He was like my god, we never had that before.

I was around for the whole shoot, and at some point very late in the schedule I jokingly said to Joel, hey, today is actually the first day for me where I don't have anything to do in terms of visual effects. It didn't really matter what was happening outside - that's not what the film was about. And for the moving background in the carriage they were referencing Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, in which there's a train sequence which is clearly rear projection but it doesn't bother you. It didn't really reference Westerns so much as other classic films like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, which has this really artificial set design. This was a challenge because had a hard time describing what they were after.

Lemke: The Mortal Remains is practically all shot on bluescreen, made to look very artificial, like a stage play almost. VI: The Mortal Remainsįor this gothic final tale, CG horses pull a stagecoach into the unknown. CG is something that scales - the more shots you are working on with CG the better. Building a CG pipeline from scratch is an enormous amount of work, and in our case it was literally only four shots of CG horses. One of the sequences was the Battle of the Bastards from Game of Thrones, and we thought how about we just reach out to the company who did that? That was Iloura in Australia. Joel and Ethan knew how hard it is to make believable CG animals, so early on they compiled a reel of digital horse stunts they found in other recent films. We went out and tried to find other reference material for horse falls - the stuff I mostly found was racehorses breaking their legs, really horrible stuff. That had to be a very specific violent animation so it was believable. I think there's two horse falls that were done by animal trainers, but what the Coens wanted is the horses step into the prairie dog holes littered around the landscape then break their legs, and you couldn't do that for real. But there was still a couple of duplications needed, some matte painting work and some really complicated CG horse work to augment the real life stunt work. Lemke: Surprisingly most of the wagon stuff is shot for real - they actually had 15 wagons on set. In this heartwrenching segment, wagon train settler Zoe Kazan faces marauding attackers on horseback.

That gave us a blue-screen head of Harry and then using a lot of compositing techniques we are able to pop that on seamlessly. So what we did was we tracked the motion of the backpack Liam was carrying, and then used that tracking data to reverse engineer it and feed it into a motion base Harry was sitting on while he was filmed by a motion control camera. We were thinking maybe it's worth going for a CG head of Harry, but when he's turned to face the camera that would have been such a close-up face it would have been super-hard to pull off - and also very expensive. So it was clear it had to be Liam interacting with a dummy, and we had to shoot a head replacement that perfectly fit all the movements. It was very straightforward, but it was important for me on set to be vigilant about shooting the clean plates because otherwise it would have been much harder.īut the one sequence that really was a lot of work was when Liam Neeson carried him upstairs into the brothel and we saw that whole motion of Liam putting him on the ground. Then after each camera setup we went in and shot clean plates of the empty stage and of the chair, and then we used that to restore all the areas behind him. Harry was standing in the stage - special effects cut a hole into the bottom of the stage and into the bottom of the chair so he was standing with his arms on his neck doing his performance. The easiest part was when he was almost like a statue propped on a chair. We had to change out Harry Melling's arms and legs pretty much throughout the show, and then come up with a really super complicated head replacement setup when he's being carried up the stairs at one point. Lemke: I guess our biggest one was the Meal Ticket story. For this melancholy yarn, Harry Melling plays a paraplegic thespian transported on Liam Neeson's broad back.

Ballad of buster scruggs