CG is something that scales - the more shots you are working on with CG the better.įor this gothic final tale, CG horses pull a stagecoach into the unknown. Building a CG pipeline from scratch is an enormous amount of work, and in our case it was literally only four shots of CG horses. One of the sequences was the Battle of the Bastards from Game of Thrones, and we thought how about we just reach out to the company who did that? That was Iloura in Australia.

Joel and Ethan knew how hard it is to make believable CG animals, so early on they compiled a reel of digital horse stunts they found in other recent films. We went out and tried to find other reference material for horse falls - the stuff I mostly found was racehorses breaking their legs, really horrible stuff. That had to be a very specific violent animation so it was believable. I think there's two horse falls that were done by animal trainers, but what the Coens wanted is the horses step into the prairie dog holes littered around the landscape then break their legs, and you couldn't do that for real. But there was still a couple of duplications needed, some matte painting work and some really complicated CG horse work to augment the real life stunt work.

Lemke: Surprisingly most of the wagon stuff is shot for real - they actually had 15 In this heartwrenching segment, wagon train settler Zoe Kazan faces marauding attackers on horseback.

Ballad of buster scruggs