Dennis Berardi on Rebuilding Mr. X and Crafting the VFX Heart of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
Picture courtesy of Mr. X and Netflix
Dennis Berardi is the owner of the visual effects company Mr. X. Yes, it’s a very fun name to say, but more importantly, it’s a company Berardi started 25 years ago. At one point, it was owned by Technicolor. In a nice full-circle moment, the visual effects supervisor bought the company back and sought to instill much heart into the work.
Mr. X’s first title under Berardi’s recent ownership: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.
For the visual effects artist, it means a lot that the first title under his Mr. X leadership is another collaboration between him and del Toro. They’ve worked together on several projects, including The Shape of Water and The Cabinet of Curiosities.
In del Toro’s rich adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, the artists at Mr. X help paint a complete picture of life and death, ranging from wildlife to self-healing to an exploding castle. Berardi recently spoke with What’s On Netflix about making some of these digital effects as tangible as possible.
How much do you and Guillermo talk about color for visual effects?
When we’re working together, there are a couple of fundamental tenets in terms of his evaluation of work. First is the composition and silhouette. He’s more after the visceral emotional resonance of a shot or a silhouette or a composition before we start ripping it apart technically.
We need, as visual communicators, to present a composition and a silhouette that is relatable to an audience member in the context. So that’s his first point, and he’ll describe it very quickly or draw something, and give movement direction as well.
Color is the other pillar. Color is intrinsically related to mood, especially in Frankenstein, where you have greens related to anything with Elizabeth and maybe Victor with more flashy, vibrant reds.
The first pillar of making images consistent to the eye stands out in the explosion of Victor Frankenstein’s lab. The film cuts from the sets built to the miniature to your company’s CG smoothly. How’d that transition come together?
It was one of the biggest challenges of the movie. I mean, we had a lot of challenges on this film. We had the ice escape with the ship, which we shot in a parking lot. We had various different animals, which were mostly digital. We had crazy stunts and explosions, and over 1,200 visual effects shots in this movie. There’s over two hours of visual effects content.
But the tower and everything that happens around the tower, and the environment of the tower, was our biggest challenge as visual effects artists. [Head of concept design] Guy Davis, [production designer] Tamara [Deverell], and Guillermo were inspired by the idea of having the lab be ensconced in a tower, and he came up with the idea of an abandoned waterworks tower, which was like 400 feet tall.
All those interior sets were built on stage. The exterior never really existed in one piece, but for digital and a model on set, on the exterior location, we built the first 20 feet of the bottom of the tower on a location.
It’s a beautiful model. Anyone can see it in the behind-the-scenes doc on Netflix.
And then the tip, the tippy tip of the tower was just a blue-screen set with a little spire that we had Victor climbing up on a rod. And then the surrounding environment, which was inspired by a location in Scotland called Seacliff, which we flew drone photography over and did long-range lidar and photogrammetric surveys to capture that landscape.
We put that tower on the edge of a very rugged, seaside, rocky environment. So, there were just a lot of different moving pieces to get it all unified. It was the best of production design, visual effects, and miniatures all working together. I’m pretty proud of the work. I feel it does feel quite unified. And then we have to blow it all up and collapse it.
You’re a big believer in models and references, right?
I’m a big believer in reference and not being married to any one technique. If you see the technique, I don’t think we’re kind of failing as filmmakers. You don’t want to see behind the set or the drywall and the plaster of the set. You want to see the front of it. If you see the technique, there’s a problem.
Even though my expertise is visual effects and CGI, I like to make sure that we’re exploring every option practically as much as possible. I’ve been working with Guillermo for 15 years, and there’s a tactile component to his movies that is undeniable. He wants things to feel like they’re handmade, and that carries into digital work as well.
Also, we’re artists. We didn’t lean into any AI on this film at all, and it was all about integrating our textures perfectly into the seamless world of the photographic realm. It was an opera of every discipline coming together.
