Interview With ‘She-Hulk’ VFX Supervisor Josh Galbincea Of FuseFX
A few weeks ago, we had the chance to sit down with Josh Galbincea, VFX Supervisor from FuseFX, about his work on the crazy, and brilliant Marvel series ‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law‘.
For those of you who haven’t caught the show, the series centres on Jennifer Walters, played by the amazingly talented ‘Orphan Black’ star Tatiana Maslany, as she navigates the complicated life of a single, 30-something attorney specialising in superhuman-oriented legal cases… who also happens to be a green 6-foot-7-inch superpowered hulk. The series also sees Mark Ruffalo return as “Smart Hulk” alongside Tim Roth, who reprises his role from the 2008 movie ‘The Incredible Hulk’ as the Abomination.
Josh Galbincea has been in the industry for over 15 years and has a wide range of feature, commercial and episodic experience. He is a two-time Telly Award winner who joined FuseFX in 2018. Before joining FuseFX, he worked at Framestore, MPC, and Digital Domain Studios. Some of his extensive credits include ‘Man of Steel’, ‘Alien: Covenant’, ‘Justice League’, ‘The Walking Dead’, and ‘Westworld’. We start off by asking about where he found his love of VFX work.
Before we get into the show a bit of background about you, what made you interested in FX and how did you get into the industry?
Josh: I’m very lucky in that I’ve pretty much known what I wanted to do my entire life. I’ve never changed a college major, I’ve always been interested in video production and movies and stuff like that. I think for me, it was ‘Terminator 2’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ that really sealed the deal. Both were ground-breaking films at the time, and all things considered, they still hold up pretty well. It’s not a cheesy rewatch as a lot of the other films that I enjoy which seem very dated for some reason. You can tell it’s dated, but it not as cheesy as a lot of the other ones. I saw those and I was like “man, anything I can imagine I can bring to life!” That just led me down a path of “How do I… What is this? What am I seeing? How does that even happen?”
Then you learn about like 3D design and the different kinds of software and stuff like that. Then you go down that rabbit hole of “So where can I learn this? What can I do?” I think, like a lot of people my age or around my age and older, and certainly, a lot of the younger generation started off with videocopilot.net and Andrew Kramer. He had a bunch of tutorials that I delved into, and I learned After Effects on my own while I was in a Community College. I was going to Community College for digital design and media creation, and that sparks me to go get a further education, and then I got a film degree.
I went with a film degree because, at the time, there were so many resources online where you could learn software for free and so I was doing both simultaneously. Learning the software side of things, of how to bring my ideas and creations to life, and then the filmmaking side of things of how to make a movie… Almost the technical side of the creativity of things like “the three-step act”, the pacing of editing of things. It’s just learning. The creative technical side of it. So that’s how I got into it.
I would say I’m a creative person, in that I filled up so many sketchbooks as a child. I’ll let the jury decide if they’re good or not. I’ve always been very creative, and expressive in that way. For the love of movies, and the creativity, and then seeing movies bring these like larger-than-life crazy things. Like, you’re watching a metal man walk through like a gate and warp around it like liquid, and it was just the coolest thing in the world! That all sent me down the path that I’m on right now. Not only getting into but continually learning visual effects and being a part of it.
FuseFX is a great place for that. The show you’ve recently been working on is Marvel’s She-Hulk. As with many of these shows, there are a lot of FX houses involved, so what were your responsibilities on the series?
Josh: So we primarily did two major parts of the show, which would be anytime you’re inside the interior of Jen Walters’ apartment, and anytime you’re inside of the law office.
Everything outside of those windows is blue screen and, from a shot status, that’s quite a bit of the show where we are inside those two areas, because they are major set pieces. So there was a lot of work to set up both what is outside of the law office, and what is outside of Jenn’s apartment. Luckily, Marvel got us back plates that we could use for Jenn’s apartment. We had a few different angles that they put up on a crane and shot different angles by an apartment building. Which, if you’ve been to Los Angeles, it feels like they shot somewhere like Sherman Oaks. That kind of apartment on the corner of the street, so we got a few of those plates.
