‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’: How the CG Design and Movements Were Inspired by a Real-Life Octopus at Vancouver…

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.”

Agnetha would be Ritvo’s main inspiration for Marcellus.

He spent approximately 20 hours with Agnetha, collecting as much reference material as he could, building an array of behaviors. “I set up cameras all around her tank, and I would walk around, filming and photographing her, and just try to collect as much reference as possible. That helped dictate the look.”

He adds, “We took scenes that she did, and we mimicked that digitally for Marcellus, and we always gave Olivia a reference, or a one-to-one, so everything you see Marcellus do in the film is directly referenced either to Agnetha or another reference we found online that an octopus could really do.”

How an octopus camouflages itself was also a topic of discussion for Ritva. Observing Agnetha, he saw how her skin was always changing and shifting. “It’s very subtle,” he says. Newman and Ritva decided they liked how Agnetha looked: “She was deep red with black frills and she had the white suckers.” From there, Ritva created iterations of camouflage and match patterns to the rocks and her environment.

In the film, Ritvo relied on Marceullus’ aging as a storytelling point. “As he’s aging, you see his color kind of diminish a little bit. It’s getting more and more towards white until you finally see him at the back door, and he’s like quite white, but then he flourishes again when he gets back in the ocean.”

Animating all eight tentacles proved to be the most time-consuming aspect of the visual effects process. Not only because they needed to interact with the environment, but because “They have to touch the glass, and they had to attract and detract from objects because they’re also alive,” Ritva explains. “Those were also the hardest to calibrate and art direct,” he admits.

In total, he used a total of 450 visual effects shots, with 200 of those for Marcellus.

Ritva’s team also had to create digital water effects depending on where Marcellus was. When he was in the ocean, visual effects shots of an ocean current needed to be created. In the scene where he’s coming out of a bucket, “that’s all digital water,” Ritva says.

However, the biggest challenge was making Marcellus a character audiences could empathize with. He notes, “They don’t have a traditional face and eyes. They’re otherworldly.” To navigate that, he created a photoreal octopus and made sure Marcellus’s movements closely matched Agnetha’s. “When you watch Agnetha in the tank, you’re projecting your own emotions onto it. I don’t know what she’s actually feeling; she’s probably in a whole different world to us, but she’s looking at you, or she’s curious, and you’re projecting emotions.”

He adds, “A lot had to do with Sally Field. She’s so good, and a lot of that was mirroring her emotion back onto Marcellus, that projection. A lot of that was dictated by Sally.”