Guillermo is very clear about his distaste for artificial intelligence in movies. How do you feel about it?
I think it’s an undeniable force that we all have to reckon with. I’m not afraid of it being in visual effects. We tend to embrace technologies, and at its best, it can be a force multiplier and help us take some drudgery out of our work. I’m thinking about things like rotoscoping and camera match-moving and stuff that’s frame by frame and that no one really gets out of bed loving to do.
Also, I own Mr. X. I haven’t had to replace any jobs with AI algorithms. I don’t intend to. In the short term, we’re starting to look at it for helping us with development of code like Python. We’re looking at it in the realms of rotoscoping and camera match-moving. We’re looking at it for technical procedures, doing technical stitches. Right now, it’s another tool that we’re adding to our armory.
I think it will become more relevant because you can get results quickly with AI, but a lot of them are really bad. Just because you can generate content faster doesn’t mean much of it’s going to be any good at all. So, the job of a director and people like me to curate and understand the content and make sure it’s in context is going to become ever more important.
I hope that we control it and it doesn’t control us. And so, we’re starting to lean in, but the thing that I’m seeing is that it’s not easy to get a great result in the context of, in this case, Frankenstein, like a period piece or where we have to be pixel-perfect and handcrafted for context. The uncanny valley in AI happens every time you prompt something; it’s always pretty bad.
Like you said, I do hope at the very best it allows visual effects artists to avoid some of those more mundane tasks and have more of a life outside the office.
I know in my own company at Mr. X that, yeah, it will allow us to do a little more with fewer hours of drudgery. Absolutely.
Going back to real references for CG work: You and your team shot actual wolves. What did you learn from those shots that helped define them digitally?
What we learned in terms of anatomy and just their behavior and how they move and what motivates them was just invaluable when we were putting it together, ultimately. I was blown away. We shot those references on the second unit that I was kind of directing the second-unit insert stuff. Andrew Simpson, our wolf trainer, who’s a genius with these animals, tried to give us a performance that we could use or use as reference for every moment in the sequence.
Although they ended up becoming animated characters in digital, I don’t know where we’d be without that work. I think it would’ve looked bad if we just key-framed, animated everything and didn’t look at any reference.
The one thing I was struck by is how powerful they are. You don’t get a real sense of how big they are until you stand beside one, which I did very tentatively. Visual effects are cool. CGI is cool. But it’s got to be based in reality first.
And so, we try to shoot it, try to learn something, find reference, build on top of it before we go all-digital with something we do. Obviously, in today’s filmmaking, there are shots in Frankenstein even that are completely digital.
What was your reference for when The Creature (Jacob Elordi) blows himself up with dynamite?
Okay, that’s a good one. We had Jacob holding a prop dynamite stick with an LED light to light up his face. And then [cinematographer] Dan [Laustsen] did a lighting cue with these big Vortex lights, which light everything up. And then, as a separate element with the practical special effects team, we shot an explosion. We effectively took a sauna tube, which was roughly the same diameter as Jacob’s body, packed it with explosives, and matched the same camera angle, and then blew it up. We used that as an element.
There’s a lot of digital elements there with snow coming towards the camera and all. The ignition point is all digital, but then we used a real in-camera explosion, which I shot on a separate unit, as reference. So that’s how we did that.
That’s a fun day. Since you worked on The Cabinet of Curiosities, I gotta ask: Any chance we’ll see a second season?
He talks about it every once in a while, but I don’t know the answer. I think he might like to do another one, but I have no idea. I know he’s writing a couple of new movies right now, and he’s got, I think, 10 projects that he’s considering. I just don’t know. Guillermo told me that he’s really only looking to do projects where he is breaking new ground or something that he’s afraid of. I think the chances are it might not be on the hit parade. He’s looking for, to use his expression, something that maybe gets him out of his comfort zone.
Before we leave you, here are some more VFX breakdowns courtesy of Dennis Berardi:
