Sleep Tight – A modern horror tale

After a few brainstorming sessions and mood research, the setting was found: The world was to be dark and foggy, the images diffuse and rich in contrast. Our professor Michael Coldewey gave us a lot of freedom to come up with ideas, and so the first very ambitious script was soon created. That’s how we came to want a creature as the main character: a werewolf.

by Malte Pell, Tobias Sodeikat and Jonas Potthoff

With this basic idea, further meetings took place in which the story began to take shape: a short, menacing sequence – a werewolf breaking into a house – told full of suspense and with a twist at the end that bypasses the usual tropes of the genre. Here, for once, no one is eaten; the werewolf creature is itself an inhabitant of the house it appears to be breaking into.
But above all, the werewolf becomes a werewolf in the course of this process. This variation is not common in film history, and it was precisely this break with the traditional that brought us a huge step forward in the conception. Based on this premise, the rest of the setting was also modernised under the supervision of Prof. Jürgen Schopper; the originally planned, run-down forest hut was replaced by a modern flat that now stands on the outskirts of the big city. The first storyboard and character drafts were created in November 2020, which were later incorporated into a simple animatic. This rough preliminary version gave us an impression of the most important story beats and, above all, gave us an idea of the timing and pacing, so that we were able to further develop the rhythm and camera angles under the supervision of our artistic collaborator Rodolfo Anes Silveira.
The conception phase lasted a total of 3 months, after which the entire project was set up on the project management platform ShotGrid (formerly Shotgun). A particular challenge in times of coronavirus was that we were often only able to meet online. Nevertheless, we were supported by weekly Zoom meetings with professors and artistic staff from the HFF, as well as experts from the industry – from topics such as concept art and storyboarding to rigging, modelling, texturing, animation, simulation and compositing.

Horror on velvet paws – the creature design

The creature design in particular posed various challenges that had to be taken into account right from the start: In terms of content, we had the requirement that the werewolf could not be too big and massive, after all she still had to fit through the doors of the house. At the same time, she had to move on velvet paws so that her husband wouldn’t wake up in bed when she crept through the building. Nevertheless, she still had to look scary and command respect. Various references from nature were therefore incorporated into the design process: The teeth are arranged in several rows, similar to a shark. We modelled the fur comb on the back on the hump and fur of a hyena.

An additional challenge was that the creature had to walk on both four and two legs. It only reaches its maximum size and dominance at the very end, when it stands up and steps into the moonlight. Before that, it only appears in reflections, in details or as a shadow, so it is always veiled. Only in this shot do we see it clearly and distinctly in front of us.

To ensure that this straightening works, we carried out a number of tests with a motion capture suit from Xsens. We realised early on that the three of us would never be able to animate the entire character by hand. So we took inspiration from films like “Planet of the Apes” and built our own forearm extension from sawn-off crutches. These were adapted precisely to the proportions of the werewolf model so that the sensors of the suit were located where the werewolf’s wrists had to be. This enabled more precise retargeting of the movements of the (real) motion capture performer to the rig of the (digital) werewolf. For her skeleton, the lower body of a dog was fused with the upper body of a human; the creature’s outer skin was modelled around it.
In addition, the extensions of our actress’s arms helped her to feel her way into the role of a 2 metre tall, four-legged monster. We were able to recruit the actress and dancer Kathrin Knöpfle for this physically demanding task.

Digital film set – motion capturing

After this intensive preparation phase, the time had finally come. The model of the werewolf was optimised for capturing, the environments were prepared so that we could create and measure a floor plan of each digital set. Then the four-day shoot began in the HFF film studio. The sets were recreated using movable walls. If there were to be interactions between the werewolf and the environment, they were supplemented with props such as moving doors, branches or a mattress, representing the bed in the bedroom. Various versions were recorded for each shot, which were analysed on set and fed into the existing scenes in Maya via retargeting. This allowed us to view all takes in the form of grayshade playblasts after each day of shooting and decide whether shots needed to be repeated if necessary. Almost like a classic film set! To recreate the mood of the scene as well as possible on set and thus support Kathrin’s performance, we also used a bright light source from the direction of the (digital) moon. At the same time, all motion capture takes were also recorded with a real camera in order to obtain as many movement references as possible.

