How a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man got toasted in Ghostbusters: Afterlife
On a snack run to Walmart, Paul Rudd's character in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (out Nov. 19) encounters anthropomorphic marshmallows coming to life, gleefully toasting some of their own kind over a barbecue, and using a blowtorch to turn another into a s'more. This sequence from director Jason Reitman's film is a tip of the sailor's cap to the original Ghostbusters and its giant, New York-terrorizing Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Who you gonna call to ask how the scene was made? That would be Afterlife visual-effects producer Kerry Joseph "They were the hardest characters for us to nail down," he says of the Mini-Pufts. "They're just going nuts."
Toddler Mayhem
Reitman had a very specific vision for how the Mini-Pufts should behave. According to Joseph, "The marching orders we got from Jason were that these are mischievous toddlers. They're essentially children that are learning the world around them, having fun, and have no fear, and can't get hurt."
Designing Men
Joseph and his team studied footage of the original Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the 1984 film to make their CG versions match. "The proportions are pretty similar," he says. "I think we may have brought a little bit more emotion to the eyes, [but] that first one was physically built, there was only so much they could do."
The S'more the Merrier
Joseph says the gag in which a smiling Marshmallow Man becomes the middle of a gooey s'more was "one of the very first ideas in preproduction that stayed all the way through to the final film. Being Marshmallow Men, I think we had to do that. It never went away."
Ghostbusters: Afterlife costars Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, McKenna Grace, Celeste O'Connor, Logan Kim, Annie Potts, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson.
Watch the trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife above.
To read more from our Fall Movie Preview, order the November issue of Entertainment Weekly or find it on newsstands beginning Oct. 15. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.
Related content:
| type |
|
| genre | |
| mpaa | |
| director |
Comments have been disabled on this post