WARM BODIES Production Notes - Visual Hollywood

WARM BODIES (2013)PRODUCTION NOTEScrew used CG to make it longer and higher than was physically possible to build.Levine credits director of photography Javier Aguirresarobe, ASC (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, TheRoad, The Others) with helping to make WARM BODIES a visually stunning movie."Javier is a brilliant visual artist," says the director. "The other great thing about Javier is that he hasa lot of soul and heart and he connects to the soul and heart of the movie."Aguirresarobe even managed to make the brain-eating scenes visually appealing. "That's a slightlyviolent moment in the film, where R is cracking Perry's head open, but it's shot very beautifully,"says Hoult. "The way Javier framed and lit everything, it just looks fantastic—even the more gruesomeaspects, there's still something very cinematic about them."Adding a surreal texture to the film are the numerous flashbacks R experiences as he eats the piecesof Perry's brain he has hidden in his pocket."We're often seeing things from Perry's point of view or from behind Perry," says second-unit directorStephen Woolfenden (Harry Potter), who shot some of the flashback footage, often adhering tovery specific pointers in Levine's script about shooting into the sun in order to create flares for anabstract effect."We've tried to get as many lens flares as we could in this one," Levine says. "I like the idea of kindof distorting the image. That's something that lens flares can do beautifully."As part of the film's visual palette, Aguirresarobe created a very specific look for scenes shot atnight. "Our night look is fantastic," says Levine. "He's created a wonderful palette for it—a littleblue, a little green. It's very pretty. I love the flickering fluorescence of the airport, the darkness ofthe subway and the stadium, and all these giant abandoned locations that are lit in these very expressionisticways that make sense because of the kind of world we're in."Of course, a monster movie is only as good as its monsters. Warm Bodies' most menacing creatures,the Boneys, were created using CG and stunt performers in motion-capture suits. Levine saysusing CG gave him a freedom he hadn't experienced before."The great thing about CG is, not only can you create these characters, but you can do things stylisticallythat I feel like some people aren't taking advantage of remotely enough. When we go into R'sdreams, for example, we do surreal transitions. At the very beginning of the movie, about the first10 minutes, there's a lot of really interesting, stylish CG that is used to tell the story in a way thatpeople haven't seen before. I've never had it as a tool in my arsenal before. It allows for the editorialprocess to be as creative as the production process."In creating the zombies, Levine says the team avoided an extremely gory look, drawing on thingslike Depression-era photos and images of coal miners instead of traditional zombie-movie referencesfor inspiration."We wanted to make a movie that appealed to all ages, so we couldn't necessarily get involved insome of the fun stuff that other zombie movies do," Levine says, adding that the process of designingthe looks of both the zombies and the Boneys was a lengthy one that started early in preproduction."We had people doing sketches, artists taking a picture of Nick Hoult from "Skins" orX-Men, and tweaking and playing with it," Levine says. "It would be back and forth internally, and© 2013 Summit Entertainment9