Korg’s career in social media is a thing to behold. You can find Korg on t-shirts, pamphlets and even on the “why Korg is the best
Thor: Ragnarok’s character" lists. His thunderous popularity wouldn’t be possible without the director Taika Waititi, who’s also played the companionable Kronan in the movie.
In an interview the visual effects supervisor Jake Morrison explains the odds the crew faced to bring the character to life. One of the odds is obviously Waititi’s height, considering that Korg was designed to be around 7-foot 6-inches tall. The crew decided to give the actor/director a backpack extension that featured a cardboard Korg head placed on a pole’s end meaning that “
when Chris Hemsworth was actually riffing with Taika he would know where the eye line was, because that’s the important thing. You don’t want the eye line to stray down to Taika’s real eye line,” the supervisor said.
The character’s height was a small problem in comparison to the fact that he is made up of 1,334 individual pieces of rock. Luma Pictures and Framestore faced the challenge of animating almost every single piece of Korg’s body trying to follow the director’s performance as closely as possible. According to Luma Pictures animation supervisor Raphael A. Pimentel his team was studding Waititi’s performance to extract the essence of his Korg
: “We ended up picking the strongest beat during the performance and animated around it; essentially keeping the punchline mannerisms, while slowing the remainder in order to hit Korg’s slower and weightier pace”.
Both companies had to figure out how to animate a character made of rocks, not flesh and also create the physics behind more than one thousand stones: “
we started with a body mesh that contained helper muscles to keep volume. Although Korg is not made of muscles, his anatomy behaved as if it did, bulging and contracting depending on his motion. There was also a layer of set driven keys that allowed animators to control individual rocks, if needed,” explained Pimentel.
Morrison was very pleased with the fact that he had an opportunity to work with Taika and hopes the audience believed that they were dealing with a real, not a CG character. Looking at all the love the blue Kronan received it’s pretty safe to say that Waititi’s Korg is definitely the
real deal.
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