How "The Substance" Merges Old Hollywood Tricks and New Technology

PLUS: A Brief AI Roundup

Author

Steve
October 08, 2024

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How The Substance Merges Old Hollywood Tricks and New Technology

I’ve waited a few weeks since its release to write about one of my favorite movies of the year: The Substance, primarily because I want people to have the opportunity to see it, and writing about it at any length necessitates discussing what happens during the film. So: if you haven’t yet seen The Substance but plan on doing so, stop reading now! SPOILERS ahead.

Something I admire so much about Coralie Fargeat’s gonzo body horror film is its extensive use of practical effects to tell its story while also utilizing modern technology and effects to supplement and heighten this work.

In a piece for British Cinematographer, the film’s DP Benjamin Kračun describes how they achieved close-up shots of characters injecting the titular Substance by shooting them using body doubles in a studio they called “the lab”:

The injection in that shot was actually into Coralie’s arm and filmed in the lab because she wanted it to be a real injection. For this sequence I wanted to recreate the look of an effect I really like when shooting on film where you drag the film through and process it back at a different frame rate which produces a blurred motion. But you can’t do that digitally, so we filmed it at five frames to create an optical flow effect when the DIT transcoded it. So instead of it playing back at fast speed, it played back as if those five frames were dragged over 24 frames, creating a blurry motion.

Also in Kracun’s article are these two paragraphs demonstrating how old Hollywood movie magic and modern technology were intertwined in the film’s production:

The grade was carried out at Lux in Paris with grader Fabien Pascal and they also helped build a very strong LUT which was great but quite heavy and took away at least a stop and a half of light. As well as working with them on a LUT for the prosthetics, another important part of the film was the liquid for The Substance which needed to be fluorescent. The props department created something that looked fantastic but was only fluorescent when you hit it with UV light, so Lux also made a LUT for any time the fluorescent liquid was shot.

Another significant setting in the film where many scenes took place was the apartment which featured a huge panoramic window. Coralie wanted the glass to have nothing in front of it and the big question was whether to choose LED screen or backdrop. I quickly realised the LED technology was so new, expensive, and tricky to use with hard light because if anything bounces back it would make it look grey. So I tested shooting against softdrop which had a kind of romanticism and I thought was more interesting than the LED system.

If you’ve seen the film, you know how Substance-cial (get it???) the use of prosthetic makeup throughout, from building an actual split-open torso to the final form of the monstrous Elisasue. In an interview with Marie Claire, makeup effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin and key makeup artist Stéphanie Guillon describe how things came together:

We designed completely from scratch. We did tons of maquettes in every way possible. We did old-school, plastic maquettes, hand-sculpted, state-of-the-art computer-generated maquettes, Photoshop—everything in between. In the end, it's an old-fashioned plastic maquette. I looked a little bit [to] Niki de Saint Phalle. She was a French sculptor from the ‘60s who had done female dancers with a fat body on tip-toes. [Coralie] wanted the feeling like the elephant with a dancer and with tons of breasts. So that was tricky.

If you haven’t seen The Substance but you’re a fan of body horror and New French Extremity, you must go see it with an audience!

A Brief AI Roundup

As is my wont, here are a few AI/entertainment story tidbits on the spectrum from interesting to embarrassing, all for your reading pleasure!

Wired covers Calliope Networks’s “License To Scrape,” an attempt to form a startup dedicated to helping YouTube creators license their content for AI training data.

Obviously licensing agreements for training data is a potentially huge source of revenue for creatives, as we’ve seen with Lionsgate’s recent licensing agreement with Runway. Yet I can’t escape the feeling that these are all too little too late, the tech industry can absolutely not be trusted to follow the requirements of these deals. How much content has already been gobbled up by their models? As we’ve seen with every other business that tech has “disrupted,” they have no interest in keeping it alive outside of their control.

Also via Wired, yet another weird AI pin for wearing around at work, I guess? What is it with AI companies and pins? I don’t know many workplaces that would be thrilled with a pin that records everything, although I’m sure HR would love keeping track of how many times you claimed your grandmother died. I won’t even get into the question of how using the restroom works!

At New York Magazine, there’s an amusing examination of SocialAI, a social network where all of your friends and contacts are AI bots. Pretty sure this is just a more honest Facebook! As always I am amazed at the constant rollout of AI products that seem to be designed for absolutely nobody.

Celebrities now have yet another public relations issue to manage, now it’s AI deepfakes! Per Variety, this requires an entirely automated approach to removing them from the Internet. Remind me to never get famous!

Lastly, over on Twitter, an “AI filmmaker” spent days getting roasted over his “live action Princess Mononoke trailer, receiving such heat that he ended up deleting his entire thread, which now lives only in screenshots:

It is of course sadly typical of bluecheck AI enthusiasts to utilize someone else’s creative vision in order to grotesquely self-aggrandize and receive credit. I do think this stuff has the opposite effect as intended, delegitimizing AI and making it seem like something exclusively for talentless goobers who want all the credit after doing none of the work. However, it is so very funny to watch. So keep it up boys! We love seeing your breathless enthusiasm for your horrible garbage.

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Hacks’s Emmy boost demonstrates the central problem with streaming. (link)

How Vinegar Syndrome creates its restorations. (link)

The inside story of Roku’s TV program. (link)