If you want to compliment Leo Wieser, tell him his work makes you gag.
“Thank you!” he says, sounding genuinely pleased. “That’s what makes a good career.”
Wieser — the special effects supervisor for the Syfy/CHCH supernatural series Wynonna Earp — is telling me about the full-body living autopsy scene featured in last week’s episode of the show, “Two-Faced Jack,” when I admit it made me queasy. Apparently, I’m not the only one who had an uncomfortable reaction to the sequence.
“On set, nothing is better than if you can make the crew go, “Bleh!” he laughs. “When [actor] Ryan Bellville reaches deep down into her body, everybody — with cameras rolling — was going “Ughhhh.”
Wieser has always been drawn to spectacle and illusion. As a kid growing up in Alberta, he says he was first drawn to magic and then to pyrotechnics, which led to him “being dramatic with fire and trying to burn down my neighbor’s yard.” As an adult, he studied theatre design and then founded Bleeding Art Industries in 1994. The Calgary studio crafts special effects for film and TV productions — such as Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story, and CBC’s Heartland — and also creates its own content, including the 3D stop-motion animated short film Skeleton Girl.
Chatting over the phone from his office in Calgary, Wieser explains how Wynonna Earp‘s autopsy scene was created, why he prefers old-school special effects over computer-generated graphics (CGI), and how he uses social media to promote both his craft and the productions he works on.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Digital Journal: You have a background in theatre design. How did you end up producing special effects and creatures?
Leo Wieser: To me, it’s all one and the same. To me, special effects are part of the art of illusion and the art of magic and the art of making people believe that things are there or aren’t there, of being able to make people suddenly see an image in a different way just by changing the lighting. Special effects is all the art of illusion.
As a mechanical special effects person, I always get put in a box where you blow things up or you make rain or snow or wind and that’s all you do, but I’ve always seen it as so much more. Going from special effects props to makeup effects, there’s a whole gamut of things that are visual effects without a computer. I started in the theatre, and I loved magician’s illusions because you sit there as an audience seeing things that you’ve never seen before, and there’s a whole suspension of disbelief because of the environment you’re in. That kind of thing always turned my crank, and theatre certainly links into that, and really television and movies are just another form of theatre and illusion.
What’s the first thing that happens when you get a script for Wynonna Earp? How do you start breaking down the special effects?
It’s not as magic as it sounds because I’m under time constraints. I’ll do a preliminary read of it to get the broad strokes of where the story’s going and the basic effects that I can plug in. We know that every time we’re in the bar we need atmosphere, every time we’re at this place we need a campfire. So there’s a little bit of time where I’m just blocking it out and getting it in the computers and starting to make lists and then just starting to toss my ideas in there. Then we all go into a concept meeting, where the director is introduced.
I’d love to say that I can put all my ideas in there — and Wynonna is really kind of refreshing for that — but really, when you’re in the concept meeting, you start to wrangle over what is more cost effective. How does this affect this department? How can you do this?
How much lead time do you have to prepare the effects?
It’s a three-week prep period, and then it’s usually around three weeks of shooting, 15 days. Though Wynonna was down to 14 days, sometimes 13 days. It was a very quick shooting period.
At one point in the season, Bobo Del Rey (Michael Eklund) grotesquely yanks out another Revenant’s tongue. How was that sequence designed?
[Bleeding Art] is like a little research factory. As soon as something comes up, I try to shoot something to show that we can do this. Otherwise, it will either get cut from the script or it gets relegated to computer generated, and I’m very old school. I can see when computer generated is there, and it kind of bugs me. I don’t want to be watching animation, I want to be in the world, and I want it to be real and get the impression that it’s real.
So with the tongue, we’re just making a fake tongue. We called it a “tongue shoe,” and it’s hollow. Our head fabricator Alyssa [Moor] basically took a molding of her tongue and of her boyfriend’s tongue, and she repoured it in silicon but made it hollow so [the actor’s] tongue could fit in it and he could puppet it. He could literally hold on to it with his own tongue as it’s being pulled forward, and because it’s a stretchy silicon rubber, it will stretch out of shape, and he could let go of it with the back of his jaw and let it snap into Bobo’s hand.
In Episode 108, “Two-Faced Jack,” there is an amazing and horrifying full-body autopsy with a live victim. How did you develop the concept?
When the body came up, everyone was saying it will be CG, and I’m like, “No, there’s got to be a way to do this,” because, to me, it was a basic magician’s illusion. A very, very simple one. I wanted to see what other people have done, and I have a huge — we call it a morgue — of photos. I’m always digging up photos of traffic accidents and all sorts of horror, which gets a little tough at times, but I have to do that. I was looking for primary source information of what it looks like for an autopsy, and we found a real plethora of stuff for human autopsies. . . . Then it became a challenge, and I said, “We’ve got to blow everybody out of the water, and we want to make people throw up on set!”
