The Verge: The last time director Alex Garland and visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst worked together, they created Alicia Vikander’s Ava, the robot star of Ex Machina. For their follow-up collaboration, Annihilation, they had a much bigger set of challenges. Garland’s newest film is a heady mind-trip that explores humanity’s self-destructive impulses, but it’s also a walking tour of the gorgeous and the grotesque. The story of Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist who joins a group of women to explore an area of coastal America that’s rapidly mutating due to an alien contaminant, Annihilation is full of improbably beautiful biological mashups, shimmering landscapes, and human-plant hybrids.
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3 comments:
Learning about the fluidity of this process is so interesting. All of the prototyping that went into the creation of the film is something that I never thought about. I know in my design proses there is a lot of just trying it out to see if it will work and for some reason I thought professionals don’t do that because they already know what they are doing. So to read about how they experiment with things and complete something that they think will work only to scrap it because it doesn’t fit with their vision and they believe that they can do something better, is encouraging. I think the process and development of a project, especially one of a major motion picture is fascinating. Learning about how a team worked together or how multiple teams worked together to complete one end goal is amazing. One really cool thing about this article and film particularly, is the combination of animation and CGI with practical. How they either made the physical and then turned it into virtual or how they made the virtual and then turned it into physical and how both of those paths effected the actors, the lighting department, the photography, and the editing.
While I have read that there are a bunch of problematic factors that come with this movie, I cannot deny that the visual effects are stunning. I have watched Garland's other sci-fi horror film, Ex Machina. Whitehurst also did the visual effects for the robots in that movie, and his work in that movie is beautiful and seamless, so it was no surprise to see that his work is still stunning audiences. I love that the inspiration for the alien mutations were "electron-microscope imagery of cells, a lot of mathematical practical shapes, a lot of reference imagery of things like lichens, spores, and mold growing". I think it is kind of interesting to think about how an alien power/life form could just be a decayed and augmented version of the earth life. I also thought it was interesting how important that the theme of "journey" was within both the plot and the design and production process. The design had to be "fluid" to fit with the journey as it was forming within the cuts of the film. That is a very cool philosophy that i think, to some extent, can definitely be applied to theatre.
The discussion of the design and production process in this article is really illuminating nd intriguing to me. Reading about how the director and designer worked collaboratively towards the finished bear creature is really cool to see, but I think the part that most interested me was the laser scanned forest. The way that they scanned the trees to create intentional errors in the process that altered the finished product is a really cool way of working that is already planting strange ideas in my head. The process behind the bear is also intriguing, albeit more traditional. That said, they were very successful in the end result, which is one of the more unnerving on screen apparitions I've seen recently. Like it says in the article, it really indicates a "fluid" process. I have not yet seen Annihilation, but I'm definitely interested after reading this article, it seems to be worth seeing for the design alone!
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