Neill Blomkamp Interview Demonic

Neill Blomkamp Interview: Demonic

Demonic director Neill Blomkamp talks about his new horror film, the technology that made it possible, and where he sees movies going in the future.

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Years after his last feature-length motion picture, filmmaker Neill Blomkamp returns to the big screen with Demonic. In theaters and available everywhere you rent movies on August 20, the horror story follows Carly Pope as a woman reaching out to her comatose mother through new VR technology that winds up unleashing supernatural forces.

Blomkamp spoke to Screen Rant about crafting his movie in the midst of a pandemic and employing a new cinematic technology called volumetric capture.

Screen Rant: Where did the idea for Demonic come from?

Neill Blomkamp: The idea was a very unusual, weird process for generating an idea. Basically, the summary is that because of COVID, I wanted to do something that we could just put together ourselves and make because everything else seemed to be paused. And so, I always wanted to make my own small horror film.

I love Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch Project, so it was inspired a little bit by those. But I also had these other elements, like volumetric capture, which looks like the simulation stuff in the movie. And when you combine demonic possession or horror tropes with something like virtual reality, the film becomes a merging of those two things. And it just arose from the combination of those.

Can you talk about the sci-fi and virtual reality element of the film?

Neill Blomkamp: There’s the process called volumetric capture, which is an unusual computer graphics way of capturing actors in three dimensions, that isn’t really in the mainstream yet in terms of film production. I think it will be at some point, but it would be like motion capture 15, or 20 years ago. I always wanted to use it, and we actually have our experimental studio – Oats Studios, where it would have been perfect to have used. Which is what I was actually thinking, and it would become like a short film or a YouTube video.

And then when the pandemic hit, and this idea of wanting to make a film came – because I didn’t want to not work – I felt like, “Why don’t I dust that idea off and use it in a feature idea more than in a different application?”

The VR elements arose from [asking], “How would I use volumetric capture?” And because it’s glitchy and new – it’s very early technology and the resolution is low – how would I justify that to the audience? And so it felt like, if it was a prototype piece of technology that a lab was experimenting with, it would justify for the audience that it looked the way that it looked. Because it won’t look better than that for a few years.

I’ve never heard of volumetric capture, so I was gonna ask you if that was rotoscoping.

Neill Blomkamp: Yeah, people often make the connection with this movie to A Scanner Darkly, which is rotoscoping entirely. But this process is completely different; it’s totally three-dimensional video, and it’s running inside of a game engine. You could actually watch those scenes in VR with a headset if you wanted to, or if you had a mouse and keyboard, you could move around the scene like in Call of Duty.

Is this going to be the future of our immersive experience with theater experience and VR?

Neill Blomkamp: Yeah. I think, for sure, volumetric capture is going to play a massive role in that because it’s the three-dimensionalization of your actors. When it gets down to hair strand resolution, that will really begin to open things up. But its resolution is pretty low right now.

Neill Blomkamp Interview Demonic

Was the house that we see in there created in this volumetric capture?

Neill Blomkamp: It’s kind of complicated, but the best way to think of it is that there’s an older process in computer graphics called photogrammetry, where you use hundreds of photos of an object to extrapolate a three-dimensional file that lives in the computer -almost like a CAD file.

If you took 100 photos of an object – but it that has to be static, like a shoe – from all different angles, and you gave it to a photogrammetry piece of software, the software would give you a CAD model of the shoe that would look very realistic. And it would also put all of the textures on from the photos, like the lace texture and the fiber and everything.

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You’d have an object, and that object can be dropped into one of the game engines like Unity or Unreal, and you could spin it around and look at it. You’ve taken something from the real world, and you’ve made it three-dimensional. That’s a pretty old process. Volumetric capture is doing that 24 times a second: your actors can move, each frame will be captured, and they will be three-dimensional objects.

When you ask about the house, the house was captured with the original version of photogrammetry. We took, I think, 12,000 photos of that house. You use drones overhead to get the exterior, and then you walk around on the ground level and inside, and take billions of still photos. You give it to the computer, and then you get a three-dimensional house with all of the textures – like the wall texture, and the wood and everything. And then you take your volumetric actor – in this case, Carly – and you drop her into that house.

If you’ve shot her on the stage correctly, it means that we will have told her – because she’s just in a room of cameras – “Imagine you’re now arriving at the door to your mother’s room. Okay, now pretend to push the door open.” When you take her and drop her into the house, if you’ve done your measurements correctly, she should line up with that house. And then the house and [she] are both existing in Unity, a video game engine, which means it’s live the way Call of Duty is live. You can get in there, walk around and watch the two of them speak.

