Now, on a new episode of Corridor Crew's "VFX Artists React" series on YouTube, Niko Pueringer, Wren Weichman, and Jordan Allen analyze the "Battlegrounds" episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephern King, which features a hitman (William Hurt) facing off against an army of toy soldiers in his apartment after he kills their creator.

While the action-packed TV short doesn't feature any CGI, it does feature plenty of clever visual effects work to bring the toy soldiers to life, including some incredible compositing. Check out comments from Niko, Wren, and Jordan below:

Niko: “This is rad.”

Wren: “This is a comp shot in order to fake that really shallow depth of field you get when you film small stuff. Wait, this is actually really good.”

Jordan: “It doesn’t have any right to be so good.”

Wren: “So, obviously, there’s a lot of incredible comp work going on here, but I think the unsung hero here is the camera work. They’re shooting everything on set here with a camera that’s maybe three feet off the ground. So then they’re filming all these army men on a blue screen that matches the on-set perspective perfectly. And you have to scale that camera move down in a way that’s not the easiest thing to do. It’s so easy to mess up.”

Jordan: “The matching of the lighting, the matching of the camera, the scale-matching. All incredibly well done.

“They filmed all separate plates, comped them all together, added the depth of field on the back to match the focal plane. What’s really cool about this, all the props are full-scale. Those jeeps that they’re lifting? Full scale. And they rubberized them so that they looked the part because you need the smaller version to match the bigger version.

“This is when visual effects is not an afterthought. This is when it is a part of the process from pre-production on, and this is what it can do.”

Nightmares & Dreamscapes Deserves Another Shot

Some Stephen King Stories Don't Need A Feature-Length Adaptation

Every year, a handful of King's stories are adapted for either the big or small screen. Unfortunately, a great many of them end up missing the mark. In fact, of the last six King adaptations, only one – 2019's Doctor Sleep – has managed to score higher than 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. While there are a host of reasons why some of these adaptations don't work, a persistent problem is that King's short stories and novellas are adapted into feature-length films when the source material may be better suited to a shorter TV special.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes was a short-lived series, evidently not boasting the viewership required for a season 2 order, but the format allowed for King's shorter works of fiction to be adapted fairly faithfully. 2020's disappointing Children of the Corn, for example, only boasts 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's possible that, had King's short story of the same name been condensed into a 50-minute episode of TV instead of a 93-minute movie, it would have been more effective.

The success of Netflix's Black Mirror suggests that there is an appetite for anthology-type horror shows, and King's name alone remains a draw for audiences. What's more, a revived Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King would likely do better on a streaming service than on TNT, with streamers allowing for more flexibility in of episode count, length, and budget.

Source: Corridor Crew/ YouTube