Smoke, Flames & Buckets of Blood: The FX Work of Renfield

Naturally, Dracula won’t let him go without a fight. The result is an action-packed, over-the-top, horror-comedy complete with ambitious FX sequences that Outpost VFX’s Montreal team were delighted to sink their teeth into. Below, our 2D and 3D teams talk through some of the work they carried out for Renfield.

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An early technical and creative challenge the team faced were the protection circle sequences. Leaning into Stoker’s Dracula, the protection circle is a boundary which, when crossed, traps a vampire and renders them powerless. 

Working alongside the showrunner, Lead Generalist Tom Rowell and the team set about defining the look and the feel of the protection circle: “We initially worked from some concepts that the client provided us that involved a lot of flames and was quite ‘real’ looking,” he explains.

“We did some versions working from that, but the conversations evolved into creating something that looked a little bit more magical; something similar to the Aurora Borealis that still felt physically plausible.”

The team were given a great jumping off point from the in-camera footage they received, with a great performance from Nicolas Cage and a clearly laid out ring of LED lighting to mark the protection circle. “We could clearly see when he crossed that boundary and entered the circle, from there we were looking at getting the movement of all of the elements working together,” Rowell says.

“We tried different speeds, different patterns of flame, different ways of the circle igniting; we eyeballed it essentially to get the look and feel right." Rowell continues. "The end result is probably around 15 or so layers of different elements all being built on top of each other – we kept the flames from the concepts, adding in this kind of magical feeling we’d developed during our experimentation. We had sparking explosions, a swirling vortex, smoke, flames, all reacting to one another to create the full shape.”

The sequence itself was an ambitious FX sequence complete with a wide variety of particles and interactivity between the simulation and the actor. “We designed everything to be as modular as possible which made it easier for comp to dial in the look when it got to their team. They could treat it as a foreground / background scene which was better for integration,” Rowell recalls.

“We had created a generic rig for it that would run across all of the shots. This worked because in most shots the elements didn’t react directly with the actor too much just because of the way he was positioned inside the circle; the depth wouldn’t have read well. But when Dracula enters the circle, we went back and re-ran some of the sims to allow for his movement to swallow the air and smoke around him to really integrate him in there.”

The 2D team helped with interaction between the actor and the particles further by adding additional embers and sparks, particularly when Dracula enters the protection circle. “Adding the particles in 2D for this part of the shot was quicker to iterate and render, and it also gave us more flexibility and control as to where the embers and particles would travel,” explains 2D Supervisor Luddnel Magne.

As a vampire, Dracula has the ability to shapeshift. On hand to bring this aspect of the character to life, our FX artists were able to turn Nic Cage into a sentient smoke form in a number of sequences using Houdini smoke simulations, working mostly with the particle age to achieve the desired effect. 

Making smooth and believable transitions from vampire to smoke was a creative challenge that the team collaboratively problem solved using colour as a visual bridge from one form to the next. Senior FX Artist Gavin Taylor highlights the process: “We were able to take the plate footage and project its colours onto a CG smoke sim for when he’s changing form. That way, we get the colour palette of his costume and his skin and blend it into the smoke to make the transition between the plate and the CG feel more natural.”

Not only did the team have to turn Dracula into smoke, but they also had to reverse the process and bring smoke Dracula back to his vampire form in multiple shots. Taylor and Lead FX Artist, Richard Tam worked on these shots simultaneously, each approaching it a different way to achieve the same results.

“Essentially, I used a procedural map to draw the smoke back into Dracula rather than pushing it away,” Taylor explains. “Then it would slowly rebuild him based on the colour in the plate, so the smoke changed from a blue-grey colour, depending on the age of the smoke, and grab the colour from the plate and pop right back into position,” he continues.

Meanwhile, Tam worked with the simulation to bring Dracula back to his regular form. “Similar to Gavin, I projected the colour of the end shape to get the colours to go from the grey of the smoke to the colour of Cage’s character, then I ran the FX simulation as before but instead reverted the smoke age to zero, so the sim played out in reverse and that did the trick for that shot.”

Within the smoke, it was important to the showrunner that it was still visibly Nic Cage and that his facial features were still readable. This also presented some unique challenges to the FX team: “When we were working on the initial shots of Dracula turning into smoke, one of the things we had to do was go back and do a crazy, exaggerated Nic Cage facial re-sculpt because when we ran the smoke over the photogrammetry scan of his face, it didn’t read as well as we wanted it too.” Rowell explains.

“We had to understand which facial features made Nic Cage recognisably Nic Cage,” adds Tam. “We found that a lot of it was in his eyebrows!”

“I had to do many iterations on how big his mouth and his teeth had to be too,” adds Taylor. “For certain shots I had to separate out the geo of his teeth and play around with the scale of his head.” 

The 2D department was also on hand to help capture the essence of Nic Cage for the smoke shots. “2D came in once the FX sim was signed off to just smooth over the transition slightly by morphing the facial features at the correct position, which again helped further with making it recognisably Nic Cage,” Magne explains.

In one of the more outlandish sequences, a well-meaning priest meets his untimely demise when Dracula uses his smoke form to make him explode by entering his body via his mouth. Funnelling Dracula as smoke into the priest required a different approach from the FX team altogether.

“Because of the nature of the motion, it was too complex to do it as a pyro-sim so we ended up doing it as a procedural volume set up where we could draw curves and define a specific path between where Drac was and where the priest’s mouth was,” explains Rowell. “By that point, we’d already gotten pretty far through the shot prerequisites and comp had worked on the priest, so we had a good line up with geometry. Then we just added some extra flourishes on top of it to sell it as smoke. 

“The hardest thing with this shot was to balance control with the natural shape and behaviour of the smoke,” adds Tam. “If I controlled it too much, it didn’t look organic enough.”

“The base is a particle simulation that we transformed in smoke and then I added a static setup on top of it and added the two together to get the effect that we see in the film,” Tam continues.

Watch Outpost's work on Renfield in cinemas now.