I, Tonya, the award-winning dark comedy film based on the true life events of the Olympic figure skater, Tonya Harding, is coming to Digital (March 2, 2018) and Blu-ray (March 13, 2018).
To celebrate the digital releases of I, Tonya, Tech Times sat down with VFX producer Juliet Tierney to discuss the process of bringing Margot Robbie's (Tonya Harding) skating sequences to life through VFX.
I, Tonya Producer Juliet Tierney Talks Visual Effects
"It was really exciting to be able to bring the skating sequences to life through the VFX," Juliet Tierney told Tech Times. "As soon as I read the script I knew it was a going to be a great film. I love working with Craig Gillespie, the director, and everyone on this project was a joy to work with," said Tierney.
"So as well as being able to work on a great film it was a wonderful experience because of the talented and lovely group of people involved. Its always rewarding when you are able to pull off something difficult!" said Tierney.
Unlike most movies from Universal, I, Tonya, was considered a low-budget film. That being said, there were challenges while doing visual effects for the film. However, Tierney worked with Craig and the production team to come up with efficient solutions.
"Our years of working on commercials gave us experience with working as effectively as possible. During the prep period we came up with budget saving strategies which saved us later," said Tierney.
Tierney was also working on a very fast schedule. The movie started filming in February 2017 and the team delivered the final VFX at the end of July 2017. "We had 3 months to work on over 200 shots. But we also had a month of prep time after the shoot, during the edit," said Tierney.
Re-building The Stadiums In CG
The visual effects team re-built the stadiums in CG by bringing a portable scanning rig to the shoot, which they used to scan the 2 stadiums being filmed.
"We took that data into Maya and re-built the stadiums to create 4 different arenas. Then we made a library of CG people and created a large animation cache to fill each stadium. Each skating sequence has a different number of people based on the real competitions, so we used the actual events as a guide," said Tierney.
"The director also wanted to give each sequence its own look, so we worked together to bring out the creative vision by changing the lighting and adding anamorphic lens flares," said Tierney.
Face Replacements In I, Tonya
One of the other biggest challenges the team ran into was doing the face replacements. Though, they considered it a fun challenge.
"It was a fun challenge to do the face replacements. In some shots, we used traditional 2D face replacements. We captured Margot's performance on the side of the shoot against the blue screen so we had real reactions we could use. In other shots where it's too fast of from a difficult angle, like where Tonya is spinning fast with her head back looking up at the ceiling we used a 3D face replacement solution," said Tierney.
"For this methodology we scanned Margot's head on set and created a CG version of her face with 4 different makeup looks, matching the ones in the film. We then hand animated the face and composited over the body double," said Tierney.
