We had the opportunity to speak with Clint Reagan, Previsualization & Postvisualization Supervisor at HALON about his team’s work on Logan.
SKNR: When working on the previous two Wolverine movies, was the development of Logan on the radar?
Clint: I think that they are taking one movie at a time with each good idea. Working with Jim Mangold, who is the director of Logan as well as The Wolverine which is the second Wolverine film. He never mentioned that he would be directing (the next movie in the franchise).
SKNR: When they brought Logan to you and your team, what was done for the previsualization process?
Clint: How did we approach the creative when we started on Logan and how did we proceed? Having worked with Jim Mangold, this is the third film that I have done with him, so we have good relationship. On many films you have to get to know the person, we were able to jump right in.
Francois Audouy, he is the Production Designer I also worked with on the other Wolverine film. We got the call to work on the film and Jim would pitch us what the movie was intending to be. Jim wanted us to help him put together the vision for the film. He wanted a two to three minute, themed shot, point of view, out of Logan’s eyes of him going through his past, a flashback to his Weapon X days.
We started with building some of the environment, run some tests, thinking about how it would look like going through a Wolverine battle all from his point of view. We animating some things as well as pitching ideas, often with Jim who would say if he liked something or wanted a different direction. My job is to put what I can into it to help visualize the whole thing.
SKNR: How did the project expand to give us the completed film?
Clint: As the film was being written, the story moved in a different direction from the three minute piece. We started using a game engine as a rendering tool which gives us a higher quality visual. The studio really liked the look. I was really beautiful. Hugh Jackman came in to look at it, everyone was pretty impressed. Jim Mangold dubbed it &The Pretty Box&, because we would take a plain gray scene and then run it through the game engine and then it would just get, you know…pretty.
In 2016, we started working with the new scenes. A lot of the action portions, He (Jim Mangold), relied on my team, and myself and his ideas and we animated it to what he suggested. He would have some story boards and I would intercut my material so we could see the whole sequence building. We had some game engine renders, classic previs, and then switch back to boards. on most of the movies, we worked in a collage format.
SKNR:
Clint: Stuntvis was also part of the journey where the stuntmen would film themselves. We would replace the background as a previsualization tool. We used the game engine, motion capture, VR goggles to get familiar with the space in the limousine. It was a fun project because I got to use a lot of different tools. We did not rely on any given approach, we used any and every tool available at some point because it was the best tool at the time.
SKNR: What sort of tools were used for the project?
Clint: There was this moment where I was working with the art department, the vehicle guys were showing their limousine. They had to build this limousine that had would get some pretty serious abuse in the course of this film. They wanted a futuristic design, something that is set in the future somewhere, closer to our time. He came out with this limousine model, and asked: Is this close to what your using? Why don’t we pull that into the game engine and let’s look at it through 3D goggles? In about an hour, he gave me the model, I pulled it into the game engine, put it into my Oculus, and was able to walk around and see it from the CAD drawings. We had a beautiful rendering of the setting in the desert where Logan and Xavier were hiding out. The vehicle and the art department were really excited because they could actually see how the light would interact with it. It was exciting that we were able to put the work in context that early on that created quite a buzz.
SKNR: With Stuntvis, you had mentioned earlier that they had filmed themselves. Can you tell us how it applies?
Clint: Garrett Warren (Second Unit Director) has a team of stuntmen that work for him. There is a scene in the movie, in the finale, where Logan is running through the forest and X-23, she is running through the forest, and a bunch of kids with all these bad guys chasing them trying to catch them. They delivered a ton of footage of the stuntmen fighting, beating the snot out of each other in a cardboard box forest. My team and I took that as a previs tool and roto-scoped all the characters, put in our previs forest. W e started adding elements like ice breath when one of the mutant kids would breathe. Adding the mutant effects, over the top. In some cases, generate a new shot to help make the sequence work. Working with the visual effects editor to find the pace, which stunts to use in the cut that was shown to the studio that was in context.
In the interview, Clint recognized his team and all the hard work that they did on this project. He is currently working on another major motion picture. We look forward to be able to speak to him again.
Logan is currently in wide release.
Here are pictures sent to us from the panel at Wondercon 2017
