Director of photography Óscar Faura overcomes the challenge of integrating digital creation and real scenes

“If in ‘The Impossible’ we had to learn how to generate a tsunami, in ‘A Monster Comes to See Me’ it was about generating a character through a digital creation and giving him emotions,” Faura emphasizes.

Óscar Faura won the Goya for Best Cinematography for A monster comes to see me, the award-winning film by J.A: Bayona, with whom he had already worked in Lor impossible and for which he was also nominated for these awards. After collecting the Goya, he dedicated it to his daughter Ariadna. The director of the production was equally excited, "for different reasons, he was very excited to be given this award," explained Faura, for whom "working with Bayona is always a challenge. If in Impossible "We had to learn how to generate a tsunami, now it was about generating a character through a digital creation and giving him emotions."

The challenge on this occasion was to work with virtual and real parts and try to give unity to a compendium of visual techniques. "What we did was that all the sequences that involved the monster, which was a digital character, we previewed them to design them not only with a storyboard, which is the usual thing, but a 3D animation was created to know all the details of what we were going to find because what it implies on a technical and resource level is a lot. That way we had the guideline and what we were going to find."

In this first digital foray, Faura worked with the camera ARRI Alexa que le dio un excelente resultado. “Tratamos de romper el exceso de realidad que a veces te da el digital utilizando ópticas antiguas o, mejor dicho, ópticas modernas hechas a la antigua”.

Sobre el estudio de animación Headless, que se encargó de las animaciones, Faura explicó que trabajaron “bastante en paralelo y nos cruzamos en el momento en el que el niño se mete en el cuento porque ahí la animación implicaba también rodaje, por lo que tuvimos que coordinarnos y hablar de color y de dirección de luz para que el niño estuviera bien integrado”.

No todo fue fácil en el rodaje, ya que al realizarse gran parte en Manchester, las condiciones atmosféricas fueron un poco complicadas por el viento, especialmente en la localización del cementerio.