Peanut Gallery is a wacky and heart-FELT SCAD student film directed by Tara Beth Oglesby. It features puppets, peanut allergies, and a dangerous game.
For this film, I was contacted by the producer Chelsea Pham with an interesting technical challenge for an effect they wanted. How could they make their puppet character, Molly, explode on camera?
Right off the bat, my mind went practical. The easiest and most visually effective way to pull this off, in my opinion, would be to create a low-budget dummy puppet the same fuchsia color as Molly, and strap some low grade explosives (M80) to it to get it all in camera.
I provided this clip as reference for them, to feel out exactly what kind of look they were going for:
Although this project seemed so intriguing, I couldn’t help but continue to think of solutions for their desired effect. Since I had been learning FX simulations in Houdini. I became convinced that this particular shot could also be done using procedural animation. Additionally, this also might give them more control down the line in case they wanted to change the look. In other words, I’M IN!
In Late January 2023, I took a trip to the set of Peanut Gallery to gather all the information I’d need to create the kinds of high quality visual effects they were looking for.
The crew could not have been more pleasantly curious and accommodating to me as an on-set visual effects supervisor. Student crew members listened without second thought when I asked for the lighting to remain the same, they were quick to provide tape when I needed to secure my HDR chrome ball and white foam ball. Someone on set even provided me with a cup of “Molly’s Guts” (pom-poms, yarn, confetti, shreds of fabric) for me to use as reference when it came to adding her innards in the gruesome explosion.
I captured this photogrammetry model of the character Molly. The level of detail on this model astounded even me. In the film’s story, all the puppet characters are allergic to peanuts and are playing a “Russian Roulette” style game with 14 sunflower butter crackers and 1 peanut butter cracker. The big, red character named Isak eats the deadly peanut cracker and thusly vomits all over Molly. As a result, Molly suffers cartoonishly hyperbolized anaphylactic shock and explodes. The green crud you see coating the model is a pea soup-like compound they used for an SFX projectile vomiting shot.
To make the shot as real as possible to hit as hard as possible, I also captured my HDR with the same lighting conditions as the shot in question.
With all of the great on-camera information I could ever need to pull this off, including various clean plates, I set off to create the effect in Houdini.
I knew this, like all great FX shots, was going to need to be layered. My first layer of simulation was the vellum simulation for expanding, ripping, and eventually exploding the cotton cloth exterior of this puppet. Vellum cloth simulation with custom constraints. I used this tutorial by Lester Banks for help in the expansion of the cloth, the answer turned out to lie in tinkering with the gravity of the scene: https://vimeo.com/360412495
The biggest challenge I faced throughout the entire creation of this effect was tinkering to get a force that exploded out from a singular point. I just couldn’t seem to find the right force to use, where one point expels to all directions, pushing RBD, cloth, and fluid.
Ultimately, my solution was creating an invisible object, a sphere with a mountain SOP for jaggedness, and animating the scale to pop outward. The unfortunate downside to this method is it leaves little volume within the explosion itself, it’s all a surface-level collision interaction.
Developing the look of my vellum fluid blood shader turned out to be a finer tune than I had anticipated. Often I would make the color too dark, then overshoot the correction and make it too cartoonishly red.
Finally, I used some of my procedural scene generation knowledge to create multicolored strips of confetti. This was the bulkiest challenge of the layers I included in my FX shot. I used this ticker tape confetti simulation tutorial as a starting point https://youtu.be/5KE–hmo46Y
The trick with the confetti was to control the speed of their fall. By determining the position of the Y normal vector for each point in the particle simulation, you could determine whether it would fall fast or slow. When the Y vector would reach horizontally in its spin, the confetti would fall quickly. The rectangular geometry would face little drag. When the Y vector would reach vertically, the confetti would fall slowly. The rectangular geometry would experience more drag. This was all achieved with a VOP network.
Finally, I took the simulation over to compositing. There was another iteration of the simulations, because the first was too slow for the comedically shocking pop the director was looking for.
In Photoshop, I used various brushes to create a splatter of blood that would appear on the screen to further the impact of the explosion.
As the sole visual effects artist working on Peanut Gallery, Tara Beth Oglesby also had some other shots that were a little too technically complicated for the editor of the film. These included a classic screen replacement and an animated typography segment.
I have a passion for typography. I believe that a font can vastly affect audience perception of a project, for better or for worse.
These shots were technically less complicated than the 3D FX shot of the puppet explosion. However, for the typography shot, there was more of a risk because the creative direction of the font and color was left to me.
Isak’s mother is a horse. The other characters mishear this as “whore.” Comedy ensues.
Uh-oh! In the last week we could possibly work on this before it gets submitted to the senior showcase as Trustees theater in Savannah, the producer Chelsea Pham hit me with quite the task. The former colorist of Peanut Gallery, who had been a part of this production for months, backed out and refused to share any of their work on the color of this film.
In their time of need, a post-production hero rose to the occasion. A generalist wunderkind named Kieran Radley. I was a photographer, supervisor, FX artist, compositor, motion graphics animator, and now- a colorist.
Is it perfect? Exceptional color work? Who’s to say. All I need to know is the director was very happy with the results based on the 1 day turnaround for the entire film’s color based on the direction of “more saturation.”