How the ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ VFX Team Put More “Movement Into Ghostbusting”

To create the Oscar-shortlisted VFX in Sony’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife — director Jason Reitman’s “love letter” to the 1984 classic helmed by his father, Ivan Reitman — Sheena Duggal and Alessandro Ongaro shared VFX supervisor responsibilities while keeping the charm, look and techniques used in the original movie. “We explored emulating the stop-motion animation style and looked at how the original elements were exposed on optical printers and how that gave you a specific look and feel,” explains Duggal. “[The original movie] drove the filmmaking style. … With modern-day tools, we have the ability to do anything that we want to with the camera, and so it was putting restraints back on ourselves.”

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One of the new CG ghosts, Muncher, took cues from a tardigrade (microscopic water bear) and glass frogs for translucency. “We spent a good amount of time in postproduction to give it a ghostly look that was somehow in line to what was done in ’84 for Slimer. As far as its performances, we had to do some trial and error before figuring out the correct performance,” says Ongaro.

Adds Duggal: “Jason mentioned he wanted him to go from cute to a monster in a heartbeat. We developed his character in detail, making sure you couldn’t access his feelings or predict if he was going to be cute or angry. … In the car chase with Muncher, we moved away from the original film … and we put [more camera] movement into ghostbusting, which makes it more fun, exciting and up-to-date.”

Then there was the delicate task of bringing original ghostbuster Egon Spengler, played in the earlier films by the late Harold Ramis, to the screen for an emotional finale, for which they used digital head replacement. “Jason felt that if we didn’t capture that emotionally, then the scene wasn’t going to work. We needed to cast an actor who could play the emotional aspects of Egon but also who worked for us from a visual effects point of view because we knew we were going to have to replace his head” with a digital one of Ramis, Duggal explains, noting that they had to find an actor of the right age that could provide the appropriate body language. “We worked with Harold Ramis’ estate, who gave us a lot of photography and images and unseen footage of him that we could use to help us create this.”

U.K. native Duggal — whose father was from India and mother from Ireland — started her career in England and moved to the U.S. during the early ’90s, when she worked at such VFX houses as Industrial Light + Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks before moving to production as a VFX supervisor (her recent credits also include Venom: Let There Be Carnage).

Of the still-limited number of women in VFX supervisor roles, she says, “I see a desire for change. … I think, unfortunately, there’s just not been the opportunity for a lot of women to reach these positions.

“There’s a lot of movement toward figuring out how we create those opportunities and how we give women support to step into these roles,” she adds. “As well as elevating women like myself into the roles of visual effects supervisors, you need to elevate a team of people with that person who understand the support and can give the support to that person to help them succeed.”

This story first appeared in the Jan. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.