We set all of those up in a 3D space. So, looking out the bay window and the TV windows was a certain direction of outside. Looking out the three back windows against the wall by the entrance door is a certain plate that we put into 3D space. And then we did the same thing for the stove and kitchen sink windows. That meant throughout the episodes of the show, there was consistency there, where we’re always seeing the same thing, and always seeing the same apartment buildings outside on the other side of the street and whatnot.
And then for the office buildings, it was a little bit more involved. The things that we got from Marvel were multiple times of day, high dynamic range, 360 stitches, that were super high resolution. Then we had a downtown model of Los Angeles. We, kind of, “guesstimated” … So, this is where they want the building. This is the floor that they’re on… If we’re 30 floors up (or whatever it was) and then you have Nikki’s office Pug’s office, the conference room, Jen’s office… Then worked out which one of those is north, east, south, or west. Which one is facing the hills, and which one is facing east towards Arcadia… We had to figure out all of that.
Then once we got all of that plotted in 3D, it was a lot easier. Once we did our camera tracking, we could do line-ups. So, we have our camera track of this sequence in Jen’s office and we can say, okay, cool, well if we have this in 3D space we know exactly which buildings we can see and which should be seeing.
The cool thing about the law offices too – because Marvel, as I’m sure you know, is a stickler for pixel-perfect and/or beautiful compositions – since everything is in 3D, we made gizmos for Nuke, which is a software we use, that had some sliders so the artist could gently lower or raise the horizon line or rotate the background just a little bit. Because, if you have a group of people sitting by a window, from a proper perspective, you might have a little building sticking above someone’s head. If you shot it and that’s the way reality looks, that’s one thing, but now we have control over that composition, so we can just rotate it fifty pixels to the left or right and move where those buildings are so everything is nice and clean and like just a better composition.
We gave ourselves the ability to do that so we could adjust things. Then, if Marvel came back with more notes, we could further refine some of the ways that it was laid out and looked. So those were the two biggest things that we did.
There was also that sequence of shots where Mr. Immortal jumps out of the window…
Yeah! He’s had enough of the conversation and, since he’s immortal, he just jumps out of the window! For that sequence, every bit of glass was CG. And that’s difficult, because, if you’re familiar with Houdini [3D Procedural Software], the simulations were more than just a glass simulation. The way the skyscraper glass breaks is the same as a windshield. It’s like safety glass where it cracks into a billion little, smaller chunks so you don’t get 30-pound blades falling towards the ground.
So we had to approach the glass breaking a little bit differently and we did a bunch of research, looking at actual safety glass breaking in slow motion, and what it looks like. It has a sticky property to it that, kind of, holds it together. But, if he’s jumping out headfirst, we want it to push out from his head, wrap around the shoulders and then have the top of the glass fall down because of the weight. It couldn’t support itself anymore because there was a giant hole. So, how does that look? How does that physically play out?
There was no reference, obviously, of skyscraper glass breaking like that. I actually found a really cool shot, arguably not skyscraper glass, but I found a shot from a movie called ‘Raid 2’. There’s a shot where they’re fighting in the kitchen. And one of the guys gets kicked through a pane of glass and the way that it broke and cracked apart had these like little, tiny pieces and stuff. It was just a really cool shot so that actually became our jumping-off point for how we wanted to make it look, and then we tweaked it, after the fact, from there.
That’s really awesome work! What other shots were you involved with?
There were two other things that we did that were pretty cool. There was a series of shots where Daredevil was not wearing his cowl, which is the part that connects from under the helmet to under the shirt around the neck. It’s when he comes back to Jen’s apartment. That was an asset that we got from Digital Domain and we repurposed it for us to match, move and track into the shot.
