2007 – Sully, Meet Ravana
Hello David- Thanks for your interest in WETA Digital! We are currently booked well into 2009… Just to give you a ballpark range…a creature like yours would be in the range of 80k- 120k to build, and an average shot cost for creatures is between 38k-45k depending on it’s movement and interaction with Live Action, Environments, etc. The additional costs include Production and Editorial.
I sent an email to WETA Digital (FX for Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, Avatar, etc.), along with sketches of the creature, somehow hoping they would offer a nice discount for a no-budget project. No dice.
I posted an ad on Craigslist. After a few replies from obviously under-qualified people, I received an inquiry from a fellow named Pedram Shohadai (http://www.pedrams.com/) in LA. He had been involved with some recent high profile projects (Ghost Rider, Apocalypto, Bulletproof Monk) and the artwork on his website was impressive.
Negotiations for his fee reached amounts I never thought I would consider. The price was reasonable by industry standards but devastating to my personal budget. I had to enter a very philosophical state of mind when I committed myself to paying 10K for 17 seconds of a CG monster. If I had been married to anyone else other than this movie, it would have ended there. We drafted up a contract we were both satisfied with and I signed on the dotted line.
This is the 3D model of the creature (Ravana) Pedram created.
To complicate matters, we still had to shoot Sully’s death sequence. This meant I was only able to give Pedram the five creature background shots for Eden’s sequence that we completed back in 2003. While he worked on those, Steve and I contemplated one of the most difficult scenes we had to shoot for the movie.
Back in 1998, we shot Patrick running under the Burnside Bridge up to where Sully’s fresh corpse lay. So this location had to be where he had to die. Fortunately nine years later it looked about the same, but our two first efforts to shoot the scene resulted in miserable failure.
The location was a city train stop that didn’t stop running until around midnight. Since it provided shelter, the homeless wandered in about that time to set up camp.
Our first effort was sometime in June. We were lucky. It was 1:00 am and it appeared the homeless were fine with the open sky for they were nowhere to be seen. I brought my own camp items, which we set near the base of the stairwell. My brother was to fly down the stairs, fleeing from the creature, trip on the third to last step and plummet off camera onto my bed.
Around 2:30am some young thugs wandered through and stole some stuff out of our light kit. It was only Steve and I, so we couldn’t really chase them and leave our gear. Also neither of us wanted to get stabbed or shot.
It was near sunrise and we had finished shooting except for the crucial last couple of shots. Our plan was for me to pull Sully by his feet a certain distance off camera, as if being dragged by the creature, while he screamed his head off. I wasn’t strong enough. As the sky turned into lighter shades of blue, I felt that familiar pang of defeat. We decided to break and come back the following weekend.
During the week I got the idea of having Sully’s hand badly mauled during that final creature attack. I found a local artist who took a mold of my brother’s hand and went to work shredding it up. The final result was a little disappointing, being too transparent in color.
Our second time out, I cajoled my other brother along to help in pulling Sully off camera. Sully was to reach off camera with his good hand and yank back with the fake one, all the while screaming. The two of us were able to pull Sully, but not quickly. It needed to be a quick jerk, not a slow drag.
We were interrupted by the hand make-up artist, “They’re towing our cars!”
We all sprinted to the nearby parking lot. A squad of tow trucks were already taking away two of our vehicles. They demanded $100 for each car to be unhooked. The small print on the sign did say no parking after 2:00am despite our having paid the after hours fee. Their usual prey was the drunks just stumbling out of the closing bars. If only they could have understood we weren’t drunks but artists having a tough time with an imagined monster under the bridge. But we were like fish caught on their hook. Any noise we made would be to them the equivalent of a trout flailing about, open mouthed and googley eyed.
When we all reconvened at Sully’s place of demise near the public trash can, our problem was still waiting for us. Nothing we tried worked to our satisfaction and that transparent hand was bothering the hell out of me. We didn’t wait for dawn this time to wrap things up and go home. We needed help.
That help came in the form of Billy Buxbaum, a local stuntman. For a modest price and my blank shooting Glock (they aren’t made anymore) he was willing to come out for a night and work his magic.
This time we moved our operations underneath another bridge. It was further away from old town where the homeless tended to congregate and was empty. With its support columns, it resembled the other location enough. We did not want to return to that other cursed location for anything.
We met Billy a week prior to the shoot. He had plenty of toys to assist in our operation.
I went over with him my idea for the shoot. He glanced over at a nearby cyclone fence encircling a couple of garbage bins.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if the creature was swinging Sully like a baseball bat against that fence?”
This guy was awesome. How could we not do that?
The next weekend, Billy pieced together a metal frame to support a harness for the swinging of Sully against the fence. He had hard plastic body shields for running and sliding on the pavement. He had a large dolly with room for two cameras. He had counter weights and climbing rope to drag Sully around like a rag doll. It was near sunrise when we had Sully hanging upside down with fake blood pouring down his torso and down his face. It was a wrap.
