The Sisters Brothers is an upcoming western dark comedy directed by Jacques Audiard
This is the third time that the MPC Liège teams have been able to work with director Jacques Audiard. Westerns are part of American film history and we all grew up with images of huge landscapes and deadly gunfights. As a European studio, MPC Liège has rarely had the opportunity to work on a western, so our teams were eager to work on it.
The Sisters Brothers is an upcoming western dark comedy directed by Jacques Audiard from a screenplay he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain based on the novel of the same name by Patrick deWitt. The film will star John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as the two notorious assassin brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters.
It’s a great pleasure to work for the third time with such a talented director and were all very excited when Jacques told us about the project. Western movies are part of the cinematographic history in America and we all grew up with those images (the landscapes, the gun fights,…). As an European studio, we rarely have the opportunity to work on a Western so we were all looking forward to it.”
Stéphane Thibert, VFX Supervisor
The supervision team consisted of 3 people that already had worked together on the movie ‘Rust and Bone’: Cédric Fayolle was the VFX Supervisor, Guillaume Pondard the 2D Supervisor and Stéphane Thibert was the CG Supervisor. They all have worked for Mikros for years and now for MPC Paris and MPC Liège.
The environment was handled in a standard approach: asset creation (lots of Substance painter / Zbrush). The CG extensions were mainly based on picture references delivered by the art department. Lighting was done in Arnold and compositing in Nuke.
The crowd was entirely handled in Golaem and we had to be careful about the historical references for the costumes. The main challenge was to match the CG crowd to the real one as they were pretty close to each other.
