How The Substance's VFX Team Turned Demi Moore into a Blob

(Warning: This story contains spoilers for Coralie Fargeat substance).

in the final scene substancethings get confusing.

Coralie Fudget's body horror satire tells the story of the fall from grace of former A-list star Elizabeth Sparkle, who begins taking drugs in a desperate attempt to regain her youth and maintain a place in sexist and ageist Hollywood. A mysterious chemical substance called “matter”. Things went very, very wrong.

Shortly after being injected with the substance, Sparkle (Demi Moore, fresh off winning her first Golden Globe for the role) writhes on the bathroom floor. Her back splits from her spine and Sue, a slimy younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) crawls out. Initially, the two clones followed a schedule of swapping every seven days. Bodies in the bathroom are kept alive by feeding tubes, while other free people live their lives freely.

But the siren beacon of youth, Sue soon begins to extend her stay outside, allowing Elizabeth to wither away in her cage. In a panic, Elizabeth ignores the one-time warning on the drug's package insert and injects herself with some of the remaining serum, triggering her transformation into “Elisasue” aka Monstro, a grotesque hunchbacked creature who's half Quasimodo, Half of it is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” It had a twisted version of Sue's face, with Elizabeth's visage howling from its back.

Fargeat uses as few special effects as possible in the game substancerelying on old-school practical effects, makeup, prosthetics and puppets. But once Monstro entered the scene, the on-set work required some visual effects support in order to achieve the film's sticky, hilarious ending.

“We spent a lot of time discussing the look that Coralie wanted because she really liked that prosthetic look as a nod to the ’80s, from David Cronenberg to John Carpenter , you know matter (1982), fly (1986),” said French visual effects coordinator Pierre Procoudine-Gorsky. His team at Paris studio Noid worked with the film’s visual effects supervisor Bryan Jones to digitally design both versions of Monstro: Shaky The deformed monster Eliasue, and Elisabeth's impassive face in the film's final scene, is now an oozing blob, sliding all the way to its Sparkle star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before being wiped away.

“We call the first one a monster and the last one a blob,” Prokudin-Gorski said. “In both cases, we were building on the work Coralie was doing on set, working with the prosthetics team and makeup visual effects to try to match the look of the prosthetics without making it feel too digital, too perfect. “

Procoudine-Gorsky won the Best Visual Effects award at the European Film Awards in December substance The team has worked on creature features before – his team helped design a werewolf for Sean Ellis' 2021 horror film cursed person – He spent a lot of time working on visual effects on French blockbusters such as Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom (2023).

“But nothing comes close the substance, he said. “Recreating the face of a famous actress and making it feel like a physical effect so it blended perfectly with the puppet was probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”

The first digital version of Elizabeth has her face buried in Monstro's back, crying, and Moore is clearly identifiable, but something doesn't work.

“It didn't blend in with (Moore's prosthetic head) that the puppet, prosthetics team designed,” he said. “Before filming, the prosthetics people would always spray a glycerin water on the face to give it a wet look but also to give it this thickness, this latex look.”

It took several weeks to recreate the look on the computer, “accurately mimicking this layered humidity and recreating the precise properties of glycerin.”

Prokudin-Gorski and his team spent “six, seven months” going back and forth with Fagit and Jones to get the right digital version.

The spots on Elizabeth's face presented a different challenge.

“We started with the same program, scanning everything we did on set, doing a full 3D scan of the puppets in makeup, etc.,” he said, “but with the blob, we needed more fluidity in its movement. This The puppet was cool, but it didn't have the fluid movement that Coralie needed.”

In the end, the blobs were designed primarily in the computer, done as “very traditional keyframe animation” before adding the final touches.

“We had the same challenge as Monster, matching the look of the set, the fuzzy, latex feel, while still being able to identify Demi's face,” he said, “but she also did a lot of facial acting because she was working on it Become a star. In the last shot, she's actually smiling. We decided we couldn't do it with just animation, we needed to scan Demi's performance.”

Time is running out. This is already the end of 2023. if substance Noid’s team had to work quickly in order to be ready for next May’s Cannes Film Festival as planned. When the Screen Actors Guild signed a new contract with the studio, ending a nearly four-month strike, Noed got an opportunity to record Moore remotely from Clear Angle Studios, a 3D scanning specialist in Los Angeles.

“We did a volumetric scan on Demi, which was a very technical session that basically involved multiple cameras shooting around her while she was performing. Coralie was able to direct her over Zoom, which was new for us. “

Using the scanned raw data, Farget began editing the final scene of the movie and sent the clip to Noid. “We had to match the CGI exactly when editing, which was tricky and required working from the original data,” says Prokudin-Gorski, “but at least we knew exactly what she was going to use, so our The version would fit perfectly with her editor.”

It's already spring 2024, and the Cannes Film Festival is just around the corner.

“We went into May, maybe three or four days before the festival, and we were still grading the final version of the footage,” he recalls. “It's kind of crazy. We delivered the final version two days before its world premiere in Cannes.”

Fargeat’s practical approach comes first substance Reigniting the physical vs. digital debate among SFX enthusiasts. But for Prokudin-Gorsky, the film is proof of how seamlessly on-site and computer design can work together. “We were never there to replace the real thing, but to match it or help where there were practical limitations,” he said. “For me, there’s no difference between practical and VFX, between physics and CGI. Any battle. It’s all about teamwork.”