VFX Work for Jake Paltrow’s Film YOUNG ONES Created in Dublin’s Windmill Lane VFX
“Special kudos must also go out to visual effects supervisor Ditch Doy…. Though presumably working with a low budget, visual effects supervisor Ditch Doy has crafted a future with robotic beasts of burden that are quite impressive.” Tim Grierson, Screendaily
Irish VFX company Windmill Lane VFX have played an integral role in bringing Jake Paltrow’s dystopian sci-fi western YOUNG ONES to the big screen, creating all of the complex VXF work in the film supervised by Ditch Doy. Starring Michael Shannon, Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult, 'Young Ones' is a futuristic Western set in a time when water is a scarce commodity and the land is barren. YOUNG ONES had its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year and will be released in the US on October 17th.
Writer/director Jake Paltrow chose to locate the VFX work in Ireland and he turned to Windmill Lane VFX (WLVFX) to provide the retro-futuristic elements to populate his world with gadgets and technological innovations.
Principle amongst the VFX work is the CG Simulit Shadow, an agricultural, robotic beast of burden that replaces the family's donkey. The Simulit was realised on-set as a partial puppet for the actors to interact with and the VFX team were tasked to seamlessly integrate CG extensions to bring the robot to life. In many instances the practical was not used and a fully digital Simulit was preferred.
Jake Paltrow wanted the Simulit to be devoid of all emotion. It is an unthinking, unfeeling machine which allows the audience to invest their own feelings into it causing it to evolve into a key supporting character. The aim of trying to convey the mindless machine whilst still evoking sympathy from the audience proved to be quite a challenge, one which the WLVFX team took on with gusto.
Windmill Lane’s Ditch Doy supervised the VFX on-set in the stunning landscape of South Africa’s Northern Cape desert. Doy explains, ‘Shooting on film with Anamorphic lenses in one of the hottest, driest places on the planet was extremely challenging, but it all seems worthwhile when you see Giles Nuttgen’s breath-taking cinematography’.
Doy highlights, ‘This was the first feature film to take advantage of our recently developed VFX pipeline. With Shotgun providing its backbone, the day to day data management is taken care of which frees up our artists to focus on their creative roles. Having integrated SolidAngle's Arnold renderer, WLVFX were able to achieve the levels of photo-realism required with far greater speed and precision.’
Speaking about the work that was carried out at Windmill Lane VFX, Young Ones Producer Tristan Orpen Lynch said “Windmill Lane VFX created and animated a mechanical machine that played a central role in film. We knew that the machine had to be completely convincing as a real machine but what I did not expect was the compelling, and in some respects emotional, way that the machine integrated perfectly into this intensely dramatic film.”
Young Ones was produced by Spier Films, Subotica Films, QuickFire Films and Windmill Lane with funding from Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board.