Jumanji: The Next Level VFX Breakdown by Sony Pictures Imageworks

VFX Online March 8, 2020, 5:03 am 1.7k Views

Jumanji: The Next Level VFX Breakdown by Sony Pictures Imageworks

In Jumanji: The Next Level, the gang is back but the game has changed. As they return to Jumanji to rescue one of their own, they discover that nothing is as they expect. The players will have to brave parts unknown and unexplored, from the arid deserts to the snowy mountains, in order to escape the world’s most dangerous game. This action-adventure comedy was directed by Jake Kasdan, with Mark Breakspear serving as client side VFX Supervisor, and VFX Supervisor Jason Greenblum, Animation Supervisor Craig McPherson and VFX Producer Doug Oddy leading the Imageworks VFX team.

The team was tasked with the desert sequence, which was mostly filmed on location in the Glamis Desert in Southern California with some blue screen photography taking place in Hawaii. The VFX work includes hero digital ostriches, a digital ostrich crowd of thousands, digital double work, digital desert environment enhancement (unwanted tire tracks removal), digital desert environment replacement, a digital chasm location, digital enhancement of practical dune buggies (adding CG wheels and undercarriage), fully CG dune buggies as well as sand, dust, and debris FX simulations to enhance and integrate our ostriches and dune buggies into the desert environment.

The VFX work fell into four general categories:

Digital Character In Plate
Live-action plate photographed on location with principles that require the addition of a digital ostrich and ground enhancement for footprints and sand/dust kick-ups.

Digital Characters and Digital Environment Clean-up in Plate
Live-action plate photographed on location that requires CG ostrich(es) addition as well as the accompanying sand/dust FX elements, digital environment for buggy tracks clean-up by replacing plate with CG desert elements.

Digital Characters and Digital Environment for Blue Screen Plate
Blue screen element of principles in a buggy on a blue screen set either on a gimbal or casters that required addition of CG buggy wheels and undercarriage, rooster tail FX elements and buggy tracks as well as CG ostriches both hero and crowd and accompanying sand/dust/tracks FX passes and a fully-digital environment.

Full CG Shot
These would consist of digital doubles of the principles, digital hero ostriches and ostrich crowd, digital buggies, digital environment as well as the full suite of sand/dust/tracks FX passes.

OSTRICHES

The digital ostriches were challenging in that ostriches have very unique animation characteristics in their necks – they are almost snake-like in their motion. They also presented a challenge in the simulation of their feathers as well as the added challenge of needing to have hundreds of birds animated in each shot.

ENVIRONMENT

Sony Pictures Imageworks employed a process of photogrammetry using drone photography of the desert location captured during the second unit shoot to create a digital representation of the desert. This digital representation was then instrumental in the camera tracking of the scenes as well as being used for rendering a CG desert to augment the sand dunes and to create the digital environment for blue screen shots.

FX SIMULATIONS

The Imageworks FX Team was tasked with creating systems to enhance and integrate the digital characters (ostriches, buggies and digidoubles) into our shots. This includes footprints in the sand left by the running ostriches, sand that gets kicked up from those footfalls as well as a layer of dust to go with the sand and then a massive dust cloud that becomes a character in the sequence. The dust cloud actually foreshadows the arrival of the herd of menacing ostriches. Along with the sand and dust created by the ostriches, the dune buggies needed to be enhanced with rooster tails of sand coming off of the wheels and tracks left in the sand by them.