Extraordinary Season 2

The Magic Behind Extraordinary’s Swirling Voids, Clones and Hair-Raising VFX

In shows like Extraordinary, there’s visual effects at almost every turn, gifting directors with the option of achieving shots that never used to be possible. For superpowers like the ability to grow and style hair, this is particularly helpful. “We needed to transition between two art directed hairstyles,” says Dadgostar. “The on location crew shot several versions to make sure we had what we needed. That included using wigs and bald caps.” Vine FX used Maya and X-Gen to create the hair growth effect, precisely matching styles with the art directed looks. Houdini was then used to add simulation on top to give a more natural sense of growth. “We opted to use plates where the talent was wearing a bald cap,” continues Dadgostar. “From that, we could closely replicate the looks of the beginning and end hairstyles, but without the restrictions of working with having those in camera. Then blending the CG shot with the practical scenes was just a matter of good editing.”

Building a swirling mass into which characters can dispose of… anything was a particular highlight for Vine FX on Extraordinary. The production had planned for a blue toned circular void and built an LED ring on location to throw the right light into the shot, but the actual look of the finished void was up for grabs.“It came to us as a fairly open-ended brief,” explains 3D Supervisor, Pedrom Dadgostar. “The on-set LED ring locked us into a blue-based colour palette, but beyond that we were able to get creative – it gave us a great reference. We developed the look pretty much straight in CG”. The team at Vine FX opted for Houdini to procedurally generate the swirling mass of the void, rendering in Mantra and passing over to the compositing team to finesse the final look. “We used still frames and matted out areas of the renders,” says Vine FX Lead Compositor, Ole-Aleksander Nordby. “The production had given us some reference material for the look, so a lot of what we did was using that and the rendered CG element to develop and iterate on”. Continuity was crucial for the void. Seen from different angles in contiguous shots, it was important to the director that each shot would match the last. It was for this reason that Vine FX chose to procedurally generate the void rather than simulate it. “It gave us a lot more control,” adds Dadgostar.

For the character of Clark, whose power is to create copies of himself, Vine FX was asked to lean into a retro RGB split style.  “We needed to make something that looked very old school,” says Lead Compositor, Alesja Surubkina. “The production wanted a rough VHS-type look to the power so we developed the pixelated colour splitting with a sort of freeze frame. Then because there are multiple versions of the same character in the frame, we were combining different passes in comp”. This is one of those moments where a well planned shoot really helps. Because the production knew what they wanted from the end result ahead of time, they could plan the shooting process accordingly. By using a motion controlled camera for moving shots, and a locked off camera for anything static, the DP could guarantee that each pass would match. “For the work we need to do, having exactly the movement across plates is incredibly important,” adds Surubkina. “It means that we can focus our attention on developing the look of any VFX elements and combining them into something believable and seamless rather than making one move match another.” Naturally, there’s plenty of rotoscoping involved in duplicating characters, but it becomes more achievable when it’s considered ahead of time.

“Extraordinary is a great example of when production teams really think about visual effects work before they start rolling on a scene. Bringing that thought forward like this really has a hugely positive impact on the end result,” concludes Beattie.