Gary Shore's Dracula Untold isn't your typical vampire story. There was a determination to do something different right from the start - beginning in a pre-production office coated in a what-not-to-do wallpaper of every vampire from every movie ever.
The film is the story of Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula. The untold story how a man with a famous name prevented another, Mehmed the Conqueror, from living up to his own.
Framestore's Christian Manz was the overall VFX supervisor on the show, with Glen Pratt in Framestore's London studio and Ivan Moran in Montreal supervising 710 of its 740 total shots. Manz got involved early on, while working on another Universal project. I got a phone call from the studio while I was in the final few months of 47 Ronin, he explains, so with Framestore's art department, I started preparing a package of mood-boards based on the script before we met Gary Shore when he came to visit us in our London office with the film's producers.
Shore was keen to avoid the well-trodden gothic vampire story and instead ground it in the history of the man Bram Stoker took as inspiration for Dracula. That historical backdrop meant a new challenge for Framestore - armies fighting huge battles - and some beautiful scenery and towering castles for them to be staged in. Grounded in history it might be, but the film still soars into supernatural territory - giant hand-like swarms of bats that can sweep soldiers aside, human-to-bat transmutations, echolocation vision and some truly gruesome deaths in a litany of highly varied challenges.
Many of those challenges required fully CG shots, with Framestore creating the environment and the action staged within it. There isn't a live-action bat in the movie, and some of the locations and battles weren't shot either. We were shooting in a set of warehouses in Belfast, so when you see this expansive army in the final images, you kind of forget. One of the biggest challenges of the show was that there's hardly anything that's the same throughout and so we needed to take a lot of different effects to an extremely high level for only a handful of shots each. That huge variety meant there was a lot of design involved.
The construction of an environment - from bluescreen and photographic plates to the final shot
Designing a vampire
That design work included developing a unique vampire. The process began at the visual development stage during which Framestores Art Department worked for months to come up with an original design for Vlad. Myriad designs were considered before finally landing on the transparent flesh that ended up in the film.
We didn't want Luke to sit there with just pointy teeth and pale skin. The idea was that there's an inner creature under his skin, says CG Supervisor Ben Lambert. Whenever he is feeding or angry, or when he's being hit by sun, the human pigment disappears and it's revealed, whether through anger or contact with sunlight.
No practical make-up was used for Vlad's transformation, with all stages of his vamping out' done with visual effects. The opaque white subsurface underneath his skin was designed to resemble an advanced human skull rather than something too monstrous, with intricate channels for blood to flow from the teeth. The final look was conveyed through shaders and look dev on top of the plate photography of Vlad. At his most vampiric, with his human-self stripped away by sunlight, Vlad is completely computer generated, with Luke Evans' performance body tracked meticulously and used to inspire the animation. His armor was re-created in CG too to allow the effects of sunlight to take its toll across his whole body.
Going to war
The movie gave Framestore a chance to get its hands on some types of work its film team aren't known for, particularly battles. We hadn't done crowds for a while, so there was a nice blank canvas element to it, says Lambert. We knew the final output would have to feed into fMob, our proprietary crowd tool, and be rendered in Arnold, but the front end of actually making the crowds was open. It was fun to be able to evaluate different crowd software and start staging shots.
Having worked with it already on commercials, the crew decided to use Golaem. In terms of film use it's in its infancy but what's great about it is they were really open to suggestions and we had a really close relationship with them throughout the show. Many of the features we're now seeing in the latest version have come as a result of our crowd team requesting them.
With that software support and the ease of use that comes from the software being embedded inside Maya, artists could be trained up very quickly. The R&D team integrated it into the interface of fMob and artists from different disciplines such as layouts, environments and animation could learn it and be running shots within a week or two.
The larger scale shots with crowd behavior changes that Montreal did really pushed Golaem's functionality at the time, so it's great to have helped improve it and it's a good base for us to build upon in the future. It was a fun process and once we saw the first crowd renders of them all marching, with the flags and their armor glistening in the sun, it was really encouraging to see the route we took worked, says Lambert.
An army of soldiers, created with digital techniques.
Castle Dracula
One of those big battles takes place on the doorstep of Castle Dracula, which was an entirely digital construction. Universal gave us rough concept model that we used as a starting point to work up into the different elements we needed, explains Montreal CG Supervisor JP Li. This included adding detail for the Great Hall, building the portcullis and corridor, adding
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Gary Shore's Dracula Untold isn't your typical vampire story. There was a determination to do something different right from the start - beginning in a pre-production office coated in a what-not-to-do wallpaper of every vampire from every movie ever. 
