This is a project Syndicate had the honor to vfx supervise down in New Zeeland and also do all the VFX work for. In other words give life to the goat heads, adding eyes, making facial expressions etc to all shots with goats in them, among other things.

The goat masks where made by the very talanted guys at Glasshammer. As time was short for pre-production there was no time to give the masks any kind of built in animatronic features so basically we where working with “stonefaced goats” To give them life we started out to shoot CG references of the goats pre fur. Basically takes of the molds spining infront of the camera with a lot of dots on them, This gave us good dot cloud references for the heads. Then we put tracking dot’s on the actual masks, small red dots that could easily be retouched away. We also gave the goats pitch black and glossy wide open eyes that allowed us to use the real eye reflection in post and insert animated eyes, iris etc, underneath that reflection and we also had digital control over eyelids, cheeks, lips noses, ears etc that where camera projected onto the CG copy of the mold.

All in all it was a fun project to participate in and New Zeeland is a great place to shoot even though it’s a quite far away… It’s actually as far away from Sweden as it could be without leaving this planet. Lol.