Breaking Bad Step by Step
The AMC black comedy Breaking Bad is well-known for being laced with irony, and the episode "Fly" is a classic example. Shot entirely within the confines of a gleaming methamphetamine lab, this episode finds lead character Walt White (Bryan Cranston) driven to obsessive-compulsive distraction by a fly that he just can't kill.
Cranston's fastidious character, who fears the pest could contaminate the lab's latest batch of product, climbs a second-story catwalk to get within swatting distance. But he reaches out too far, loses his balance, and crashes to the floor below. The final irony finds the fly, in extreme close-up, walking across Walt's eyeglasses while he lies in stunned silence. "A simple annoying fly causes the character to go over the edge—literally," says Visual Effects Supervisor Mat Beck of Entity FX in Santa Monica, Calif.
Entity FX was tasked with creating the fly for a couple of dozen shots, but none was more crucial than this final close-up. We see the fly in extreme detail as the camera racks focus between the animal and the actor's eye behind his glasses, reacting to the sight of his nemesis. This shot also had to flow seamlessly from the prior shot of the actor falling to the ground. "The camera, in one wide shot, watches him fall," Beck says. "He lands, and the camera pushes in, so it's plain that it's [Cranston]. We combined a stunt man with the real actor. We did a rough comp on the set—a morph between the stunt guy and the real actor—to make sure that those lined up."
Turntable test with the 3D fly.
Back at Entity, the final morph was achieved using The Foundry Nuke. "It was a difficult morph, and it was always going to be," Beck says. "In order to make it look as realistic as possible, we didn't do it over one frame. The morph happened on the action. We watch the character fall from a wide angle, and then he lands and the camera pushes in to show that it's him. Of course cheap trick number 14B is to move the camera, but we did it with the camera not moving at all. You see him lying there, and then you hear a buzzing sound and you see his eye move as the fly lands on his glasses."
The CG fly was modeled and animated in Autodesk Maya, and rendered in mental images mental ray for Maya. "For developing the fly's behavior, the production bought great reference footage," Beck says. "There are lots of stereotypical behaviors, like the way a fly moves its head when it grooms itself, and the shaky things it does with its legs. They're really twitchy animals. We created little animation cycles for all of those behaviors. You're five times more likely to see the thing if it's moving a little bit. A lot of what makes a fly look real are all the little hairs coming out of it. Even if you don't notice all of them, a fly has that look because it has all those hairs on its legs."
To ensure that the CG fly would appear locked onto the surface of the glasses, Entity used tracking markers that would later be erased via Adobe After Effects.
Tracking of the character itself was done with 2d3 boujou and The Pixel Farm's PFTrack. "This wasn't a nature world documentary, but using tracking markers made things easier," Beck says. "Any slight sliding would have pulled the shot apart."
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To light the fly in a manner that matched the set lighting, the Entity crew used high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI) information gathered on set. "We did all the standard stuff that you do to document the lighting in a room," Beck says. "We had the chrome ball, the grey ball, a complete panoramic still photo of the environment, and we also bracketed the camera exposure. But if this had been a real fly, the DP would have put a little a kicker light there so you'd be sure and see it. So while we started with the set lighting on the fly character, we cheated it a little bit more to make it pop. We had a separate kicker coming off the wings, so when they twitch, there's a little bit of light variation that pulls your eye towards the iridescence of the wings. To make the fly look like it's really there we also needed to manage just a hint of a contact shadow."
Beck stresses, "There wasn't anything we could do with the fly that didn't make sense with respect to what Bryan Cranston's eye was doing. The rack focus starts on his eye. We were able to put the fly in a place that worked photographically and also worked with his eye line. We flew the animal in just a little bit ahead of his eye movement so that he appears to be reacting to it. Also, we were flying it— conceptually, in 3-space—out of frame and getting it to a point where Bryan's eyes were looking at something just out of frame. But you can hear the buzzing, so you know what it is. When it lands on his glasses, his eyes are sharp, and then we pull away from that sharp eye to find the fly."
Entity used After Effects to do the final composite the CG fly. "When we considered the complexity of doing this, at first we thought it would be easy," Beck says. "But it was a challenge to make the fly's movements appear consonant with where the actor was looking."
Beck credits the role that sound effects played in making the shot work. "It was accompanied by a sound that makes your skin crawl," he says with a laugh, adding, "We got a nice compliment from the sound guys. They wanted to know how we'd been able to get a fly to land on exactly the right spot!"
Credit Roll
Director: Rian Johnson
DP: Michael Slovis
For EntityFX:
Senior VFX Supervisor: Mat Beck
Additional On-set VFX Supervisor: David Stump
Inhouse VFX Supervisor: Brian Harding
3D Supervisor/Compositor: David Alexander
3D Artist/Animator/Compositor: Mike "Pharoah" Barrett
VFX Executive Producer: Dan Rucinski
VFX Producer/Co-supervisor:
Trent Smith
VFX Coordinator: Bob Hamel
3D Artist/Animator: Kaz Yoshida
3D Artist: Junji Hirano
3D Artist/Lead Tracker: Rik Panero
3D Artist/Modeler/Texture Painter: Leslie Conover
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