![]() So the production office got a bunch of different types of guinea pigs, including some that looked like the original Cuteguy. I think guinea pigs don’t tend to live that long – maybe four or five years. I think by the time we had started shooting the movie, unfortunately, Cuteguy had passed away. The original concept for the whole movie came from this guinea pig that Hoyt’s son had borrowed from school called ‘Cuteguy’. Scott:: The production office that Hoyt worked out of had adopted a series of guinea pigs. If the wet guinea pig was falling down on some concrete or something, we’d throw a wet reference fur ball down and have that on film as reference.įxg: How did you then go about building the digital guinea pigs? If the guinea pigs in the scene were meant to be wet, we’d douse the reference spheres with water. ![]() It’s basically a hairless guinea pig, like a hairless cat, which gave us a good actor interaction and made for an easier paint-out.Īnd for everything we shot, we put these hairy round spheres out there for filming for fur reference. So we actually used what’s called a ‘skinny pig’ for the hand interaction. But by the end when we came back for re-shoots and we’d had some experience with these shots, we knew what that interaction looked like. It was really nice having the guinea pig fur to see how the interaction worked. We shot the first part of the movie with very docile, easy to handle guinea pigs. But what we found for G-Force was that the actor’s best performance was holding a real guinea pig. In the past we’ve used stuffies or silicone bucks that the actors can grab onto. We also found that sometimes using real guinea pigs for interaction with the actors gave us much better and nuanced performances. In this case, Hoyt’s got a really nice self-contained system that captures everything and stitches it all together and delivers it in a nice package. Traditionally at Imageworks we’ve used a series of bracketed fish-eye photographs to capture our HDR images for environments and for image-based lighting on set. Scott: One of the things we did to capture our HDRI on set was use Hoyt’s HDR cam. A lot of it was definitely off-the-cuff and working with the location and environment we had and trying to compose stuff on the day.įxg: Were there any special things done on set to facilitate what would be done later with visual effects? The first unit camera operator, Patrick Loungway, would get down close to them and block out the shot. Here, Hoyt and Troy Saliba, our animation director, would get the props people to move the stand-in stuffies around on sticks. A lot of the previs came in really handy for the plate photography there, but on first unit there was really a lot of ‘puppet theatre’ as we liked to call it. There are federal police chasing them in SUVs and everything. On second unit there was a lot of plate photography for a chase sequence in the guinea pigs’ RDD. Everything else pretty much involved setting up the visual feel of what it was going to be. There was basically only one motion control shot on the whole movie that we had to prep curves for. We didn’t do a lot of heavy duty shoot-prep in terms of the previs. I got in during the script breakdown sessions and initial previs, working with the previs editors and Hoyt. Scott: I’ve been on the show for about two years. I wish I had written down some of them, because you could write a book from his stories.įxg: When did you get involved in the production and what sort of concept work and previs did you contribute? On a personal side, he’s told me some great stories. In post, I’ve been able to really understand his vision very easily and understand his language. We were testing these tiny HD cameras for specialty shots and probe lenses and other incredible things. So on set he was into special camera rigs and setups and creative things like that. Even on set, Hoyt’s probably forgotten more about camera gear than I will ever know. Scott: It has been incredibly cool, from the start of the production right to the end. Imageworks visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk gives Ian Failes a run down of his work for G-Force, a Hoyt Yeatman-directed feature about an elite troupe of guinea pigs who must save the world from an evil billionaire.įxg: What was the experience like working on a film by Hoyt Yeatman, given his visual effects experience? ![]()
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