With the theatrical release of the fantasy comedy film Sketch happening last Wednesday, director Seth Worley shared how he, along with other VFX artists, were able to create the unique special effects seen on screen.
Worley goes into depth on how some CGI scenes were made on a recent episode of Corridor Crew via YouTube. When rewatching specific clips of Sketch, one scene in particular that he commented about the process on was when a big crayon creature named Dave was attacking a school bus. Worley discussed how this was a years-long process to create these monsters, Dave in particular, with the first VFX tests for the film done in 2017. He explained that their goal for designing these creatures was to make something that was in between “flat 2D, like you know two and a half D.” Worley said it wasn’t until they started the movie and brought on VFX artist Mark Lundgren to help that the monsters’ designs started coming together. He explained Lundgren’s ideas further, saying, “He had the idea to just do this in Cinema 4D, to basically, our monsters are cloners built up of these card sprites of those scribbles. And then mixed in there, of course, we wanted them to have this mixed media element to them. So like the googly eye, we rigged it to where we had control over it, but it was also physics-based. So it would, wherever it would point, we’d let it run out of steam at some point and keep falling and flopping around.
Worley wasn’t afraid of going practical for effects either, with him admitting that they used chalk to create the dust that would come up from the ground when the monsters moved, as well as chalk dust from themselves. The director and writer also discussed how they came up with making the “eyeders,” single-eyed creatures with spider legs, explaining that it came from a vendor partner of theirs. “And they’ve [the eyeders] all got these little objects. Several of them have knives they’re just carrying upright. They did all of these shots of the eyeders. And I honestly, truly don’t know how they pulled off half of them.”
Sketch, which stars Arrested Development’s Tony Hale and Good Place’s D’Arcy Carden, follows a young girl named Amber, playing Bianca Bell, who sees her chalk and crayon monsters “come to life when her sketchbook is accidentally dropped in a magical pond.” The feature first premiered at TIFF in 2024 and was released in theaters last week to positive reviews, with a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. It’s safe to say that Worley’s hard work has paid off.
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