Mean Girls

FuseFX NYC worked on 130 shots for Paramount Pictures’ Mean Girls. The studio began speaking with the production team two years ago about the film’s visual effects needs and how they would be executed.

According to our VFX supervisor Ariel Altman, one of the more challenging VFX sequences was unexpected — the one where Janis performs her solo for “I’d Rather Be Me.” In the scene, actress Auli’i Cravalho, who plays Janis, exits the band room and makes her way outside. The sequence appears as one long and continuous shot. However, a weather event — light snow — kept the outdoor portion of the scene from being shot that same day, and instead, the “A shot” of her leaving the classroom was intercut with a “B shot,” captured the next day.

FuseFX also worked on the bus hit, which follows shortly thereafter. In it, Janis and Regina are walking from the school toward the street. When they get to the curb, a yellow school bus rushes by, striking Regina. The sequence is composed of a number of elements.

“There’s actually an interesting bit there,” Altman recalls. “Because of the long take, it’s difficult to get into a more simplified visual effects solution. We have a clean pass of Regina. We have a pass of a stunt. And we have a pass of a bus.”

The long Steadicam shot was supposed to end with the camera coming to a stop in just the right position to capture the bus hit. “We had the camera operator come down, and there was a position that we locked into,” he explains. “Ari (Robbins) is a machine! He actually hit that position really, really well, so that’s the main take, and the base plate doesn’t have a bus in it. Regina just stops and positions on Janis in the foreground. The production then shot a pass of the bus from a locked-off camera, as well as another pass of the stunt performer being yanked off her feet by a wire. Finally, they shot footage of the students reacting to the accident, with Regina missing from the frame. The viewer gets the impression that the bus is traveling at a high rate of speed, but according to Altman, it was only going 10-20 miles per hour. The framing and size of the vehicle creates the impression of it going much faster

Beyond their work on some of the film’s transitions, our team also enhanced confetti sequences by adding more elements in several shots. Rather than create CG confetti, the studio instead shot practical elements against blue and black screens.

“The confetti hallway was really fun and pretty simple,” Altman notes. “There was the real confetti, so for the main moment, where the confetti cannons go off, we added a little bit more to fill it out…We were actually able to leverage machine learning to extract some depth information from that shot to help layer in the confetti with the depth. It actually ended up working pretty well, because confetti is a small particulate, and it’s fast moving, (so) it’s pretty forgiving. “Doing it as a particulate — as a CG effect — I think the visual benefit would have been minimal,” he continues. “Obviously, we’d have been able to control certain physics and behavior of it much more, but we just didn’t think it was necessary.

FuseFX even worked on the pimple that ruins Regina George’s perfect complexion. While the blemish was actually a prosthetic that was captured in-camera, the studio did some enhancement to it during post production.

We even worked on the pimple that ruins Regina George’s perfect complexion. While the blemish was actually a prosthetic that was captured in-camera, the studio did some enhancement to it during post production.