Psychedelic Anime and the Beatles Inspired

The Daniels' raucous new multiverse movie was inspired by a little bit of everything. From the moment Everything Everywhere All at Once spits Michelle Yeoh's dowdy laundromat owner into a multiverse of wild and wonderful possibilities, the movie becomes an I Spy of filmic and musical influences. It's tough to make a multiverse movie without referencing the aesthetics of The Matrix. 


You don't cast Yeoh in a film unless you're going to pit her against some breathtaking Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow martial arts choreography. Even casual moviegoers will spot its Pixar-inspired overtones, its love for the exaggerated visuals of Satoshi Kon movies, and its moody, green-tinted Wong Kar-wai homage.


Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known collectively as directing duo Daniels, represent the new class of weirdo cinema, having exploded onto the feature film scene in 2016 with the absurdist and touching Swiss Army Man, in which Paul Dano befriends a farting corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe. For their second feature together, Daniels somehow came up with a king-sized playground of parallel universes that allowed them to create a cat's cradle of genre, tone, and structure that improbably ends up connecting perfectly together.


"We're very aware of the attention economy and how much we all collectively waste each other's time," Kwan explained over a Zoom chat with Thrillist. "I call it unethical attention extraction. Like, if I'm going to have you sit down for two hours, it better change your life." For Everything Everywhere, which tosses Michelle Yeoh into a network of increasingly absurd alternate worlds in an attempt to reunite her family, both directors took inspiration from the beautiful and the odd, and took Thrillist along for the ride.


It's a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day


Structure is a crucial component to any film, but Daniels looked specifically at films that upended the traditional narrative cues and pathways. The two they mentioned both accomplish the near-impossible feat of providing an unconventional story presented in an unconventional way that also doesn't make the audience's head hurt.


KWAN: The stuff that really inspired us to push filmmaking past what other multiverse movies had done, that was stuff that I was watching and trying to figure out and dissect. The simple stuff like the structure of It's a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day—both of those films were mind blowing for their time, but at their core really personal. I was like, I want to do that for modern audiences. And they're all digestible, too.


Masaaki Yuasa's Mind Game


Japanese anime director Masaaki Yuasa is known for his trademark stylized, two-dimensional look, which is evident in feature films like Night Is Short, Walk On Girl and Ride Your Wave, as well as series like Netflix's Devilman Crybaby and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Obviously, Daniels were immediately drawn to what is arguably his weirdest.


KWAN: It doesn't fully hold up, but it's wild, just in the finale, crazy. The last half hour of that movie moved me so much. And there's not a single line of dialogue. It's just chaos. I was like, if I could do this in live action, I will be so happy. It's just a scene where people are trying to escape a whale. It just is incredible, just virtuosic editing and animation, and you're like, what is life??? It fully ends, and then before the credits roll, there's just a full on five minute montage of just random images of life existing and you don't know any of the characters or you recognize some of them. It becomes a palate cleanser before you go out into the world.


How ‘Dune’ VFX supervisor Paul Lambert invented Nuke’s IBK keyer


Paul Lambert, now a two time Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor for Blade Runner 2049 and First Man, and also nominated this year for an Academy Award for Dune, was working as a compositor at Digital Domain in Los Angeles back in 2004 when he somewhat cavalierly suggested the development of a new keyer for the studio’s groundbreaking compositing system, Nuke.


At that time, Nuke was already legendary in the visual effects community but for several years had only been available to use inside Digital Domain. In 2002, a spin-off company D2 Software had been launched to sell Nuke to the outside world. Lambert thought it still needed a good keyer.


“They were basically offering Nuke without a keyer,” recalls Lambert. “We were in a Nuke user group meeting and the whole keyer thing came up and I sheepishly put my hand up and said, ‘Look, I understand how these things work,’ because I had figured out some keying things when I was at Cinesite back in London. I said, ‘Well, look, give me some time and I’ll figure this out.’”


“I remember the guy running the group looked at me and must have thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ But I went off, and six months later I came back with this algorithm.”


That ‘algorithm’ was the design for Nuke’s IBK keyer. And it’s a keyer that still exists nearly two decades later inside the compositing tool.


A quick IBK lesson


So, what is the IBK keyer? The very non-technical answer to that is that the ‘image- based keyer’ is a proprietary keyer in Nuke that typically deals with classic bluescreen or greenscreen plates (that need keying) by recognizing that these plates do not always have uniform color coverage. We’ve all seen uneven blue and greenscreens; that’s one place where the IBK Keyer can come in handy.

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