You Won't Believe How We Made Pennywise (Practical + VFX Breakdown)

Riley. — Wow. Oh yeah. Bill Scarsgard as Pennywise, in my opinion, is one of the greatest horror villains of all time. And with Welcome to Dairy Now Out, I wondered, could we put a convincing Penny Wise in one of our scenes? And the answer is yes. But you're going to laugh at how we pulled it off. And no, it wasn't AI. The first shot we tried was this wide of Pennywise, and we wanted a lot of control in post as far as the overall look of the room. So, we used a technique that we've shown in the past where you walk around and light your scene from a number of angles to create lighting passes. So, while getting this pass, I'm envisioning what the end result might be, and I'm creating angles of light to facilitate that, including stepping outside to get a bit through the windows. Now, in post, we can stack these in a comp set to add and then mask, feather, and alter opacity of different areas that we want to keep or remove to achieve the look we're going for. And we'll often comp with a temp grade in place, which really helps to find the right look overall. Another thing that you can do with these light passes is alter the white balance independently or completely change the color, which we ended up using for a later shot. We can also use stock textures of shadows as gooos the same way you would in real life but again with full control in post. So we'll use them as alumat on certain passes to add interest and break up a solid lit area and add some blurs where needed to knock areas out of focus. We also use this free stock video for the windows to add

some faint extra motion there to help move away from that still frame look. But for Pennywise, here's what we're working with. A6 scale figure. It's a great looking piece with a lot of detail, but it's still just a figure, which means we'll need to give it motion and wasn't what we used for the close-ups. I'll show you those in a minute. But first, we took the figure and matched the angle and light direction to our plate the best we could. And this did come with a balloon, but we knew we'd need to handle that separately. So, for his arm raising the balloon, we just manually moved it as smoothly as we could, despite the joints being a bit stiff. — Pervertion. Once we had a take that worked, we brought that into After Effects where we'll roto and key. After that, it was time to swap out the head with what we used for the rest of the shots, and that's these life-size busts of Pennywise, which are perfect for our close-up shots and for animating in a much more realistic way, which I'll talk about that in a minute. So, for

continuity, we swapped out the figure's head for this one, then added it to our scene, changing color and exposure to match, and used a feathered mask for some areas to brighten as an edge light. and then added a ground shadow as well. But still, the motion so far was looking too stiff with the rest of the body locked in a pose. So, we ended up shooting real gloved hands for some lifelike motion and used them to replace the figure's hands. We then tracked the subtle motion to the null objects and used a puppet pin tool on the body, linking those to the tracks. It's subtle, but it helped a lot in making them feel connected. We then ended up using another puppet pin effect at points over the character, using wiggle expressions on some for subtle random movements to give it more life. For the

balloon, we did shoot a practical version with the actual lighting setup, but the reflections felt too much like studio lighting rather than our nightmarish moonlight vibe. So, we opted to make it in trusty old element 3D using a sphere and red tinted glossy shader. Then, we used our dining scene as the environment map. changed some deform settings to give us a balloon shape, then used the knot from the real plate. With a null layer, we key framed a slow rocking back and forth motion and a lagged rotation to follow. As the balloon sways, we key framed the element environment rotation to change with it so that it feels like it's actually being affected by the motion. For the string, we drew a line on a shape layer, added some fractal noise for a faint pattern. Then to add some variation to the shape, we use turbulent displacement. — this. — Then we used a puppet pin tool and parented the top pin to the moving null and changed the pin type to advanced. With this added to the Pennywise comp, we changed the placement and scale before linking to a null we tracked to the new moving hand, giving us this. Next, we're going to get into our close-up shots. But first

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handled with similar steps. We shot the bus leaning back practically as the main motion using one bust for the mouth as it had a lot of nice detail for close-ups and the other bust mostly for the rest. And we did comp a few elements of each for continuity. We also did some moving light passes similar to how we lit the kitchen as well. These were mainly used as moving specular highlights over the blood and portions of the makeup, but we also used a pass in the close-up shot of the eyes. We tinted red again to act as spill from the balloon. We could have just used a feathered mask again, but this way it follows the contours of the face correctly. For the real Penny Wise, Bill Scar's guard is in makeup, and we can see the tiny details of the face paint cracking in the textures, which our bust lacks. So, we grab some free stock textures, use feathered masks, and place them around areas of his face with various blending modes. We use Mocha's Pro mesh warp tracker to make these textures stick to his face as he moves, as well as a few 2D tracks, which we assign to null objects. Now, for facial animation, we use the liquify effect. However, when working in ACES, which we are for this project, unfortunately, there are currently a number of effects which are capped at 8 bit, meaning our ASUS 32-bit workflow will crush the highlights when effects such as liquify are applied. So, until

