These days any substantial film requires Visual Effects work. Part of a story that are hard to capture in camera. Or it would take longer or be more expensive on set than in the suite afterwards.
And so began our work on what would turn out to be a film beyond expectations on the January 2nd 2025, when a post producer we had worked with on a commercial connected us with the film makers of 'Good Boy'. They had a list of 43 shots in the film that needed work. Some of the usual fare of rig removals, comping of plates, breaking glass, set extensions, etc. but also some unique requirements - like morphing a character into a disintegrating skeleton, inspired by famous movie scenes.
All the work was done over several weeks in Autodesk Flame. And a recently added feature in Flame, the ML based morph node, came just in time to handle some of the trickier scenes.
Most of the work was done remotely. During the final online editing phase, the team came together at Dungeon Beach's Williamsburg facility to put the final touches on colour and also review the vfx shots on the bigger screen. With remote access to the Flame workstation from the facility, some final tweaks to timing shadows and broken glass were refined.
Everything was finished on time, and the film premiered at SxSW. And then it gained unexpected momentum, being picked up for distribution by Shudder, and playing on 1,600 screens in the US, and later went to streaming on AMC+. It ended up being the 3rd highest grossing film by IFC/Shudder.
A great interview with director Ben Leonberg about the making of the movie can be watched here: The Making Of Good Boy