VFX Supervisor Chris Ritvo knows a thing or two about creating animals in CG. He collaborated with director Olivia Newman on Where the Crawfish Sing, where he created the CG for the birds. Ritvo faced an even bigger challenge when he was asked by Newman to create a CG octopus for “”.
The Netflix film, based on Shelby Van Pelt’s best-selling book, stars Sally Field as Tovah, a widow who finds joy again when she works at a local aquarium and forms an unexpected bond with a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus.
One of the first steps Ritvo took in the process was testing. He says, “We used basic assets to animate a short CG scene of Marcellus on a ledge reaching out and touching Tovah to show what was possible.” He added, “Although the content was very violent, it showed that I empathized with the digital octopus, and that was a selling point.”
Creating a CG octopus with emotional depth was no easy task.
Ritvo visited the Vancouver Aquarium and was drawn to Agnetha, a real giant Pacific octopus. “When I first saw her in the aquarium, I was able to see her so close and realize how complex everything is. Their skin is constantly moving, they have eight tentacles extending in every direction, and they have thousands of suckers moving around at all times.”
Agnetha would be the main inspiration for Ritvo for Marcellus.
He spent about 20 hours with Agnetha, gathering as many references as he could and building a course of action. “I set up cameras around her tank and walked around photographing and photographing her, trying to gather as many references as possible. That helped me decide on the look.”
Additionally, “We shot the scene that she did and digitally imitated it for Marcellus. And we always gave Olivia references, one-on-one material. So everything Marcellus does in the movie is a direct reference to either Agnetha or another reference that an octopus could actually do that we found online.”
How octopuses disguise themselves was also a topic of discussion at Ritva. As I watched Agnetha, I noticed that her skin was constantly changing and changing. “It’s very subtle,” he says. Newman and Ritva decided they liked Agnetha’s appearance. “She was bright red with black frills and had white suckers.” From there, Ritva repeatedly created camouflage patterns, creating patterns that matched the rocks and surrounding environment.
In this film, Ritvo used Marcellus’ aging as a storytelling point. “As he gets older, you see his color fade little by little. The color gets closer and closer to white, and when you finally see him at the back door, he looks pretty white, but when he gets back to the ocean, it flourishes again.”
Animating all eight tentacles proved to be the most time-consuming part of the visual effects process. Not only because they had to interact with the environment, but also because “they had to touch the glass, and the objects were alive, so they had to attract them and pull them away,” Ritva explains. “They were also the most difficult to coordinate and art direct,” he admits.
In total, he used a total of 450 visual effects shots, 200 of which were used for Marcellus.
Ritva’s team also had to create digital water effects depending on Marcellus’ position. When he was at sea, we had to create visual effects shots of ocean currents. In the scene where he comes out of the bucket, “It’s all digital water,” Ritva says.
However, the biggest challenge was making Marcellus a character that the audience could empathize with. “They don’t have traditional faces or eyes. They look otherworldly,” he says. To overcome that, he created a photorealistic octopus and made sure that Marcellus’ movements closely matched Agnetha’s. “When you look at Agnetha in the tank, you’re projecting your own emotions onto the tank. We don’t know what she’s actually feeling. She’s probably in a completely different world than we are, but she’s looking at you, or she’s interested, and you’re projecting your emotions.”
He added, “A lot of it had to do with Sally Field. She was a very good person and a lot of it was a reflection and projection of her emotions onto Marcellus. A lot of that was directed by Sally.”