How long did it take to build?
The mock-up, on and off, was almost four weeks for the body. The casting of the body was actually [actress] Sasha [Barry]’s body. So with Alyssa and a few others, we had a closed session and we did an upper body casting of Sasha, so Alyssa did have that to work from. If you closed the body up, it would be perfectly accurate. We wanted to get all the proportions correct.
Once the body was ready, how long did it take to shoot that scene?
I think it took us 25 minutes to get her into it, which was exactly what we were looking for. We made it very comfortable for her in there, so she was very relaxed. We wheeled her out and everybody is going, “Oooh” and “Aaah,” and got her all set up in position and got the camera set up. The scene of her, when they’re looking at her, took about an hour and a half. Sasha was in there about two hours, but she was nice and warm.
The lungs and heart are moving during the scene. Is that done with air?
Those organs, the lungs and the heart, are basically just bags. They’re silicon bags that we made that we’re pushing and sucking air out of to get kind of the life and the movement.
There have been a few very bloody scenes in Wynonna, including one where blood splatters all over a vehicle windshield. What is the art of a great blood splatter? How much testing goes into something like that?
We try very, very hard. A lot of people would do it with a cannon and do it on the day, but we try really, really hard to test all of that because we’ve got to make it repeatable. So we did a lot of testing. We measure down that this cannon needs to be at this pressure and this amount of blood and this amount of thickener. The looser it is, the more it’s going to be a light splatter and, in that case, we need to obscure the windshield, so you didn’t see the driver.
You are also the special effects supervisor on Heartland, which is a very different show than Wynonna Earp. What’s the biggest challenge working on a show set in the real world as opposed to a supernatural world?
I think actually the challenge for me — because I always want to embellish it and they don’t want to be embellished — is somehow coming to what their idea of naturalism is and what’s right for the show. Trying to figure out when the right time to step back is and when the right time to step forward is the challenge for me. We were almost ready to do one bullet hit once, and I don’t know what happened but they opted not to do it. It was on the actor, and I’m ready to go, and [they said], “Well, you know what, maybe let’s not do it. We’ll just show him bloody after the fact.” And I’m like, “Awwww!”
We did the burning of Hanley Barn, and that was a wonderful challenge because here’s an existing set in the middle of a dry farmer’s field, and it was a set, it wasn’t a real barn. You’ve got to make it look like it’s burning down and you’ve got to rescue Georgie, but you can’t really burn it down. You have to have an entire shooting crew in a barn and make it look like it’s completely engulfed in flame and not scorch even a wall. And we actually did it. It was amazing.
So Heartland has its moments. It’s just a very different show. There are some birthing scenes coming up and so we’re working with baby horses and horse goos and amniotic sacs. But they wouldn’t let me do the placenta cannon. I think they just put up with me because every now and then the script will say, “Georgie explodes,” and I put that on my sheet and they go, “No, that’s just a writing term.”
Digital Journal is interested in the way artists use social media to promote their work. How do you use social media to support Bleeding Art Industries?
Social media is really interesting. First of all, we are madly blogging and IDW has been fantastic to work with. Emily and Seven24, all these guys have been really amazing to work with because they are letting us really dash forward with the social media aspect of it. We want to do more Wynonna Earp. She’s a fantastic character, there are strong female leads in there, and it’s stuff that we haven’t seen before and we want to push all sorts of different boundaries. We want a Season 2, so we fully recognize that we need to be part of the machine that’s putting that out there.
But for Bleeding Art Industries, we make our own products, and our products sell worldwide. We send stuff to Australia, and we send stuff, funnily enough, to Hollywood. So part of the business is to keep this tiny 5,000-square-foot shop and our small team of people going, whether it’s creating our own work or doing service work. So part of that is being out there in a way that can generate the interest and generate a fanbase that will hopefully buy our products, watch our films, and watch films that we work on. We fully recognize that we’re part of an environment that needs to be consumed.
What else is coming up for you in 2016?
We’re putting a lot of effort out being out there about Wynonna, so we’re hoping and praying for another season of that. And with Heartland, we’re almost halfway through block one, so that’s the first two episodes.
Bleeding Art Industries itself has some content properties that we’re developing. We’ve got the continuation of Skeleton Girl — which we’re not sure if it’s film or it’s feature or if it’s a series — called Twisted Tales for Demented Children.
_____________________
‘Wynonna Earp‘ airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on Syfy in the U.S. and Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on CHCH in Canada.
Note: Canadian viewers can live stream ‘Wynonna Earp’ on the CHCH website at 10 p.m. ET on Fridays and again at 9 p.m. ET on Mondays.
‘Heartland‘ returns to CBC this fall.
Follow Bleeding Art Industries on Twitter.
Follow A.R. Wilson on Twitter.
