Pictures courtesy of Netflix / Odd Studio
Adam Johansen is the co-director of Odd Studio. The VFX company, based in Melbourne, Australia, is responsible for prosthetic makeup, creature effects, animatronic characters, props, and models. They’ve worked on Alien: Covenant, The Invisible Man, and Mad Max: Fury Road, among many other projects for film and television. Odd Studio has crafted some beautiful monsters, but in the shark attack film Thrash, Johansen and his team created the predators’ victims.
There’s a decent amount of body horror and lots of blood in Tommy Wirkola’s film. Johansen and his crew had plenty of blood and puppets to deliver for the production. Recently, the VFX artist spoke with What’s On Netflix about creating some of the puppets and shark bites in Thrash.
[Warning: Some graphic imagery features below]
When you’re working on blood for a movie, how much does the color and texture depend on the tone of the movie?
Absolutely. Generally, this goes for special effects departments, makeup effects departments, and even costume, the three departments often will do a bunch of camera tests. The DP will light things differently. Bloods do show up differently in different light and in different environments and different textures.
On Thrash that, yes, we had to see how that red looked in water. It was a different water as well. It wasn’t just the ocean; it was murky, dirty water. The water was dark, so what’s going to show? Finding a color that really popped in the murky water was important.
What are some of the early tests of finding what blood really pops in the murky water?
We are Sydney-based, and this was shot in Melbourne. For the prep, it was sending down different batches of blood. The special effects department guys were doing all the camera tests with Tommy, the director, down there in early prep. We were just taking notes. It was like, these colors we think will work, but let’s see ultimately what Tommy and the DP want to go with. It was just finding different batches and recipes.
Tommy’s movies, including Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, do show an appreciation for practical effects. How much does having a director who clearly likes practical help you do your job?
It’s amazing. It doesn’t get any better than that for us because it’s a collaborative thing and you’re bouncing ideas off each other. And if the director already has, well, if he has an appreciation for practicality, that’s huge. He knows the passion and the craft that goes into it, but also knows how to shoot it well.
It’s so great when we jump on a film and there is that kind of director and the DP really, if they both have a sense of practical effects and what they want, that helps enormously. But then with Tommy, it was also like, how far can we push it? How much more could we do? With effects and some of the dummies. I’ve got to say, this film for us was some of the most creative deaths we’ve ever done.
Oh, yeah?
Building these puppets to be torn apart the way they were was fantastic. But it was a challenge because it was making puppets to sort of break away. All the sharks were digital. So, it was imagining things happening to the characters, these puppets, and then removing the shark and seeing these bits being torn off and doing all that on camera in water. It was awesome.
Picture courtesy of Odd Studio
When you and the team were researching bull sharks, their bite size, how accurate did you want to be?
Yeah, really, really accurate. We did loads and loads of research. For myself and [special makeup effects artist] Colin Ware, who came down on set with me, Jaws was… I’m sure there are millions of people that have been affected by that film, but for me, it was kind of like the most terrifying film I’d seen because I’m in the water a lot. I’m a surfer. But even as a kid, I was really fucked up by Jaws.
Have you done a shark film before?
I’d really never done it before and really wanted to do it. So having the opportunity to work on a film like this, it was amazing. Of course, Jaws is a great white and there’s lots of other shark films with whites and makos and things like that. But for me, the bull shark here in Australia, it’s one of the most, if not the most aggressive and terrifying of the sharks, because they really can get into brackish water and fresh water.
It’s not just in the ocean. They really do go upstream and they really are very aggressive and territorial and hunt in packs. So, it’s a very different species. With the bite size, they’re not as big as a white, but we definitely looked at how accurate the bite size was, the jaw size, the teeth, all of those things. We were looking at some real shark attack victims and some photos. As with every film we do, really well-researched.
Picture courtesy of Odd Studio
When you think of the effect Jaws had on you as a kid and now as a visual effects artist, how do you want, say, the visceralness of Quint’s (Robert Shaw) death scene to influence the intensity of your own work?
Having watched the film, it would be dishonest of me to say that – I wish more of that was in the film. We really shot the shit out of it and everything was on camera. I’m not sure if it’s a ratings thing. I haven’t spoken to Tommy about it. All of the deaths we filmed and the puppets we made were far more visceral and graphic in nature.
