Prime Focus VFX, formerly Frantic Films VFX, has completed 175 visual effects shots for the Summit Entertainment release, "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" directed by Chris Weitz. Prime Focus contributed a majority of the film’s most frequently featured visual effects, including CG water, atmospherics, CG matte painting and environment work, and the “Diamond Skin” effect on Edward and the other vampire characters. “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” is based on the popular series of novels by Stephenie Meyer. The film stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner and hits theaters Nov. 20th

Prime Focus’ newly expanded Vancouver studio, which has become the VFX hub for the company’s North American operations, handled the bulk of the work on "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," which was shot on location in British Columbia. Key effects included creating apparitions of the Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) character and custom designing the “Diamond Edward” effect, whereby Cullen’s skin sparkles when coming into contact with sunlight.

Director Chris Weitz and his Visual Effects Producer Susan MacLeod tasked Prime Focus with evolving this signature Diamond Skin effect so that Edward’s skin refracted light as if diamonds were embedded under his skin. The Prime Focus team, led by Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Pascarelli, went through extensive look development to achieve this effect, and used as its inspiration Greek Thassos marble, a very white, translucent material with flecks that reflect light very efficiently. The team even had a slab at the office for the CG artists to use as reference.

 

“Creating the diamond skin effect turned out to be a very rewarding experience.” said Pascarelli. “The effect appears many times throughout the film in several very different scenarios. It was challenging because the diamond effect appears in sunlight, whenever Edward’s already very pale skin is lit by sun, and on top of all of that brightness, there needs to be a convincing diamond-like sparkle. Film doesn’t really have enough brightness range to do this, so we had to resort to some trickery, such as lens effects, flares and light rays to give the feeling of super-bright glimmer. In addition to all of that, we needed to show the skin having a translucent glow. There was a very delicate balance of the elements that make up the effect. We used 3D particle geometry dispersed over a CG model of Edwards’ head to reflect several artificial environments in order to create the sparkles and rays. Chris and Susan loved what we came up with very early in the process, which ended up being one of the happy surprises during production.”

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