Adobe updates this, we found that using an exposure effect placed first to darken the image, then another copy after an 8-bit effect to bring the exposure back up should help solve the issue, but it could vary per project. We had a liquify effect for the mouth area and another for the eyes. each linked to corresponding 2D tracks so that the distortion sticks to the motion pretty well. We then key framed the distortion mesh to change throughout the shot just to give some animated expressions. And then we used one to animate some of the blood slowly moving over time. For the eyes, we wanted something more detailed that we could rotate to control direction. So again, we opted for element 3D and a sphere model. This time copying our own eye material to use with a variation for the other eye. We just applied this as our diffuse map and used a subtle gloss and bunk texture to get detail for the reflections, which this time we're using a different environment map as opposed to our dining room location to get more highlighted areas. With these eyes linked to 2D tracks and placed where needed, we can use a couple tracked iroto shapes as alphamats. Rotate the element environment if needed to get the correct reflection angle. Then key frame some animated rotation moving slightly to give some life. Or you could go much more animated if needed, which they sometimes did in the films. Then we just used some color effects and masks for shading. We used more liqufy effects key framed to sync with the moving eyes just to add some distortion to the eyelids and surrounding area to make it feel more connected. We also tracked in some extra eyelash assets on top of that. And with these shots rendered, we can then add some secondary motion. Again using the puppet pin tool with a wiggle expression on one centered point which will control most the face area as well as a CC smear effect with low reach and high radius also with a wiggle for some motion. In both of these close shots we were able to use a practical plate of a balloon rising which we keyed colored to match and knocked out of focus. We used this as a mat for some very slight displacement and compound blur just to try and ground it more into the scene. Then we used a feathered mask below to add a shadow moving over his face as the balloon rises, giving us this. For this shot, we followed a similar process again, filming some light passes for specular highlights and practically moving the bust. This time with extra motion to sync up with his dialogue later. We again used Mocha for a mesh warp track, 2D track the eyes and mouth, but also a few areas of his collar this time, which we were able to use with another puppet pin tool effect on the figure body to have it warp as the collar moves, making it feel connected. We skipped the skin textures for this wider shot, but did follow the same process as before with the element 3D eyes. Again, changing the rotation to alter slightly throughout and this time key framing them to grow bright by the end of the shot. We did more liquefying of facial animation. Similar to before, we also used another liquify effect this time to make him talk. We did this manually every few frames, which surprisingly synced up well with the dialogue we recorded later. And if you use a trackmat of the mouth with a duplicate of the inner mouth below, you can use liquify without it warping the teeth, giving a better result. Then we used yet another subtle wiggle puppet pin effect for additional head movement and finished the shot off by comping it into our environment. then added the balloon string, used a glow as well as an extra for the eyes as they brighten. And lastly, we gradually scaled down and warped the background for a bit of a dolly zoom feel. And used a keyframed optics compensation effect over everything to wobble and increase by the end, giving a similar warping reality vibe to this moment in the first IT

film. For this final jump scare shot, we just tilted the bus down over the camera. We did try it with the other bus, too, but it didn't have the same vibe. Once again, we used liquify to add some facial animation and brighten up the eyes, keeping the practical ones this time, and we added a few blood splats onto the lens as well. There was a lot of other moments we wanted to try, but unfortunately didn't have enough time. But it's definitely fun to experiment with different lighting and ideas when trying to bring an inanimate object to life and land it at a quality level that just wouldn't be possible with traditional methods and a very low budget. But that's it for today, but I want to hear your thoughts. Were these shots convincing for you? Or did you guess how we did it right away? Let us know below. And as always, if you dug the show, do us a solid and like, share, subscribe, and hit the bell to be notified when we put up the next episode. It really does help us out. But until next time, don't forget to write, shoot, edit, repeat. Greeting.

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