That was difficult because… it’s low light which is very forgiving… but, it’s also HDR, and you have to check it by exposing up and all that stuff… We made a photorealistic “cloth-simmed” version of that, and put that into the shots. Then we had a “cloth-sim” it as he pulls off his helmet because we’ve never seen what that looks like and we’ve never seen, like, you know, does it zipper in the back? Is it a piece of Velcro?… Marvel was very collaborative with us and they’re like, “well, we’ve never seen it either, so just show us a few different things!” Ultimately, we went with it’s, like, something that comes apart in the back. So as he pulls his helmet off, we did a “cloth-sim” so it wraps around his face and comes out from underneath his shirt. All of that was actually very successful and looked fantastic.
And then the final thing that was a big thing for us, was the original Incredible Hulk intro which was super, super, cool.
Yes! That was awesome because I grew up on the original Bill Bixby 1970s Hulk series, which was on reruns in the early 80s here. I remember that iconic intro which you recreated so authentically for ‘She-Hulk’. It was just glorious and brought back so many memories. How did you go about doing that one?
You said it. Authentically!… That’s absolutely the case. Marvel, in all of their power, got original film scans of the TV show and they did digital scans of the film for us. So, our plates came from those film scans. That shot of Bill Bixby in the chair, as it turns as he’s doing his science work, which is one of the first shots of the opening intro. That actually was the film scan from the TV show. We did a digital paint out of him, preserving as much of the plate as we possibly can. And then we had a plate of Jen Walters in the semi-same position sitting in the chair, with her hands up like she was resting her hands on the control panel. We fit her into the chair. There are a few things that we had to digitally change, because she’s obviously a lot shorter than Bill, to make it look right. We had to shorten the length of the end of the chair. We had to digitally recreate the panel that she had her hands on, so that was a whole CG panel that we lit and rendered to try to match the original lighting of the shot. Then we actually reprojected her onto some Geo because, as the camera turns, you get a little bit of parallax between the front leg and the back leg and the back arm and all that. It became a really, really, cool and quite technical shot to complete.
But the cool thing about it is, then we re-grain and degrade the image just a little bit, because all of these things are being shot on like cameras that are a year or two old and are super high resolution and super low noise, but we have to make it look like it fit old film stock from the 70s. It was really cool to be a part of that.
We did that for literally every shot. Where you see Bill Bixby, we painted him out. So when she’s looking up and the radical is coming down on her head, we remove Bill Bixby and we put her in. When she’s changing the tyre, we remove Bill and put her in. We matched all the plate rain and made it look like she was actually there. When Lou Ferrigno was flipping the car, we painted out the original plate and put the in the bodybuilder stand-in.
It was just really, really, cool to be a part of that, because, like you, I remember watching the reruns in the 80s in my grandparent’s basement on their little tube television growing up. So I remembered the original Incredible Hulk TV show opening as well. It’s so cool that Marvel, not only had the courage to do something crazy and quirky like an intro like that, but it’s absolutely a love letter to the original TV show. And not only that, but it’s completely appropriate for that last episode, which is such a meta episode!
Yeah, yeah it is! That last episode is one of the craziest things I think they’ve ever done. It’s brilliantly and wonderfully bonkers. I love that episode so much… But the opening… I had a big grin on my face when I saw that it was just so well done. You mentioned a couple of times working in HDR for this. Can you quickly explain what HDR is for people that don’t know, and why that is an extra challenge?
Sure, so HDR is High Dynamic Range. And it is, in my opinion, absolutely the future of all storytelling, more so than resolution. 8K, 16K… At some point it doesn’t matter how many pixels you can fit into an area, you’re going to get diminishing returns. But High Dynamic Range opens up the world to a whole bunch of luminance values. Deeper blacks, brighter brights, richer colours that we’ve never before seen, and it’s closer to what the eye can kind of take in and absorb. So from that aspect, it’s the better technology for storytelling. You can get some really deep, dark shots that still have detail, brightness that still has detail, and colours just seem to pop as you get the more dynamic range.
