by Keith Herft. The final shot is a seamless blend of Live action and CG destruction mayhem.



THE CHAOS THEATRE
Scott confronts Ramona’s arch evil-ex Gideon at his state of the art nightclub “the chaos theatre”

He pulls a flaming sword from his chest and fights a horde of charging hipsters.
Scott flips and cartwheels around the nightclub dispatching hipsters with well orchestrated precision. The intricate fight was choreographed by Brad Allen. Michael Cera wielded a plexiglass sword filled with red leds so that he had interactive light cast on him representing the flames, it also gave great reference for the level of motion blur the CG flaming sword should have. He had a cut off version of the sword allowing him to swipe “through “ his attackers, and a full length version of the sword for shots where his strikes don’t connect.

Each time Scott strikes one of the Hipsters with his sword they burst into a shower of coins. The coins explosions were created in maya DNB and rendered in renderman,

The plexiglass sword was replaced with a CG metal blade which in turn was engulfed in CG flames.

The CG flames were created with in house fluid simulator squirt and rendered with renderman. The flames were overseen by Mick Harper with Help from Federico Fasselini. Jim Steel oversaw the compositing effort.

Scott and Gideon run at each other and clash in mid-air in an Anime style sequence. To create this we shot 2 stunt doubles jumping on trampolines, we shot them with the phantom camera at 288 frames (a multiple of 24 we derived for re-speed purposes). Background plates were a combination of vistavision plates shot on set and tighter shots of the Chaos theatre LED panels, the plates were combined to create an abstract Manga BG that retained the favour of the photography. The stunt doubles faces were digitally replaced with Michael Cera & Jason Schwartzmans faces.

HEARTS& FLASHES
Throughout the film Edgar has a very playful approach. ,The film changes format & Aspect ratios throughout, for instance a hard 2.40 mask will appear and someones hand will cross into the mask area, or a graphic will cross the line between the image and the mask.

In the scene on the bus where Scott and Ramona first kiss, we subtly play with lens optics, in the background we can see the defocused lights of Bloor St. but as the scene develops the defocused lights on scotts side of the bus become heart shaped and the defocused lights on Ramonas side turn gradually from x’s into hearts.

There are a number of shots in the movie where people kiss and we see hearts tumbling toward the screen. These hearts are actually practical elements. I bought heart shaped metallic confetti from a craft store and shot them backlit against black using the phantom camera at 1000fps. We’d drop them in front of the lens onto a polystyrene (styrofoam) board so they’d bounce back up in front of the lens. The end result was a mesmerising cascade of bouncing, spinning, tumbling, twisting slow-motion hearts. Individual hearts were later rotoscoped and composited by Olivier Ryard into various shots throughout the film. The final result having a very different feel to a computer simulated effect, many of the hearts had scratches and defects and caught he light in an interesting way, there’s something very low-fi & physical about the effect which fits perfectly with the pilgrim aesthetic.

Edgar has a great love of stagecraft and theatrical techniques, he’d always try and minimize the use of Bluescreen and insist on physical representations of digital effects. For instance Michael was actually wielding a red light emitting sword on set, to represent the flaming sword. If there were going to be CG coins exploding in the scene, we would always have some real coins or silvered mylar for the actors to react to. Instead of doing fades to black in post , Edgar & Bill would have all the set lights switch off at the end of a take, plunging everyone into darkness, real fades!

In one particularly elaborate gag, Michael walks into his bathroom and then out of the same door into a “dream” corridor, rather than do the transition as a bluescreen effect Edgar had a corridor set on wheels built, so Michael walks into the room, the set is physically switched by grips sliding the sets, the effect is done completely in camera.

Edgar wanted the punches and kicks and sword clashes in the film to have a comic book style effect, to do this we decided that whenever a connection was made in a fight (either a punch or kick) there would be a bright flash, If a knockout blow was delivered the flash would be more extreme. Edgar didn’t want these flashes to be purely digital, he wanted the flashes to affect the environment and the peformer. To achieve this 4 photoflash bulbs were rigged to a C-stand and placed at the point of impact, the puncher would hit a softblue pad rigged by Marcus Raitts SFX crew with a trigger to set the flash bulbs off, an effect that would be impossible to mimic digitally. At the final count there were over 7000 photoflash bulbs used during production. The “knock out” blow lighting was triggered remotely,. It was a 70,000Kwatt lightning strike, the result was often shot using the phantom overcranked to 288fps (a multiple of 24 we derived during testing).

The FX in Scott Pilgrim were a lot of fun to create, their production required all the artists involved to be endlessly inventive. Ultimately the VFX play a key role in creating the fun, energy and insane “never seen before” surprises that characterise the film.

Tags: visual effects, scott pilgrim vs the world