[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): Morning, champ.

[upbeat violin music playing] 

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): Well, well, well. 

[air hissing]

[rubber stretches, pops]

[mischievous music playing]

Victor Scalise: Hi, I’m Victor Scalise.

Scott Ramsey: And I’m Scott Ramsey. We’re the visual effects team behind Buggy the Clown.

Victor Scalise: In the One Piece universe, there’s a lot of interesting characters. Buggy, to be honest, was one of my favorites. 

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): Go on.

Jaco Snyman: Buggy is such a cool character. 

Richard Bridgland: Buggy’s obviously a clown. 

Amanda Ross-McDonald: He is the leader of the Buggy Pirates.

Victor Scalise:  But he also has a power where he can basically split his body into parts.

[CLIP] [grunts]

[TITLE CARD] VISUAL EFFECTS: BUILDING BUGGY

Victor Scalise:  We used a bunch of different techniques for doing that. We had some blue screen, where we had the real actor as an element. We had a digi double, which is basically a full 3D CG version of the actor that we can animate to be able to split apart into pieces, because I don’t think anybody really wanted us to chop Jeff up. We kind of offered it up, saying, “You mind losing an arm? You mind losing a leg?” But we kind of opted for digital instead. 

One of the things that we wanted to really work with, OK, how is Buggy gonna separate? Because when he’s in the manga, it’s panels. It’s a frame, it’s two frames. So you’re not seeing the separation. You’re seeing the before and the after. But we have to show how he does it. One thing that we started playing with that really started working well was almost like a little magnetism. The early tests where we were just separating him felt like you just sliced it, and it looked like bad animation. So, you know, we ended up having to really kind of play around with how much magnetism? So when the arms come back together, you get that little hug and that little squeeze together.

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): What have you done to me?

[thud] 

[CLIP] Man: Cut you down to size.

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): One Piece will never be yours! 

Scott Ramsey: Little Buggy is when his entire body has been separated from him and captured. He is just now feet, hands, and a head. One of the coolest things we ever did with him is he knew his hands and feet in Little Buggy were gonna be all 3D. So he said, “Look, let me do the actions.” And, like, “Yeah, do that.” “We’ll match-move him and get him in there.” And the best part about it is we didn’t have to do a 3D head for that. We kind of just did it on the fly that day and said, “Hey, pop the camera down low. Jeff, sit there, do your actions.” Came together great.

Victor Scalise: One of the cool things about Little Buggy is, it goes back to Buggy’s character where he’s pretty much defeated and has nothing left to throw at Luffy. Yet he’s still a wiseass. 

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): You’re just a sad … lonely little boy wearing another man’s hat! 

Victor Scalise: In creating Buggy, it really was an ensemble of all departments. You know, hair, makeup, stunts. 

Scott Ramsey: You have to have every department come together and work with visual effects on this, because the visual effects can carry so much. But with the look of him, that really drove the whole thing.

[upbeat synth music playing] 

[TITLE CARD] HAIR AND MAKEUP: BUGGY’S LOOK

Amanda Ross-McDonald: Hi, I’m Amanda Ross-McDonald, and I’m the hair and makeup designer for the Buggy the Clown character. When I first came across Buggy the Clown, I was really impressed with what a character he is. He’s got the striking blue hair. He’s got this massive, big nose. So he’s quite a crazy character. It took us quite a while to develop before we even had Jeff in hand. Part of this was coloring the hair, and the hair took us about two weeks to get the right color and tone. I remember looking one day at my colorist, and she was covered in blue because she’d been coloring all this hair for two days. But the process to get Jeff into Buggy every day is about a two-hour process. It starts with us shaving him. Then we have to put his hair back for his wig. It’s putting the tattoos on, putting the nose on. We had individual eyelashes that we put on for him. And then it’s the painting of the mouth, applying the wig, applying the bandanna. One of the most challenging things of Buggy’s makeup was the nose, and making sure that it was seamless. Our collaboration with the prosthetics department on this was absolutely huge. Jaco and his team built the most amazing nose for Buggy.

[TITLE CARD] PROSTHETICS: BUGGY’S NOSE 

[upbeat funky music playing] 

Jaco Snyman: My name is Jaco, and I’m the prosthetics designer for One Piece. For Buggy’s nose, we went through quite a couple of design changes because we are changing the media in which you see this character. Matt and Steve were adamant that it had to just look like a clown’s nose but actually be Buggy’s nose. So we did a version where his nose looks like a round foam nose, but it actually blends into his skin and has skin texture on it, which everyone was happy with.

[CLIP] [dramatic music playing] 

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): Ah. Would you look at that? Somebody escaped my tank of doom.

RIchard Brigland: I’m Richard Bridgland, and I'm the production designer. The important thing with all the sets is all of them have got a foundation story. Buggy’s tent was really interesting because Buggy’s obviously a clown, but he has a ship. So I figured that his tent was kind of his mobile HQ, and he would have made it out of the things that he had to hand. So what he had to hand were old sails. It’s also what gave it the crazy design, because the sails were all irregular shapes, and they would have been stitched together in this slightly anarchic way. So everything was sort of ship-based. Using that as kind of the foundation story, that then kind of designed itself fairly seamlessly.

[CLIP] [screams] 

Amanda Ross-McDonald: One of the most satisfying parts of creating Buggy was just seeing Jeff love being in that character, and also seeing people’s reaction to him because he owned it, he embodied it.

[TITLE CARD] THE JEFF FACTOR

Scott Ramsey: Ah, he loved that.

Victor Scalise: Jeff was a trooper. You couldn’t have asked for a better actor. 

Scott Ramsey: He’s the only person I saw who got a standing ovation from the extras after he got done with one scene in his big dramatics. He does this whole presentation. He’s killing it. Everybody’s blown away. And at the end, all the extras were kind of like …

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): No! No, no, no! [applause] 

[CLIP] Jeff Ward (as Buggy the Clown): Stop clapping. No, stop. It’s all wrong. 

Victor Scalise: One of the cool things about One Piece is the variety. You know, it’s not a space show where all you’re doing is spaceships. We’ve got boats. We’ve got creatures. We’ve got a guy who stretches and is rubber. We’ve got a guy who breaks into a million pieces. We’ve got swordplay. We’ve got kind of every type of effects you could come up with, all in one piece.

[uplifting music playing]

[CLIP] [man shouting indistinctly] [laughs]