Whether it was a ratings thing or it just didn’t flow for Tommy in the film, it doesn’t really quite show some of the things that we built or how far we took those attacks. But I’ve got a bunch of behind-the-scenes videos and photos. Hopefully, we can start to share some of those things.
But yeah, we approached everything in that kind of tone. I think the horror and the realism of the attack needs to be as real and as graphic as possible. And if you have that, then you can use it or you can shoot around it, but it needs to, I think, be there. Tommy really wanted us to go there. There were a couple of like, “This attack is it. This one’s going to be the one.” And then the next character, Billy, it’s like, “No, Billy’s is the one.” And I was like, “No, Rachel’s demise. Rachel, that’s insane.” For us, we were just losing it. Each one was insanely graphic.
Picture courtesy of Odd Studio
What was an extreme that you all went to that we didn’t see?
Billy and Rachel were puppets. They were puppet heads. They were the most intense pieces that we created for the film. At the start, there’s the arm when Lisa is trapped in the car – it’s from the truck driver. That was a huge prosthetic piece and he’s been pulled up and he’s literally missing half his torso. So, we built all that stuff and shot all that stuff. It looked fantastic. There’s bites on his arms and his arm is missing.
But it is the Billy and Rachel heads that really are, by far, the best things. Again, the most graphic puppets we’ve built, both of them equally terrifying. It’s for when Rachel gets sort of pulled back into the water. You’ve seen the scene where the kids are in the window, and so we’re in that tank behind there. We’re sitting there in wetsuits. There were four of us holding the puppet down and puppeteering it.
Picture Credit: Odd Studio
That’s fantastic.
Basically, she’s an articulated puppet, so she’s kind of screaming like that. We cast her mouth, she’s sort of screaming, and she gets her arm and shoulder torn off. So, the puppet was resettable and could be split in half almost. We did a bunch of takes of coming up and coming in and getting torn apart and thrashing around in the water.
The Billy puppet you do see a frame of it in there. Basically, he’s on his back. It was storyboarded and described in the script as looking down on Billy, as he’s fallen back into the water and three sharks basically tear him apart. Classic Tommy. So one comes in on the side, two on the side kind of thing, and one comes over the head and just bites and collapses the top of his head. So, that’s what the puppet did.
We had a resettable puppet with Matt Nable, the actor. He’s screaming and thrashing around, fully articulated, throwing back to the Rob Bottin dummies and puppets that he built, trying to capture an expression in there from the start. And then the head collapses because it’s a bite, so it collapses, goes in and gets torn off. It’s exposing the skull and brain.
We just had lots of blood. We had a camera looking down on it like the storyboard suggested in the script and then one from the side. And then there is a shot from the side in the film where that is our puppet and that is getting pulled back in as the top of his head gets bitten in half.
So we hadn’t done anything like that. With the water and blood spurting and brain matter and a whole heap of things flying on, resetting it was challenging, but super fun.
Is there one part of the human body that is maybe one of the more difficult parts, whether inside or outside, that is always a challenge to get right?
I think the coloration for the first scene at the window of the car when Phoebe was stuck in the car, for that guy, that character bitten in half and you’ve got a nice cross-section of his body. You can see all the way through, and that’s what Tommy really wanted, to see a chunk out of. It wasn’t just a prosthetic sitting on top of the actor that you could see bite marks and a bit of gore.
We just built the whole classic Tom Savini-style dummy so you could really get the sense of the empty space. And so, the coloration of that is there’s so many colors on the inside, intestines ,and textures that we really wanted to make sure all that really popped in red in the murky water and the thrashing and the blood.
So I mean that and the head, the brain matter and things like that, both of those things are pretty important to get real. Pretty tricky.
Speaking of blood and thrashing, you worked on the spectacular backburster scene from Alien: Covenant. Any fond memories working on that beautifully gory sequence?
The backburster was insane, man. That was one of the bloodiest. For a dry set, being on a set and puppeteering that little guy, the Xenomorph, I’ve never been on a set with so much blood. It was literally gallons of blood spilling everywhere. I was trying to puppeteer the thing and run across the set and Ridley’s in your ear going, “Faster, faster.” We were just slipping everywhere. It was chaos. So fun.
Picture courtesy of Odd Studio
