Are we going into the Badlands or out of the Badlands? I could never get that straight, because they spend a lot of time going both ways and then the Badlands turn into Ireland somehow. Another production where I got to work with an actor I admire. In this case Nick Frost, taking a vacation from Edgar Wright for some reason. Maybe his agent thought it could get him an audition for the MCU. If you look closely at the dock shots you’ll recognize Sylvia from Loki. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how genre actors get cast and recast.
I worked closely with the effect team getting blood simulations from Houdini to render correctly in Maya. The difficulty was getting the vectors transferred for the motion blur which we ended up accomplishing by embedding the data in colour information and then remapping to MB at the Maya end.
I designed some reprojection set extensions that involved massive amounts of assets – one being a 400 foot high wall that only existed in the director’s mind until we put it on screen. What we were given to start with was a drone shot of a few vehicles and a gaggle of actors in a very Irish looking farmer’s field. This ended up being an endless procession of pilgrims passing through it the Badlands – or they going into the Badlands? See above.
Are we going into the Badlands or out of the Badlands? I could never get that straight.
Crowds and vehicles
The practical vehicles were designed by the production’s very talented art team, and I took their design cues and expanded them into several more apocalyptic vehicles, trying to get a bit of Greek mask and Victorian ironwork into the designs. Of course, no good procession is complete without a stream of pilgrims and we only had about a dozen in the shot so I had to add another 400 using crowd tools. Then onto crowds in shots of a village along with extra tents and various props. It was a fun project to work on and if you buy into dystopian ninjas and don’t pay a lot of attention to internal logic, you can really enjoy this one.
