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The Maze Runner Creatures: Method Studios Interview

How Method Studios' Animation Director, Erik-Jan de Boer (one of the Oscar-winning VFX team responsible for Life of Pi's tiger), brought The Maze Runner Grievers to life!

How Method Studios' Animation Director, Erik-Jan de Boer (one of the Oscar-winning VFX team responsible for Life of Pi's tiger), brought The Maze Runner Grievers to life!

Still taken from The Maze Runner
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.

Introduction:

When tasked to create the Grievers for The Maze Runner, Method Studios recruited Animation Director Erik-Jan de Boer, who was part of the Oscar-winning VFX team responsible for the remarkable tiger featured in Life of Pi (2012).

Method Studios VFX Breakdown: The Maze Runner

"Wes is a young guy with a lot of energy who is respectful, and has a great
eye and vision"

Wes Ball

When it came to bringing to life the pivotal creature for The Maze Runner (2014), Method Studios turned to Oscar-winning Animation Director Erik-Jan de Boer (Life of Pi); he was allowed direct access to filmmaker Wes Ball who started out his career as a digital effects artist.

As an effects artist I have done many of my own projects and its hard to not start designing your way around some of the things you know are going to be hard or almost impossible to do if you have that in-depth knowledge," Erik-Jan de Boer comments. Wes Ball" was good at not worrying about that but pushing for how things we wanted to look; on the other hand, he understood how tricky things could be. Wes is a young guy with a lot of energy who is respectful, and has a great eye and vision. What I found to be fun was every time we started to describe these Grievers, with their mechanical legs and strange proportions, one of the things he was good at was going from being an nice calm dude to crazy, screaming and walking around the room acting out what these Grievers should be like, and in a split second going back to the calm self and say, Something like that.

Director Wes Ball on-set with Dylan OBrien who portrays Thomas
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.

Organic and mechanical

Pre-viz is always helpful, but didnt deal with any of the intricate challenges that these Grievers had, observes Erik-Jan de Boer. How do they exactly move? How do we find a balance between them being an agile and fast predator but also clumsy enough that the kids have a chance to defeat them?

"We ended up with a creature that was too insectoid for Wes and the studios liking. We started to pull more mechanical references to build in some of that clumsiness"

We started to do original motion tests and I was looking at nature like ants, cockroaches, and centipedes which are similarly built creatures. We ended up with a creature that was too insectoid for Wes and the studios liking. We started to pull more mechanical references to build in some of that clumsiness. What I thought was fun about the Griever was that combination of an organic body with these mechanical legs.

For my own rational, I pictured them pumping hydraulic fluid with their hearts into their mechanical legs and were using their lungs to drive the pneumatic feet. The pneumatic jackhammering allowed them to get traction onto the maze rocks. De Boer remarks, What we added to the design was the ability to telescope and reduce the length of the legs; that allowed us to vary their motion style depending on whether they were running in open space or climbing around and locomoting within the smaller alleys of the maze itself.

A nasty combination of organic and mechanical parts
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Visual effects plate
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Completed shot with looming Griever
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Weight and movement

We did two flavours of the Griever, one with a tail and one without a tail, states Erik de Boer. In some of the poses they do look scorpion-like. The Grievers had these little knives that run up the tail which we handled procedurally because of the quantity of them. We still had the ability to change the source key frame animation and have some fun with that.

Complicating matters were simulating the connecting hoses between the organic body and mechanical chase. On a scene-by-scene basis we had to change the length of these hoses to make them pretty and not too slack or taunt. Unlike a spider the Griever had to have a sense of weight.

"We looked for opportunities to put more of a cadence into the main body without screwing up the feeling of scale and size"

When youre talking about an eight-legged creature that has a crabby way to move its sometimes hard to avoid the feeling that theyre floating. We looked for opportunities to put more of a cadence into the main body without screwing up the feeling of scale and size. We also looked for opportunities to connect the creature with the set by bringing the image into shadows and out of light, and by having hard percussive hits of these metallic telescoping legs on rock, dust hits, and bits of rocks that flew off and got kicked up. The sound helped us a lot with that as well. We also used normal tricks like making sure that every time the Griever takes the weight there are small adjustments within the shape that added up to a believable heavy creature.

Visual effects plate
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Completed shot with Griever ready to pounce
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Burning Griever and finale

There is a moment in the movie where one of the Grievers drags the whole kitchen hut with him, turns around and faces the group of kids, remakes Erik-Jan de Boer. Teresa [Kaya Scodelario], our female hero, grabs an oil lamp from a drum that is standing next to her and throws a Molotov cocktail at the Griever. The practical element has fire bursting onto the ground. The plate was framed a little low so we had some restrictions there in terms of keeping the Griever low and in frame. We did a lot of iterations trying to get the motion right and we ended up with a beautiful shot where the Griever gets distracted by the fire, which is great effects work from our effects team here.

The Griever finale was memorable. The kids have to run across this bridge with huge drop-offs on both sides and towards a door. The door is protected by a Griever which is later joined by some of his buddies that close the kids off. It was filmed in Baton Rouge on a 50-yard long piece of ground surrounded by blue screen. When you see the final movie its a huge gorge. As an animation director I was really happy with the physicality of these kids hitting these stunt guys. We managed to sell that they were really poking at these creatures and that it was a believable fight with a realistic outcome.

Visual effects plate
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Completed shot with burning Griever
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Team work & old-fashioned monsters!

Oscar-winning Creature Supervisor James Jacobs (Avatar) who was also added to Method Vancouver team had a critical role in creating the Grievers. When I started here there wasnt a pipeline for this type of creature work so James developed one that allowed us to take our choreography from the animation stage into the creature stage, run our simulations effectively, and pass it on in a clean way to our lighting department.

"What I like about some of the reviews is that they call the Grievers old fashion monsters"

De Boer describes the animation team as being fun, super smart, and having a great eye with strong sensibilities; he particularly points out the contributions of Animation Supervisor Dan Mizuguchi, Animation Lead Andrew Chang, Animator Stephen Clee, Rigger Victor Barbosa, and Creature Technical Director Paul Jordan. What I like about some of the reviews is that they call the Grievers old fashion monsters. Nobody so far has mentioned the word CGI which you tend to get lately. Im happy that we managed to make these things miserably violent and aggressive predators, and stick them into the scenes without people being aware that theyre CGI. The Grievers are serving the story properly and thats something which is very cool.

Getting close to a Griever
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Erik with the cast of The Maze Runner!
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Method Studios.

Related links:

Discover more from Method Studios
Find out more about The Maze Runner movie
Read more features from 3dtotal
Check out 3dtotal's ZBrush Character Sculpting tutorial book

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