Case in point, you can’t go to Costco and buy a $500.00 TV that does not have HDR included in it. You can’t buy a modern phone that does not have HDR included in it now. So I just think it’s the way of the future. The old way used to be, let’s master for standard dynamic range and HDR separately, which is twice the amount of work. But the cool thing with HDR is it’s backwards compatible, to some degree, with standard dynamic range. So all that really happens is that you clip off higher bright values that you wouldn’t be able to see if you were to expose down, and you limit your colour range, because you can’t show certain colours at brighter luminosity.
This is Marvel’s first project, and ours, and really anybody working on the show, where Marvel chose to master the show in High Dynamic Range from the get-go. So, for everybody, that leads to a slew of problems that we had to overcome. First and foremost, reviewing in HDR. If you can do it internally in the studio, you need the software and the setup so your editorial team can like play back the shots and review them in HDR, which is something that most places don’t have set up yet because it’s just up-and-coming technology. And then, because of the pandemic, a lot of the visual effects industry has been working from home to keep the content pumping out for all the different platforms. That raises the question of if the artist is remoting into their box to work, is the box transmitting an HDR signal? If it’s not, okay, then the artist can’t see HDR. If it is, then does the artist have an HDR monitor that they’re working off? So there’s a lot of these things that are problems.
What we did at FuseFX is we created a tool to help the artist check – expose down, expose up, check the saturation levels of the shot – to make sure… Okay, you see a bright background outside, but if you exposed down, it could be pure yellow… But that’s the beauty of HDR, because now you have to colour grade for these higher values that like look white or look blown out, but all the detail is still there. So, we created some tools to help the artists regardless of HDR or SDR or whatever their monitor was. where they could double-check and triple-check their work and make sure everything was falling within the ranges and looked accurate and correct.
It’s a super cool thing for our studio to learn with Marvel, and then also set ourselves up for the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. It’s kind of like the same thing as the 4K boom in my opinion. Everything went 4K but I think having more colour range and values there just produces such a much more beautiful image. And the cool thing about that is, it’s technically future-proofing itself. If you colour grade for a very wide gamut of colour because – this whole show was done in ACES Colorspace as well – So, if you colour grade for ACES Colorspace in HDR, then theoretically, your shots and your show will look good on TVs that come out, like, 10 years from now because you know all of that information is still there to show. Whereas the 4K, 8K, 16K boom, you’re not going to get that much of a return once you start getting into ridiculous resolution. But yeah, it was super cool, and HDR is the future, and it didn’t come without its challenges, but it was cool to grow and learn from that.
Yeah, and like you say, it’s future-proofing and it also sets FuseFX up to be able to do it in the future. It puts you in a really good position.
Well, you know, if Marvel’s the first to do it that way, you know other places are going to start sniffing and they’re going to say “Ooh we should do that way too.” And then next thing you know everyone’s doing it that way.
Yeah, it’s like the moment Disney created The Volume stage for ‘The Mandalorian’. Now have one over at Paramount to do ‘Star Trek Discovery’, and other places are building them. So what for you was the trickiest sequence or shot to work on?
Two things come to mind. The jumping out of the glass thing was a very tricky thing because we went through, basically, 100 iterations of trying to get that to look right, and feel correct, It’s a very, very tricky shot in how you build it. I don’t want to say it’s like a Jenga puzzle, but if you change one thing, and then Marvel wants to change the exposure or move the background outside, that changes the way it looks. You’ll notice after he jumps out through the glass, the glass is no longer there so it’s slightly exposed up and has more contrast, because there’s no natural shade from the window. So there’s a lot of back and forth and little tricky things that we have to do to make it absolutely pixel-perfect. There’s a lot of simming and simming, over and over and over again, to get the look and feel right and natural. So that was probably the hardest shot that we worked on.
