Filming Assassin's Creed: The Costumes, Animus, and Leap of Faith

Filming Assassin's Creed: The Costumes, Animus, and Leap of Faith
Highlights
  • A total of 2000 costumes were made for the film
  • The Leap of Faith was done from a height of 120ft
  • The film releases December 30 in India
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One of the most important aspects when making a film adaptation of a video game is the existing audience. Michael Fassbender, the lead actor in Assassin’s Creed, releasing Friday in India, understands those expectations, and hopes that the film won’t let any gamers down.

In the film, Fassbender plays two different roles – Callum Lynch, a death row convict in the 21st-century, and Aguilar de Nehra, an assassin who lived during the Spanish Inquisition in 1478. To truly make the latter believable, it fell to costume designer Sammy Sheldon-Differ, who has previously worked on movies such as X-Men: First Class, Ant-Man, and Ex Machina, to create a look that would be true to the games, yet looking authentic.

“We decided to draw on a Moorish theme, and all of the influences from North Africa at the time,” she said. “These were the kinds of people who were living in Spain at the time of the Inquisition, and so we tried to give Aguilar’s costume a tribal feel, with a lot of bone, metal, and weaving.

“It’s about making clothes for a person, rather than a costume. In a video game, you can manipulate every angle to make it look cool, but in reality, a hood or a cloak doesn’t stretch like that, so you have to build things differently. You have to think about the soul of the character and make clothes you believe they’d live in. The clothes don’t wear the person.”

assassins creed filming hood Assassins Creed filming hood costume

Sheldon-Differ said her team created around 2000 costumes for the film, which included multiple variants for the one worn by Fassbender, to make sure it looked right from any shot angle. “With some of the costumes in the game, they look great but you couldn’t really translate them that well into film,” Fassbender explained. “They might look just a little off. That was a major part of it, the costume, and the look we discussed off the back of it."

“It was long hair, beard, all the classics,” he adds, before laughing. “And just some contact lenses to give me brown eyes instead of blue.”

The most problematic aspect of Aguilar’s costume, Sheldon-Differ explained, ended up being the hood that has been a staple for any assassin in the game since the first title.

“We did 20 or 30 hoods for Michael, and all the details built from there,” she said. “The hoods were always going to be a problem because it’s all about the face and what we hide and don’t hide. I don’t think you’d usually analyse one aspect of a costume so much, but we had to learn how to cut an Assassin hood. Each shot is manipulated in terms of how we have to set it, and there are different hoods.”

For a film as action-heavy as Assassin’s Creed, Sheldon-Differ had to factor in the practicality of the costumes too. That meant working closely with two other departments, armoury and stunt. “This film has been so collaborative because the blades are tricky to make work,” she noted. “It’s been a learning process in terms of how we attach them to the costumes.”

 

“For each wrist blade we made different versions that do different things on camera,” weapon designer Tim Wildgoose said. “If they wanted to show Michael [Fassbender] cocking his wrist blade, everything on one of them works and rotates and swings around.”

But not everything could be based entirely on the video game, too. When characters experience “regressions” – memories from their past – in the franchise, they typically sit in a chair or lie down on a bed. “You can’t watch Michael Fassbender lie on a couch for several sequences,” joked production designer Andy Nicholson, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Gravity. “We started with the idea of immersing him in some kind of liquid, but then we came up with the idea of the Animus being this robotic arm. It’s far more visual and dynamic, and we can achieve a lot of it practically.

“The arm is a dancing partner for Cal, and it is reading his genetic memories. It interprets them to play the movement back so it can be experienced more strongly. The way we’re shooting it, if he’s fighting someone you’ll see the impact from that fight in the room for real.”

Nailing the signature Creed moves
While most films would have relied on CGI in today’s age, director Justin Kurzel was interested in pulling off as much possible in-camera. “The game is very human,” he said, and “the Assassins aren’t superheroes. They don’t fly around on birds, and there are no dragons in this. They’re real periods of real time, and the Assassins’ feats have been developed through their own ancestry and skills.”

assassins creed filming parkour Assassins Creed filming parkour

“So many of the fight sequences and stunts are performed by the actors and real stunt people. I could have shot it all on a parking lot and made it very CGI-heavy, but I thought what was really interesting was how we could make the audience feel as though it were possible; that Assassins in real life can jump between buildings.”

This spirit extended into realising one of the most iconic of the Assassin’s Creed franchise – the Leap of Faith, a straight vertical jump from a high spot that ends with the character landing in water or a bale of hay. To pull it off, they roped in Damien Walters, a stunt performer who’s made a name for himself as a YouTube personality, with his videos gaining upwards of 100 million views.

For the big jump, the production crew proposed a height of 20 feet. But Walters wanted to go big; he had been planning to do the Leap of Faith by himself before he got the call on Assassin’s Creed. Obviously that presented its own challenges. “Let’s put it this way: anyone can drop from 120 feet. It’s just how you walk after it – or if you do,” he said. “The thing is, people don’t do high falls anymore. Technology has moved on and people thought it would be easier as a visual effect. If you’re going to do the real stunt and see somebody doing that move, it’s such an iconic part of the game that I don’t think it should be ruined with visual effects.”

 

When the day of the filming arrived, Walters admitted he was nervous. “If you’re not getting scared, it’s meaningless,” he added. “I like to be a little bit nervous about whether I can pull something off because it means you’re pushing your limits.” Walters said that the reason it was important to do it “real” was because, “you can tell when it’s done as a visual effect”.

It was also much harder than the game makes it look, Walters noted. “Yeah, it’s a lot harder than you think to hold one position,” he said. “You take off and you literally have to guess at the start how much rotation to put in. If you put in more rotation than you need to, you’re adjusting in the air the whole time. All of that alters the body shape. Whereas in the game he just holds that shape and goes down.

“It takes practice to figure out what you need to put in from the start and hold that position. If you hold that position with too much rotation you’re going to come down on your feet or your knees, and you do not want to come down on anything else but your back in that high a fall. You want to land perfectly flat, or you won’t be doing this sort of stuff for a very long time afterward.”

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