Soho VFX studio, One Of Us announced their involvement in Matteo Garrone's Pinocchio, released in the cinemas across the US from Christmas Day.
The film, which features some of the most beautiful and ambitious work in their 15-year history, is based on Carlo Collodi's original story from the 19th century and draws on Carlo Chiostri's illustrations.
With a theatricality which might seem hard to reconcile with digital visual effects, their work ran to over 200 shots and nearly half an hour of screen time and was nominated for a David di Donatello VFX award.
Garrone's is a world in which animals portrayed with little more than make-up (a fox, a cat) live alongside fully digital creatures (a donkey, dogfish, woodpeckers) and prosthetic-digital hybrids (tuna, snail, cricket).
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The company became involved in the project early in the pre-production process and began by testing approaches to the portrayal of Pinocchio himself, working alongside make-up and pros- thetics magician Mark Coulier, to be sure the digital work was in sympathy with, and added to, the richness of the world that Garrone was building.
Through pre-production, and a three month shoot in Tuscany, Puglia and Rome, One Of Us VFX supervisor, Theo Demiris, built a relationship of trust with Garrone, developing an under- standing of his aesthetic intentions and planning the best route through a short post period.
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Theo Demiris commented on the complexities of the VFX, “the work presented both technical and artistic challenges, including a 40 second shot of a drowning donkey enveloped in a shim- mering school of fish, and the breaching of the whale which swallows Pinocchio, with all the chaotic water interaction that entails.
We also need to mention the iconic sequence in which the young puppet’s nose grows in re- sponse to his lies and is resolved by the arrival of a small flock of woodpeckers. These and many other complex shots needed to fit within the singular world that Garrone had created, and much of this was achieved by an ongoing dialogue between One Of Us, the Director, and his Concept artist and character designer Pietro Scola.”
Pinocchio will be showing at cinemas across the US from December 25th, 2020.