VFX supervisor Chris Ritvo knows a thing or two about creating animals in CG. He had worked with director Olivia Newman on “Where the Crawdads Sing,” for which he created CG birds. Ritvo was faced with an even greater challenge when Newman tasked him with creating a CG octopus for “Remarkably Bright Creatures.”
The Netflix movie, based on the bestselling book by Shelby Van Pelt, stars Sally Field as a Tova, a widow who works at a local aquarium and finds joy again when she forms an unlikely bond with a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus.
One of the earliest steps Ritvo did in the process was testing. He says, “We took a basic asset and animated a short CG scene of Marcellus on the shelf, reaching out and touching Tova, to show what was possible.” He adds, “It was very rough, but it showed that you empathize with a digital octopus, and that kind of sold it.”
Creating a CG octopus with emotional depth was no easy task.
Ritvo visited the Vancouver Aquarium and was drawn to Agnetha, a real-life giant Pacific Octopus. “The first time I saw her in the tank, you get to see her so up close, and the amount of complexity you see in everything about them; their skin is always moving, there are eight tentacles going in every which direction, and there are thousands of suckers moving around at any given time.”