Also Jenn’s apartment. All of the invisible background effects outside of those windows. It definitely was hard because some of those shots, naturally the way they lit it on set, get these big, big, glares on the window. Sometimes you saw equipment outside of the window, like the light cans. It was just difficult to figure out how to pull a key, make it look natural, and make it look like sunlight is actually glaring through the window. And we want to do that dozens and dozens of times across multiple angles, just to make it look natural and right. Which, I know, people don’t even notice or think about it, but it’s definitely that hard to get that last 10% to fall in and make sure that all of your edges are correct, and the glass still feels like it’s somewhere between the background and the foreground, and it’s showing enough of what was naturally blown out, but also showing enough through it that you can now see the new background that’s not just blue screen… So there was a lot of fine-tuning in that, which definitely proved to be very, very challenging.
Yeah, something like that is one of those things that quite literally disappears into the background of the shot, but if it’s slightly off, the audience will feel it.
Yeah, it’s so interesting. In some aspects, not just this show, but in some aspects, the larger-than-life shots can be a little bit more forgiving because it’s less about the realism and more about the “epicness”. Let’s say there’s a large explosion and the vehicle like explodes into a billion little, tiny pieces. You know that stuff is fun, and it looks good on a demo reel and it’s super epic and a cool action part of a movie. Sometimes those shots can go a lot quicker than something where you’re like – “oh man, there’s a crew ladder in the background, and I can’t key this and now we have to roto[scope]…” Or there’s a smudge on the window to remove… It becomes a lot more involved and a lot more about being pixel-perfect to get it right, than something that’s completely huge and epic and not in that realm of invisible effects.
Yeah, I remember talking to Kevin Yuille about Miss Marvel and he mentioned, there’s a scene, I think in the school office, where there was a hatstand or something that they had to move over just slightly. It takes a lot more time than the big flashy effects.
Oh, the other thing on that note, was with the windows and pulling all of the keys and interior anytime Jen or Nikki, or anybody in the show got close to any window. There’s a natural reflection that happens. It was also hard for us to find the balance of realism between like “Okay. It’s shot on blue screen, but now we’re putting a downtown background back there and it’s a lot brighter. So how much reflection should we see?” It was hard to keep or maintain the key sometimes, but it was also very much a creative/collaborative process of “how much reflection do you want to see?” Obviously, there’s an aesthetic there when you have full control over that kind of stuff, like, we’re going to want to tweak it, Marvel is going to want to tweak it, but yeah, there’s a there was a lot of work to get those to look the way that they did.
Speaking of those sorts of invisible effects shots, were there any other places where you did stuff which were CG shots and might have been quite surprising for the audience that they were CG?
Well, I think the most surprising thing would be Daredevil’s cowl. I don’t think anyone knew that, when he comes back to Jen’s apartment, anywhere underneath the helmet and anywhere above the shirt is a CG costume. But there was a handful of things here and there.
Like even certain angles of Jenn’s apartment, there was a little… not a seam, but you could tell where they painted. It was two Hollywood flats that came together and there was a little bit of a bump in the wall… I mean, arguably, having lived in Los Angeles for 13 years, that’s actually, kind of, accurate from the earthquakes and from the fact that a lot of Landlords just paint over something like 100 times! But obviously, we wanted to spruce it up a little bit as it didn’t look accurate There are a couple of angles behind Jenn’s couch where you could see a little bit of a lip line in the paint, so we would remove stuff like that. I would consider that stuff like beauty work. It’s the other side of beauty, work. Beauty work for the set or for things that, we were just cleaning up and making a little bit nicer.
There’s also a shot where Daredevil is leaving Jenn’s apartment and he’s walking on the grass and there’s a woman walking her dog, and they cross each other. It’s his walk of shame moment when he’s leaving, and that’s a 100% composited shot that we did where they were shot completely on blue screen and then the plate was just the plate of the apartment with no one walking there. So that was a key that we did, and we massaged it into the shot.
