What a Catch

Grizzle has been steadily ticking off formats from the list: DOOH ads, TV ads, social ads, music videos, charity films, sports stats, video game trailers, explainers, promos, fundraisers—the list goes on. But never much in regard to independent film. So imagine our excitement when, following on from his recent documentary I Could Never Go Vegan, writer, director and horror fan Tom Pickering got in touch asking us to produce some VFX gore for his short film What a Catch. Combining bloody scares with a critique of the fishing industry, the film sets out its stall with the logline:

“On a late-night trip to the lake, a Victorian fisherman’s evening takes a sinister turn.”

Our job was to add the finishing touches to bring the film together—the meat substitute filling of this Hammer Horror-esque production.

Blood, No Guts

The gnarly prosthetics on the shoot were enough to make us a bit squeamish. The meat of the work, however, was in adding more blood and gore to help lure in horror fans, whilst keeping continuity as shots cut back and forth. The gore was fleshed out in Adobe After Effects once we’d trawling through productioncrate.com for as many visceral VFX assets as we could muster. These were then dropped into the scene with a spot of colour correction and masking once we’d tracked the floor and the talent, carefully matching up the meaty textures to the prosthetics.

The real challenge came when our fisherman falls in the water. With his face pretty mangled at this point, the idea was to have blood streaming from his newfound orifice. The track alone proved tricky, with limbs waving around and bubbles everywhere it would have been tricky to automate so we had to hand-track the sequence After Effects to get anything steady enough.

The blood itself was simulated in Cinema 4D, where we emulated the forces of the water on the blood as it emitted from the tracked head, while also dispersing the blood into the surrounding body of water. This took a couple of lengthy attempts, but once satisfied, we took the rendered image sequence back into After Effects for final colour correction and a stack of additional masking around the arms.

All that remained were a few spots of cleanup throughout the film with some time given to the emergence of the hook, fittingly drawn up by a fishing line. The only catch? With so much mist and smoke around the hook, it required a fair amount of inpainting and layers of soft masking, sampling the spaces around the line in order to conceal it.

Awards and Impact

Pickering has won or been nominated for several awards for his work on What a Catch, including Best Director at Tuesday of Horror and Best Editor at Short Stop International Film Festival, while the film itself took first place for Best Mini Short at 2024’s Short to the Point.
It’s important, whilst enjoying the film, to consider the point Tom is making. The fishing industry is catastrophically damaging to marine life, with 2.2 trillion fish caught globally every year, and approximately half going into animal feed.