“The interesting thing for me, creatively for 3 Body Problem, was that there was a wide range of work,” says VFX supervisor Stefan Fangmeier. “There was a little bit of everything – we did the VR game, we did other recreations, obviously slicing the tanker, but there was also a little bit of creature work with the chimp, the rocket taking off… so there was a lot of stuff I hadn’t done yet.”
3 Body Problem follows a group of scientists in the present day who are confronted with a technologically advanced extraterrestrial threat, due to a decision made by one woman during the Cultural Revolution in 1960s China. Visual effects played an essential role in the creation of the series, as the alien threat is first introduced through a VR game world.
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“There were a lot of moving parts to the game world, it all kind of started with how would we shoot it,” says VFX producer Steve Kullback. “There was a lot of emphasis and interest in shooting things virtually in front of an LED screen and we did actually incorporate LED screens as a lighting tool, which was very helpful.” The use of LED screens for lighting aided the cinematographers in their job, and allowed for an easy transition when a blue screen was needed to insert complex backgrounds in later.
Visually, Fangmeier says the VR game world was fairly straightforward. “Initially, they’re just in this sort of desolate landscape, so photorealism was probably the most important aspect of it, but the thing is that it was meant to be a video game that the player would experience in a way that they never experienced a video game before and we sort of equated it to dreaming.”
One of the more challenging effects to create for this season was the oil tanker being sliced by nano-wire in the fifth episode, “Judgment Day”. “When I first read this, of course I knew this was going to be a simulation challenge,” says Fangmeier.
“It’s fun when you open up the script and you see wacky things,” says Kullback. “Like, ‘We’re gonna put a rhinoceros through a meat grinder, or an oil tanker through an egg slicer,’ and you start to break down, ‘Well, what the hell is that gonna look like?'” Though they initially looked into renting an oil tanker, Kullback says they decided to build a smaller portion of the tanker’s deck as a set piece and then created the rest virtually. “[It] was probably about a third as long as an oil tanker, and half as wide, but it was a significant set piece that we could literally land a helicopter on. And we did.”
“The rule of the game these days in production versus visual effects is that when you need to have a part of the scenery that needs to be inhabited by actors… you usually build that,” says Fangmeier. “Then the rest of it is usually extended by visual effects because it’s just so much easier, especially if you are going to do something as large as a tanker, to not do a physical build of all of that.”
Click the video above to watch the full interview.