A body double, CGI skull, and secret filming sessions all helped 'Blade Runner 2049' earn a VFX Oscar nomination

While all of that was going on, back on set Villeneuve shot the “Rita” scene with Ford and Leto. Actress Loren Peta was brought on as the Rachael body double. With Nelson and Young also on hand, the scene was done with dots all over Peta’s face, which would be needed when the footage went through the motion-capture phase. Peta’s face would be erased, and CGI Sean Young would be inserted.

“Sean would be sitting with Denis and they’d be talking about Loren’s performance as Rachael,” Nelson said. “She would advise him on the movements and the looks of Rachael. ‘I would have done it this way or that way,’ she would tell Denis.”

At this point Nelson took the footage shot and inserted what they had done with CGI Rachael, and showed what they had to Villeneuve and the producers. But no one was that impressed.

“They were like, ‘Well, it really looks like a woman that looks a lot like Sean Young, but it doesn’t look like Sean Young,’” Nelson recalled. “So I went back to the drawing board.”

Nelson went even deeper, and that’s where he found pay dirt.

“What I found is it's her imperfections that make her beautiful,” he said. “Her eyes are not symmetrical, her eyes actually stick out of her head a little more than most people. We studied how makeup was done when 'Blade Runner' was made. In fact, we went to every woman on the crew and asked about how makeup was done in the 1980s. We learned about the right shade of lip stick. Just subtle things from the first movie that we could put into our Rachael.”

Nelson went back to Denis and the producers with four scenes from the original “Blade Runner” and inserted CGI Rachael into a single shot in each scene. But he didn’t tell them what he did.

“The producers and Denis were like, ‘John, this is great but why are we looking at the first movie?’ and I told them what I did and they couldn’t tell, they actually got upset,” Nelson said. “They were like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ And I was like, ‘Isn’t that the point? It’s supposed to be like the real thing.’”

With CGI Rachael now perfect, Nelson had to make her a believable actress. Following the shoot with Ford and Leto, Nelson said Villeneuve then did a “super secret Saturday session” with just Young and Peta where both wore motion-capture rigs and did the scene. The goal was to get the character to show confidence, longing, and rejection during her time on screen.

“At first we had our digital double come on screen becoming immediately emotional, it didn’t look like Rachael,” Nelson said.

Once again going back to the original “Blade Runner,” Nelson studied how Young played her, specifically Deckard and Rachael's first meeting. In it, Rachael is extremely confident. So Nelson changed course for the “2049” Rachael scene.

“I brought her out confident,” Nelson said. “Then Denis said when she gets to Deckard it’s like two people who haven’t seen each other in 20 years and when they see each other they can’t help themselves.”

In the final version of the "2049" Rachael scene, Rachael walks out of the shadows confident, then has a look of longing when she gets close to Deckard, then has a face of rejection when he says to Wallace that the real Rachael’s eyes were green.

“We took little subtle nuances from the original movie with our facial motion capture and put them into the performance,” Nelson said. “Down to her eyes tearing up and strands of her hair misplaced.”

Nelson said Villeneuve was very nervous about the Rachael scene and if they would be able to pull it off. He admitted to Nelson that he didn’t like a lot of the CGI human footage he’d seen in movies. But Nelson knew he had met his director’s high standard when Villeneuve gave him four words.

“For me, the satisfaction came when he said with his rich Montreal accent, ‘I deeply love it,’” Nelson said. “When he really loved something he would say, ‘I deeply love it,’ that’s when I knew we were there.”

Since the movie came out Nelson has found a lot of admiration from his peers in the VFX community.

“A good friend of mine who worked on one of the movies where they had a digital double came up to me recently and said, ‘You did it man, it’s the best yet.’ And my response was, ‘We looked at your work really closely, we just built on top of it.’”

But Nelson doesn’t see the creation of CGI versions of actors becoming widespread in Hollywood. He admits it’s still very difficult to pull off (CGI Sean Young is on screen for about a minute and it took a year to pull off). However, it’s vital to fill in gaps. The example Nelson likes to use is when he had to digitally create actor Oliver Reed when he died in the middle of production on 2000’s “Gladiator” (the work would earn him an Oscar). It was possible, though, because — like CGI Rachael — there was a living actor to reference.

“It has to start with the actor,” Nelson said. “The real person is the source material. It’s simpler to hire a talented actor and let them act. The magic comes from them as opposed to an animator.”