Industrial Light & Magic embraced something completely different with Luc Besson’s heady sci-fi actioner, “Lucy,” in which Scarlett Johansson plays a badass and brainy super-gal who taps her full cerebral capacity in blazing a new evolutionary trail for humanity.
Thus, to help visualize how Lucy colonizes her brain after a bizarre drug overdose, ILM became more design-centric and abstract than usual for Besson’s pulpy version of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
For the airplane sequence, Besson ripped out a picture of a woman’s face covered in cupcake sprinkles he spied in an in-flight magazine and asked ILM to reproduce the look. “He wanted the elegance of a Dior commercial for the decomposition sequence that gets progressively more horrifying,” Bluff continues. “But other than one shot, he didn’t want her to look ugly. Her skin is being thrown off her in a zero-G, particle way. She’s always struggling to rebuild herself. So it was a lot of re-projections of her face back onto her geometry and then animating erosion maps with crystals on the edge and then the sprinkles animated through a Houdini particle set up.”
When Lucy grabs the baddie’s head, we go inside his brain, which lights up as she searches for the info that she requires from his memories. It starts out looking like a real brain and then gets very abstract in structure, more like underwater micro-photography of sea urchins and star fish. They we fly further and arrive at the tip of a swimming sea anemone, where his memories are stored.
“But we took a number of those and concepted out a story effectively of what would happen if everything exploded during the Big Bang and went through all these changes, the energies that would be created,” Bluff explains. “What would happen if you went through a Black Hole? Could you get to the edge of the universe? Is the universe a surface and what would it look like? This was uncharted territory for us.”
But the most challenging and complex sequence occurs when Lucy utilizes 100% of her brain capacity and transforms into a slithering, otherworldly black mass comprised of thousands of tendrils. Technical director Florian Witzel built the procedural program for conveying mass and movement (utilizing ILM’s in-house Zeno system). The substance grabs and absorbs electronic equipment in a lab and gives off an electrical vibe but with a non-threatening personality.
“We used almost everything available to us at ILM and Luc wanted to be surprised and so he would step in and out of the work. It felt a little overwhelming at first, but Luc gave us the freedom to really experiment and that allowed us to hone the various looks of each sequence.”
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