The Girlfriend Experience

VISUAL EFFECTS / DESIGN / EDIT FACILITY

Afterparty delivered unique digital magic on over 200 shots for the third season of ’The Girlfriend Experience’ from Executive Producer Steven Soderbergh, and Writer / Director / Creator Anja Marquardt.

CASE STUDY

USING AI / DEEPFAKE

In the series finale the main character steps into a VR world to meet a ghostly AI version of herself. We used deep learning systems and deep fake to create the digital double ensuring the most authentic AI clone possible.

THE WAREHOUSE 

We produced 33 VFX shots for a sequence in an Augmented Reality sex party. To create the surreal aesthetic, all the actors were filmed in skin tight latex outfits matched to their skin tones. We retouched every suit, which included painting out all wrinkles and matching the latex to the adjacent skin.

THE BIONICS
Many of the characters wear augmented reality bionic prosthesis. The director wanted a future-tech level of AR - very real looking, but still obviously virtual. We had to devise ways to allow the actors to perform naturally with limbs that would be replaced with glass prosthesis in post. We integrated lighting and neuron-like particle systems in our bionic designs to ensure that they looked interesting and visible in the dark space. When possible, we set up limbs in front of bright, illuminated light boxes to take advantage of the beautiful internal lighting and refraction we got in the jewel-like glass prostheses.

THE V 

The audience is introduced to this series through a chilling encounter in a Virtual Reality space called “The V”. The aim was to create a world that would look real and uncanny at the same time, while avoiding the usual science fiction tropes of VR with high tech user interfaces. The virtual world is clean, precise and realistic. The scene was shot on location but the set was heavily cleaned up in post.

To give the characters an uncanny digital quality, we tracked the actors' performance and replaced their actual faces with cleaned up static face textures. The effect gave the characters a subtle, unnatural quality, and the director was able to select a level of “uncanny” on a shot by shot basis.

AI CHARACTER

The series follows the creation of an AI character called EMCEE. We were tasked with creating a digital human that would increase in fidelity and humanity through the episodes. To ensure a sense of humanity she was created not with full CG, but instead by tracking pre-recorded footage of an actor and then relighting and laying in CG Elements - a marriage of a 2D and 3D approach. Houdini was the main driver behind the look on this project which allowed us to try many things with varying levels of complexity. To achieve the final look, we used a custom growth solver that connected data points attached to the face, a specialized curve system to represent neurons, and a simple but effective network to break her face up into triangles whilst still maintaining the details that make her feel human.

Director Anja Marquardt / Starz / Transactional Pictures