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In the new prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, audiences meet a young version of the tyrannical President of Panem, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth). He is a star student at The Academy, determined to be a positive force of change, but a series of traumatic events lead him down a path of oppression and subjugation. This character transformation is at the heart of filmmaker Francis Lawrence’s return to the dystopian franchise, for which he has directed three out of four installments. Frequent collaborator Adrian de Wet is also back as visual effects supervisor.
Over a period of a year, De Wet partnered with VFX producer Eve Fizzinoglia to create 1,400 shots by Important Looking Pirates, Ghost VFX, Outpost VFX and RISE. Among the many inspirations for the visuals was the reconstruction of European cities post World War II.
Capitol Building
“One of things I learned was that city planners and architects took the opportunity to redesign the layout of cities,” notes de Wet. “Prior to that moment, cities grew organically without looking at the big picture. But after Berlin was flattened, they took the opportunity to open up the city and design it as a whole. We tried to get some of that into The Capitol. It’s designed more symmetrically and ceremonially, because it’s a more authoritarian regime that is ruling Panem.”
Harkening back to the Roman Colosseum’s gladiator fights, the 10th Annual Hunger Games unfolds in an arena where the occupied districts’ Tributes fight one another to the death for the entertainment of the masses. The interior of the arena was shot in Wrocław’s Centennial Hall in Poland, which was combined with Berlin Olympic Stadium to create the exterior.
“Centennial Hall was built in 1913 and is an architectural wonder,” says De Wet. “It’s an enormous dome with seats all around the inside and beautiful Art Deco arches. We weren’t allowed to so much mark it. It had to be left completely pristine. We shot in there but replaced all of it in CG. We even had to age the undestroyed areas, but for the post-bombing arena we had to have a huge hole in the ceiling that took up a third of the screen real estate.”
‘What I’ve learned from my 10 years of working on The Hunger Games movies with Francis is that the success lies in shooting something which has an existing element to it.’
— VFX supervisor Adrian de Wet
His team also had to put scorch marks and explosion damage all over the walls. He adds, “Thousands and thousands of these orange seats all around the side had to be broken apart, damaged and destroyed for fairly close-up shots. On the day we had a little bit of rubble; however, in order to get the cameras rolling through there and stunt performers and actors running around the arena floor, we had to carve alleyways and pathways that couldn’t stay in the final image. We ended up replacing a lot of the rubble on the floor.”
In the film, Head Gamemaker Dr. Gaul (portrayed by Viola Davis) has a penchant for rainbow-colored, venomous snakes that she unleashes upon the remaining Tributes. “The simulation of the snakes was a monumental task from Ghost VFX which also did the look development on each snake,” explains de Wet. “We went through several iterations with the look of the snakes because of the rainbow iridescence on the surface, but Francis also wanted them to be a quite saturated native color as well. Striking the right balance there was tricky, and [also] to get them to react correctly in the light and shadows, because usually you only get iridescence if you get the right light and direction. But we had to have the snakes iridescent even in the shadows and had to cheat that to make it visually interesting, otherwise they went a dull gray-brown.”
Along with roto animating digital doubles to the actors in the plate, cloth simulations were critical in getting the proper interaction between the cast and snakes.
“To get the snakes to look like they’re crawling over someone’s shirt you need the creases of the fabric being compressed, stretched, ruffled and twisted when they’re going over the arm of Lucy Gray Baird [Rachel Zegler],” he says. “A huge amount of effort and detail exists in the interaction between snakes and the individuals being covered by them.”
Birds played a key role in the prequel’s world-building. “I’m always sensitive to how birds animate because whatever you think birds should do, they never do that!” says de Wet, laughing. “We were asking quite a lot of the Jabberjays, because in the story Dr. Gaul has figured out how to use them as a recording and playback device. We had the Jabberjays freeze and go into zombie mode when they were listening, and when playing back we kept them moving because birds have very alive, staccato movements and are constantly breathing.”
In one sequence, drones transport water bottles into the arena at the behest of a Tribute’s mentor. “Our production designer, Uli Hanisch, did a great job of designing the drones with this warm brass color. It already had a period piece, Steampunk, Art Deco look to it. We took his design and made digital versions of it and attached digital water bottles to them and got the propellers to move around. For them to be a threat to hit people, they had to move very fast. One of the key elements was the dust that gets kicked up from the floor because without it, you might not notice the drones. When we shot that there were no drones, so the actors had to mime the whole thing.”
Screen composites were used for the 1984-style monitor shots. “We did have playback on set, which was useful to get the interactive light from the screen and to have the actors perform to something,” reveals de Wet. “However, we ended up replacing every single monitor because when you go into the cutting room and cut it together you get a different order than you should have!”
De Wet has nothing but praise for his VFX team. “My visual effects producer, Eve Fizzinoglia, was instrumental on this as she made miraculous visual effects production decisions,” he says. “I was overlapping with the movie Slumberland right at the beginning of the show, so for a big portion of the shoot I had Sean Stranks on set for me.”
Working for Scales
The VFX supervisor says that, looking back, the movie’s biggest challenge was the CG creation of the snakes. “Not only snake animation, which is hard, but also snake interaction. We had to create rubble and pebbles on surfaces for the snakes to move between as well as make dust on surfaces, so they could leave a trail to make the audience believe in them. And we had to do all of the cloth simulations with the clothes.”
De Wet says one common element can be found in each installment of franchise. “What I’ve learned from my 10 years working on The Hunger Games movies with Francis is that the success lies in shooting something which has an existing element to it,” he notes. “For instance, the Corso with the statue, that is Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. The base of the buildings and street layout is really there and that little roundabout in the middle with the statue is real, too. We created and duplicated existing façades, added a war-torn patina to it and inserted buildings in the background which were partially constructed with scaffolding and a symmetrical layout. That has always been the basis of how we do The Capitol in these movies.”
Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes opened at No. 1 on November 17 and is now screening around the world. As of Dec. 3, the prequel has grossed $243.9 million in worldwide box office.
