One of the most important things about Okja was, obviously, her eyes. If the animation isn’t realistic enough in that aspect, it can often make a CG animal or creature look cartoonish and the audience may no longer suspend their disbelief about what they are viewing.
“As you saw the eyes of Gollum in ‘Lord of the Rings‘ and also Caesar’s eyes in ‘Planet of the Apes,’ I wanted to see something like that,” Bong says. “How can I have a close up? I really want to see deep inside of the eye.”
De Boer followed up, noting, “The main inspiration for all of this was nature. We looked at hippos, elephants and of course pigs themselves and we’re always studying nature for inspiration. Even for a fantasy creature like this. Tilda Swinton had some dogs that we had video of that really had expressive eyes. But, in LA there’s a beagle that a friend of mine has that is at our house a lot, that I spend a lot of time with. Funny enough, the beagle had the perfect proportions and even demeanor, and ears to serve as inspiration for Okja. So, I was looking at that beagle a lot. The eyes were just awesome. The dynamic, the overlap of the ears was good inspiration. You know, beagles are a special breed. They have a really, sort of, specific personality if you could say that.”
One of the most difficult aspects of filming was finding a way for the actors to interact and “touch” or feel Okja even though it’s a CG character. A majority of that responsibility went to Stephen Clee, a Method Studios visual effects animation supervisor who wore foam pieces to represent the character in good portion of the film.
“We knew we had all these very specific pieces of physicality and contact to solve. So, for each of those we created a very specific solution and they were just sort of props,” De Boer says. “It could be the part of a foot, it could be a head with a foam ear on it that had the right weight, and of course size. Some of these got pretty complicated. We had a huge pogo stick that we bounced Mija on and off. We didn’t come up with one expensive, sort of, hydraulic driven robotic solution. We were looking for organic solutions that allowed us to puppeteer and improvise and go with the flow. Allow for some of the curve balls that Bong would throw at us to be implemented. That was really important.”
He continues, “Instead of having the effects team show up on set go, ‘Here’s your tennis ball look at it.’ I really wanted to give Mija some comfort and trust. And make sure that she understood what we were trying to do so that she could really deliver the best acting performance. She did an amazing job connecting with these pieces of foam. Part of that plan was Stephen. [His presence] gave Mija not only a very nice guy to always be rehearsing with, but understand what we were trying to do. We could practice the timing cues and make sure that everything was well taken care of before we would go on set or location.”
The fact Clee, who sat in the audience for the Q&A, was on set for almost the entire production. That turned out to be an immense benefit for the post-production process.
“Steve also was the animation director for the team back here in Vancouver. So, Steve also now had an intimate knowledge of the forces, the physicality and the timing that we were trying to achieve,” De Boer says. “He also knew exactly what Bong’s direction was for the shot so he could just go to the facility and guide his team of 25 animators and in the most convincing way direct them to execute the shots. Because there was nobody better, more intimately knowledgeable about the work that we had to achieve than Steve.”
“Okja” is currently available on Netflix worldwide.