Tippett Studio Brought Buckets of Blood and Butt Guts to ‘The Toxic Avenger’ [Interview]

The talent isn’t just on screen in writer/director Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger; it’s just as stacked behind the camera. That even extends to the gore, with legendary Tippett Studio handling some of the film’s bloodiest and most outrageous VFX moments.

Tippett Studio, founded by Academy Award-winning VFX artist and stop-motion animator Phil Tippett, is no stranger to gore. The studio has covered extensive ground in the genre space since its launch in 1984, including horror movies like Alien: Romulus, Blade 2, and Piranha 3D. The Toxic Avenger not only fit right in the studio’s wheelhouse, but the project also provided the team with new terrain that only Toxie’s style of gory chaos could provide.

For Compositing Supervisor Ross Nakamura (“The Witcher,” Mad God, Cloverfield), it was a project he really wanted to be a part of. “Oh my God. Most of the team that we worked with, myself, even the producer – I’m dating myself here – but we all grew up with the whole campy, gory thing, like Toxic Avenger,” the artist tells Bloody Disgusting. “I know there’s probably like 10 of them, but I watched up to the second one. As a kid, my parents were totally cool, exposing me to these movies. But it was that, Creepshow, gosh, what else? Basket Case, Ghoulies, all of those films. It was a good primer for everybody to have those sensibilities of what Macon wanted. In the initial meeting, it was more like a roundtable talk, but sharing coffee. I think he’s relatively around the same age, so it was really just a meeting of the minds.”

Nakamura continues, “And he really was referencing a lot of the old Toxic Avenger stuff. He wanted to have the same essence, but give it a modern twist. Even things like, there’s going to be common physics involved, but we don’t really need to hone in on the actual physics of how the gore should react. But it was that very free-flowing fluid, very, very, very organic meeting of the minds. So it really felt like we were a part of that creative process from the initial start.”

While The Toxic Avenger features a variety of VFX, including Toxie’s transformation, Tippett Studios was tasked with Toxie’s carnage. “It was mainly gore,” Nakamura tells us. “We had, I think, a group of about 20 artists. We had maybe 25-ish, 26 shots. It was a relatively small package of shots that we did. But we did handle, I’m hoping, the iconic shots, where it was a really tight shot of Budd Beserk getting lobbed off. We did get some key art on how the brain was going to be situated after Toxie’s head chop with his magic mop, and they just aired on that. But still resonated the same tangible, very, very practical makeup quality of it.”

Nakamura breaks down how the VFX worked in tandem with practical effects: “There was a shot where we lobbed off Buzz’s head, and then the reverse shot facing Toxie, it was just a complete wipe of blood. It was a mixture of a lot of practical stuff that we shot at Tippett a while ago, and then we just added and padded some CG stuff because it wasn’t enough. You can call it a balance of how we would weigh things with the gore, just initially off the gate. We thought it was too much, but it was just right, more or less.”

The Toxic Avenger plays its gore frequently for laughs or pure Troma-style fun. That comedic slant allowed for a looser interpretation of reality and factored into Tippett Studio’s approach to the VFX, both in the color palette and splatter placement.

Even the blood color was taken into consideration. “There was a lot of colorfulness to it. We did a version where we had done the research, especially with the brains, the tissue, and all that, but we added a sense of color to it. They wanted to broaden that palette so that’s taking you out of, in a way, the reality of very tangible, recognizable gore. But it created this comedic content to it, and I think that’s what was adhered to early on. Once we got that feedback, we started to add those elements into the look itself, but without deviating too much from reality. It was those little details that we would goose up post render once we saw it rendered and lit and textured and everything. If it were a CG element, we would go in there and just add a little bit of flavoring, so to speak.

“There was a moment when a brain exploded. So, we placed emphasis on the buildup to that punchline part of a shot, where I think we had the brain bubbling, and it would just increase in frequency and amplitude, and then have this moment where it would just explode. Then we went in just offhand without even consulting [Blair] and the team, and we added these secondary blood squirts. Again, over the top, but it all went into the film.”

As a lifelong horror fan and tenured artist at Tippett Studio, Nakamura is well-versed in decapitations and arterial spray. Yet he found himself wading into uncharted territory when it came to The Toxic Avenger, with a Toxie moment so repulsive that it left Nakamura with feelings of pride and modesty.

He teases, “There was a shot that we pulled off. It’s definitely an eyesore, in comparison to what I know about the film and what I’ve seen with the red band trailer and everything. It’s just definitely one that will stick out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like it before. So I’m proud of that. And honestly, in my 21 years at this same studio, I’ve worked on gore, we’ve worked on monster films. I’ve never worked on something quite like that before.”

Nakamura is referring to what Macon Blair himself has coined “Butt Guts,” even crediting Nakamura and the Tippett Studio team as the Butt Guts Unit. It doesn’t even require description; you’ll know it’s the Butt Guts moment when you see it. And the team fully committed to bringing it to life on screen.

“It was just like when we first did the first version, we added way too much,” Nakamura recalls. “It was shot practically, but we added way too much stuff. And 98% of it stayed in there. I think all of it stayed in there because I put that shot together. I think the first pass that went out was like, ‘Okay, this is good, let’s finish this shot.’ I was like, ‘Okay, that’s fine with me. I need to get onto other things.’ So, proud? Yes. Proud? Not really.”

The Toxic Avenger is now playing in theaters nationwide.

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