There are little things you wouldn’t even notice like the sidewalk had a bunch of cracks with grass growing out of it, and splotches and gum stains. Stuff like that. We went in and we cleaned it up a little bit so it didn’t look so janky right outside of her apartment. There’s a handful of things like that throughout the show. And even if we weren’t asked to do some things. Like if we caught something, we would do it, because Marvel catches everything, so we would find little things that we could clean up and fix before they became an issue. We did that throughout the show on as many shots as we found things.
So we’ve come to the last couple of questions. The first question is, what TV shows are you watching at the moment?
My wife and I just finished ‘House Of The Dragon’. Super, super, fun! Thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m a fan of that world and I’m hoping that storyline… ends in a way that I’m more pleased with… [laughs] But I’m very hopeful at the moment for that because I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I think, for anyone who’s current with the show, we’re all ready for angry Mom to go to war!
Yeah, very much with you on that!
That’s something else I’ve finished recently. I’ve been going through this show called ‘Alice in Borderlands’. It’s a Japanese show on Netflix, and part of the reason why I’m watching it is because I’ve been actively learning the Japanese language. Just for fun and to keep my brain elastic. It’s been a really cool show. They have an amazing shot in the first episode which blew my mind. It’s a one-take shot of kids running into a bathroom at the train station, running away from guards, in downtown Shibuya. It’s one shot they all hide in a stall together, and all of a sudden the lights go out. It takes them a moment to gain the courage to leave, but then they leave and they walk back out into the crossing, and it’s brilliant. If you have not seen this, it’s incredible, because they walk through the Shibuya Crossing, go into the bathroom, come out and the entire downtown Shibuya, the train station and crosswalk, are completely empty. I saw behind the scenes of how they did it and I thought it was absolutely brilliant, and pretty straightforward, honestly. But the amount of work to make it look as real and as good as it did was incredible. So anyway, that’s something that’s fresh in my mind.
Yeah, that’s very cool. It must be interesting watching it like when you see something like that thinking “how did they do that?” Can your CGI knowledge be a problem sometimes when watching a show?
You know it is very interesting. Usually, I know a show is good when I’m not paying attention to any of the FX. If I’m paying attention to the VFX, I’m usually like, okay, I’m either not interested, or I’m not involved in the story, or these VFXs are so bad at taking me out. But that was something which was so good. And I was just like “Oh my gosh, I gotta rewind this. How did they do this? This is incredible!” Because I’ve walked the Shibuya Crossing before and like, how do you remove a couple of 100,000 people? It’s just crazy! So that didn’t take me out because it was bad. That took me out because I was so impressed by it. I was just like “Ooh. I gotta see that again, that was incredible!”
Finally, if you had the opportunity to work on any TV show, can be something historical, something present-day or some sort of future genre that you maybe haven’t worked on yet, and it can’t be something you’ve already worked on, what would it be?
One of the things that I would absolutely have loved working on is the show from the past. It would have been ‘Battlestar Galactica’, the newer version with Edward James Olmos. I’m a huge HUGE fan of that show. I love science fiction and I love sci-fi fantasy in general. Comic books are fantastic, but that show… The way I describe it to people is, it’s not a show about space, it’s a show about science and religion that just happens to take place in space, wrapped around these crazy circumstances. You get all this religion and lore throughout the show. And then you get all the politics of it as well. It’s just this fantastic thing, I will say, the show itself is a little bit dated because that was right around when a lot of these technologies were getting implemented In into TV, and they weren’t necessarily smooth yet. But it still looks great. There’s just something about that camera work and the way it would zoom in and follow the pilots fighting and stuff like that. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful, show and I love the aesthetic of it and I think it would have been really, really, fun to work on some of that stuff.
‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law‘ is available on Disney+ right now. If you want to see more of FuseFX’s work, go check out their website here!