Bringing the dead to life – the animation

A more detailed, three-dimensional animatic, the first real rough cut so to speak, was cut together from the playblasts of the motion capture shoot. This allowed us to reassess the narrative necessity of each shot, after which we significantly shortened the entire film. Now we could start with the detailed work. In almost every shot, errors that had occurred during motion capturing or retargeting had to be corrected by hand animation. The hands, ears and the blendshapes on the werewolf’s face also had to be animated by hand and any connection errors between the shots had to be corrected.
The two words that give the film its title, “Sleep Tight”, also posed a challenge, as they are spoken by the reverted woman at the end of the film. She turns directly into the camera and speaks to us. Her eyes glow discreetly in the darkness. In order to avoid the Uncanny Valley as much as possible, we had initially thought of a more distant shot. However, for the emotional impact of the final scene, we realised that we couldn’t avoid including a close-up of the woman. This meant that the lip synchronisation and facial animation had to be as detailed and believable as possible. To do this, we not only recorded the audio of the speaker in the recording studio, but also filmed her face at the same time to obtain reference material. This helped immensely with the facial animation. It added nuances to her performance that we would probably never have realised when animating by hand without a reference. We tried to recreate her acting as well as possible digitally. Our lecturer, Prof Melanie Beisswenger, was a great support in this, regularly assisting us online with all questions relating to the animation.
Furthermore, the animation of the camera was fine-tuned afterwards to ensure that the camera movements meshed as well as possible. At the same time, our concept from the outset was to limit ourselves to camera movements that could actually be realised and not to incorporate any illogical or exaggerated movements. We also wanted to do justice to our role models, the early horror films.

Cosy blankets and lumpy fur – the simulation

Once the animation was complete, we moved on from Maya to Houdini, because another major challenge followed: the simulation. Our aim was to make the look as realistic as possible. So with a creature full of fur, we had no choice but to delve into the topic of grooming. Various attempts and several hours and Gbytes of simulation cache finally led to a result. In the final version, the setup consists of three different grooms for different parts of the creature’s body, each of which is simulated with its own parameters in order to get as close as possible to real fur behaviour.
In addition, the woman lies down in bed with her husband at the end of the film, so an elaborate cloth simulation was necessary for the interaction of the two characters with the blanket. Finding the right stiffness with a natural drape took time. But the specialist Felix Hörlein helped us enormously with all the simulations.

Leathery to shiny – the texturing / shading

Underneath the fur, our werewolf naturally also needed a detailed texture for her skin, nose, teeth, eyes, etc. All the texturing was done in Substance Painter. Here we made sure to give the skin a leathery look and to include lots of details such as abrasions and scars, especially on the face. The shader itself was then created in Houdini, with various masks for individual areas such as the skin, nose, teeth and eyes. As with the modelling, we received a lot of support from asset specialist Dirk Mauche. The fur was deliberately not simulated in scarred areas so that the skin comes through in some places.
The remaining shaders for the environments and objects were also built in Houdini. Here, we paid particular attention to matching the colour scheme to the black and white final image from the outset, so that the greyscale supports the focus on the respective image section wherever possible. There was also a further element to help focus on certain areas of the image: a special feature of the creature is that its eyes constantly emit a menacing, subtle glow.
The glowing eyes in the darkness of the house were an element that we wanted to have in the film from the outset. It can be found in early mood boards, but also in the very first storyboard. And it closes the film as a bracket, because the eyes of the reverted woman in the bed also glow in the dark. For this, we created the shaders with an emission map in Houdini. In this area, the texturing went hand in hand with the lighting.

Telling darkness with light – the lighting

Just like the visual design of the camera and set pieces, our lighting concept was consistent throughout the project: Light that is as hard as possible with clear edges that emphasise certain parts of the image and thus support the suspense of the film at the end. At the same time, we hide the exact appearance of the werewolf until the last moment – and thus (hopefully) also increase the suspense.
To achieve this look, we tried to limit ourselves to as few light sources as possible and orientate them on real-life models. The moonlight in the outdoor shots was mainly created using HDRIs supplemented by hard panel lights. In the interior shots, mainly strongly focussed panel lights were used, which were supplemented with moving gobos in some places. These moving, very natural shadows also helped massively to give the images a more realistic look. The lighting design process was supervised by creative director and CGI artist Kathrin Hawelka and DoP Moritz Rautenberg.
Rendering was done with Redshift from Houdini. Pipeline TD Jonas Kluger set up his own render farm at the HFF, which is operated via Deadline. Despite the computing power, up to 5 days were needed for some of the renderings. The fine-tuning of the images only came afterwards, in compositing.

