Sealing the deal

Red Rocks director and producer David Stubbs transports DQ to the New Zealand set of this family adventure series to reveal how his “old school” approach to special effects helped him to achieve a climactic final sequence featuring an animatronic seal.

The shooting of Red Rocks, our eight-part family adventure series, involved many specific and unique challenges. We spent eight weeks filming on Wellington’s South Coast, with 70% of that time outdoors – in the middle of winter – on the rocks or in the water. Madness, really, as the next stop south was Antarctica. To top it off, in the spirit of keeping it real, we added animals, children and animatronic seals into the mix.

Red Rocks follows 12-year-old Jake as he is drawn into a world of mythical creatures and adventure when he finds a sealskin hidden on the rocky shores of his father’s seaside home. When unexpected dangers are unleashed, Jake is called upon to protect his family.

Featuring animatronics created by Oscar- and Bafta-winning visual effects and props company Wētā Workshop, Red Rocks takes the Celtic myth of the Selkies – or seal people – and transplants it into the landscape of Wellington’s wild south coast, throwing an ordinary boy into a life-changing adventure.

Produced by Libertine Pictures for BYUtv (US) and Sky (NZ) with investment from NZ On Air, the series is adapted from New Zealand author Rachael King’s award-winning novel of the same name and distributed by WildBrain, with the New Zealand Screen Production Rebate cash-flowed by Hinterland.

Wellington is notorious for its roaring and bitter southerly winds, and we faced them daily. Calm seas just aren’t a thing here – except in the writer’s imagination. So when one of our climactic final scenes required fog as an obstacle to our heroes’ escape from an angry Selkie, we had no choice but to go indoors. We transformed a local primary school’s enclosed swimming pool into the cruel sea of Cook Strait. This required creating a whiteout fog, dealing with nervous child actors, a rickety, sinking dinghy, and a champion freediving puppeteer operating and submerging our one-of-a-kind, very expensive, and meticulously crafted Wētā Workshop animatronic seal. I wore my brown trousers that day.

The scene follows an exciting chase sequence where our young protagonist, Jake, is pursued across the seas of the south coast by Cara, a Selkie desperate to reclaim her skin and potentially punish Jake for taking it. We had already shot parts of this chase out on the water, where the seas had been choppy and freezing and the wind bitter and sharp. A combination of stunt performers and brave actors allowed us to piece together the first part of the chase, shooting boat-to-boat. But the next part involved Jake rowing his dinghy into a fog bank (as much a fantasy in these waters as Selkies themselves), so our challenge was to achieve this without resorting to CGI or VFX fog.

My philosophy is always to try to get things in-camera. I believe the audience can sense when something is CGI, and it can disrupt the emotional journey when those elements are presented as obstacles. That’s why, for Red Rocks, we embraced animatronics instead of 3D CGI seals, and used real fog effects instead of CGI fog. In a town famous for Oscar-winning visual effects (The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Avatar), we proudly took an old-school approach.

To achieve our foggy ocean, we pumped copious amounts of atmosphere into Berhampore Primary School’s learner pool – a pool in which both of my children learned to swim, and one I was familiar with from several under-eight birthday parties. Its compact size made it easy to fog up, but also meant the sides of the pool were quickly revealed unless the fog was extremely thick. So we doubled down on the white stuff and positioned fake rocks along one side to create jagged and dangerous obstacles.

We also covered the bottom and sides of the pool with black fabric to block out the blue tiles and match our real-world environment – standard procedure for a pool shoot, but remarkably effective.

Water-loving art department volunteers used barrels to pump the water and create waves, while we suspended our camera over the pool with a jib arm and gimbal rig. Luckily, the pool’s enclosure was semi-opaque, so daylight lit the environment for much of the day.

Next, we introduced our hero seal, Jessie, a Selkie – meaning she can shed her skin and turn into a human. In this case, she’s a seal pup who, in human form, is a curious and sprightly girl who befriends Jake. In this particular scene, she leads him through the fog to safety.

Wētā Workshop created two seals for us: a full-size adult and the smaller Jessie. The full-size seal was designed to charge on land, built around a stunt performer/puppeteer inside, along with external cable animatronics. The ‘Jessie’ seal was effectively a hand puppet with cable-operated animatronics for the mouth and nose.

With a goal to achieve everything in-camera, we needed the primary puppeteer to operate below the surface, effectively holding their breath while performing for scenes where the seal was in the water (whether in the pool or the ocean). In this case, Jessie needed to pop out of the water in front of Jake, lead him to safety by swimming a few meters away, turn back to check if he was following, and then dive underwater.

Ideally, we’d get this in one shot without needing to paint out the puppeteer later. To this end, we were fortunate to have Kristine Zipfel, a real-life water wonder woman who could not only puppeteer Jessie into life but also hold her breath underwater for extended periods without scuba gear. A freediver of some renown, Kristine always resurfaced with a smile.

On the day, we got everything we were after and more – the footage looks fantastic. The seal survived its watery submersion and was ready to re-enter the real ocean a few days later. The only VFX will be some eye blinks and nose flaring for the Jessie seal to complete the transformation.

As I write this, I’m heading into editing to piece together this scene with the rest of episode eight’s climactic chase. Will the transition from the epic real-world setting to the swimming pool work? Will the audience prefer a super-realistic puppet seal over a CGI one? And, most importantly, will Jessie help Jake escape the clutches of Cara? I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.

tagged in: BYUtv, David Stubbs, Hinterland, Libertine Pictures, NZ On Air, Red Rocks, Sky, WildBrain