Among the many creatures and aliens showcased in director Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are members of the Pearl, a beautiful race of humanoid-like creatures who live in a picturesque beach setting.

The Pearl were completely synthetic creations by Weta Digital, which generated the characters from performances by actors with motion-capture equipment for their face and bodies. The principal Pearl actors were also scanned in ICT’s Light Stage for extremely fine face and skin textures.

“(Director Luc Besson) wanted to be able to make (the Pearl) abstract enough from their selves that although we could still read their emotions and read their personalities and read their characters, they were still very much not of this world.” — Martin Hill, Visual Effects Supervisor, Weta Digital

VFX Voice visited Weta Digital in Wellington to find out more from the studio’s Visual Effects Supervisor, Martin Hill, as he runs down some of the main challenges his team faced in making the Pearl. Here are his comments:

FINDING THE PEARL

To get a lot of the grace and poise that he wanted for the Pearls, Besson basically cast models for the roles. He went to model casting agencies, cast all these actors and met with them all, made sure that he could work them and they could act, and all of them were really quite spectacular at acting. Then, when I first met Sasha Luss, who plays the Pearl princess, and Pauline Hoarau, who is the Empress, we went to the ICT Light Stage and we took them through the standard FACS session of getting all the standard poses.