Digital to analogue – compositing

As each shot from the lighting was rendered as a multilayer EXR with 32 bits, we still had a lot of leeway in compositing to adjust the light across all shots and to further harmonise the atmospheric elements with each other.
For the establishing shot in particular, in which we see the modern house and the werewolf’s leg for the first time, some layers were combined as matte painting in Photoshop and Nuke.
In compositing, we also further developed the aesthetics of the film under the guidance of senior compositor Heike Kluger. In order to simulate older lenses, we created a sharpness drop-off towards the edges of the image and a separate lens distortion for each focal length based on old Angenieux zoom lenses. The corresponding lens grids were shot by fellow students from the HFF camera department when they had a seminar on handling green screen and VFX on set at the same time as our motion capture shoot.
In Nuke, we also added a subtle glow to the highlights and particles, similar to the properties of a BPM filter. This stylistic patination of the otherwise clean, digital images contributes to the impression that the footage was actually shot, and we also wanted to get even closer to the aesthetic of old horror films. In colour grading (colourist: Claudia Fuchs), we then reinforced this impression even further by adding film grain and high contrasts. Here, too, the large headroom of the EXR files paid off and we were able to give the images the perfect finishing touches.

Lost in the sound? – The sound design

The final step was a sound mix in 5.1 under the direction of Gerhard Auer and Rodolfo Anes Silveira. For the sound design, we focussed on atmospheric sounds and music beds that didn’t sound too melodic and intrusive in order to draw the suspense from the sounds of the creature and the house. Only at the big climax, when the werewolf stands up, do weird violins enter and the music comes to the fore, getting louder and louder to make the atmosphere as uncomfortable as possible and the twist afterwards all the more effective. We even recorded the squeaking for this ourselves at home.

On velvet paws into the future – an outlook

Once the sound mix and the edited material had come together in the form of a DCP, an internal team premiere took place in the HFF’s own cinema. Guests included the department heads and supervisors from the industry, with whom 9 months of work on this film came to a provisional conclusion. We are very proud of the result and would like to thank everyone involved for their support. The film will be released in 2022, and perhaps our Werwölfin will then sneak into one or two festivals. Until then, you can watch a making-of at is.gd/hff_sleep_tight.

Team

Cast

Motion Capture Actress: Kathrin Knöpfle
Voices: Lisa Hagleitner, Hendrik Ehlers

Crew

Directors, Script, Editing, Camera, Animation, Simulation, Compositing: Tobias Sodeikat, Malte Pell, Jonas Potthoff
Producer: Luisa Eichler
Project Supervision: Prof. Jürgen Schopper, Prof. Michael Coldewey
Project Consultant: Rodolfo Anes Silveira
VFX Pipeline TD: Jonas Kluger
Line Producer: Ina Mikkat
Assistant to Line Producer: Jenny Freyburger
Team Assistant: Petra Hereth
Colour Grading: Claudia Fuchs
Re-Recording Mixer / Sound Design: Gerhard Auer, Rodolfo Anes Silveira, Stefan Möhl
Postproduction Supervisor: Christoffer Kempel
Scheduling: Beate Bialas, Sabina Kannewischer
Editing Support: Christine Schorr, Yuval Tzafrir
Technical Support: Benedikt Geß, Florian Schneeweiß
Rental HFF Munich: Rainer Christoph, Boris Levine
Studio Management: Peter Gottschall, Andreas Beckert
Conforming: Martin Foerster
Consultants: Dirk Mauche, Kathrin Hawelka, Moritz Rautenberg, Felix Hörlein, Melanie 
Beisswenger, Heike Kluger

Production

University of Television and Film Munich
Supervising Professor: Prof. Jürgen Schopper, Prof. Michael Coldewey
Technical Details
Frames: 4,608; Resolution: 2,048 x 858; Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1; Renderer: Redshift; Compositing: Nuke, After Effects, Photoshop; 
3D software: Houdini, Maya, Blender, Substance; Sound: 5.1
Website hff-muenchen.de/