Can you talk to me about that mythology of creating the story we have here in Demonic?

Neill Blomkamp: Well, the demon was the result of [wanting] to use volumetric capture, and since I wanted to do something like Paranormal Activity’s demonic possession, what would happen if you combine those?

The idea was that maybe you can use VR in the story, where a person who’s in a coma could be able – because their mind is active – to get out into a virtual environment and walk around. I was thinking that would be interesting if someone else joined her in the simulation and ran into the thing that was possessing her, that is effectively trapped inside of her body – or inside of her mind.

The mythology just became a case of, “What would an interesting demon be, that isn’t based on anything.” So, I just kind of made one up, and I liked the idea of the whole raven or crow. I don’t know what that was. I think it may have been because of the pandemic. I was looking at a lot of imagery. Have you ever seen those medieval plague masks? I think I was playing with that idea, and it kind of turned into a beak or something. I’m not sure exactly how the raven came to be.

The other thing that was important was that however, it possesses people, I wanted it to be on a very specific piece of land. It kind of hangs out there and waits for someone to walk through. And then if it possesses them, and the Vatican wants to exorcise the person, they can’t get it out unless that person is on the same piece of land. I just was making that up, really.

You’ve worked with Carly in the past, and she’s brilliant in this film. Can you talk to me about what she added to the role that wasn’t necessarily on the page?

Neill Blomkamp: It’s like you just said, her name in the script was Carly because I just wanted to use Carly, which is pretty funny. All of these elements just came together in a way that just slowly pieced together. It’s a very backward way of coming up with a movie.

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Because I’d worked with her in all of the Oats Studio stuff, I felt like she obviously had the talent level to carry the movie. But also her personality. Everyone on the low-budget film was a team member that was trying to make the movie happen, and I knew that her personality would be really great in that environment. Which I was correct about.

Then it became, like, neither of us had really done horror before. So, we would just talk scenes out. And I thought she did a really, really good job. The only sequence where she was like, “Well, what am I doing?” was when she actually gets possessed. And it’s like, “Well, you’re just kind of flailing around a bit.” We went back and forth discussing that a bunch of times, and I like that sequence. So, it worked.

One of my favorite sequences in the film is when Carly’s best friend, Sam (Kandyse McClure), shows up and gets possessed. How much of that is done practically?

Neill Blomkamp: That’s 100 practical. It’s crazy. There’s a performer from Toronto – his name is Troy James – who is one of the most amazing contortionists I’ve ever seen in my life. And as soon as I saw him, I was like, “I have to work with you somehow.”

When I was playing around with this horror idea, I loved the idea of it just being all in-camera. There’s no wirework, there’s no CG, there’s no stunts – there’s nothing other than us just filming Troy. It was pretty awesome.

He also does that at the drop of a hat. He’ll do that in a restaurant – like, he’ll do it anywhere. He’ll just do it. It’s pretty incredible what he can do, so it was a total blast shooting that with him. I loved it. But he had to become Sam so, obviously, he’s just wearing her wardrobe. I would love to work with him again.

Especially in COVID, the theater experience has taken a huge hit. Do you think you know where the direction of theaters, in general, are headed?

Neill Blomkamp: Obviously, I have no idea. I don’t have a crystal ball, but my instinct is that there’ll be bigger movies in theaters that there are fewer of. Everything will be a little bit more like a massive spectacle film, and they’ll need to draw audiences out of their streaming households with a reason big enough to go to a movie theater.

I think studios will probably make fewer movies in theaters that are bigger expenditures; that are just massive event movies. Character nuance and stuff will probably begin to – it’s more about spectacle, really. But streaming will be where complex stories will be, and I think they’ll continue to just diverge like that.

You can think of it almost like a theme park, I guess.

Do you think you’ll be using volumetric capture throughout more of your films as you go forward?

Neill Blomkamp: I would love to, as long as I can justify how to do it. Because as the technology gets better, as the resolution increases, there’ll just be more and more opportunities. I really wanted to use it, and I wanted to it because it’s so new. I knew where it will go, but it’s hard to figure out exactly how to use it unless you can justify the glitchiness within the story – or the audience would reject it.

If you just have visual effects that look like that, they’d be like, “What the hell is this?” It has to be embedded into the story, so I would have to figure out a second way to do that. Or make a sequel to this in order to be able to use it more.

I think that District 9 is one of the best sci-fi movies ever created. Are there any updates on District 10?

Neill Blomkamp: The way I think of District 10 is just that it’s in the relatively near future, and I want to make it. It just may be a film or two behind, but it’s definitely there. I love where the script has gone, and I just want to get it right.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/neill-blomkamp-director-interview-demonic/

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