Check out the trailer for The Green Hornet on AWNtv!

With Michel Gondry, you never quite know what you're going to get, but it's bound to be an adventure in nature and science. So, when it came to making The Green Hornet, the vfx folks were part of the adventure, too. Jamie Dixon, owner of Hammerhead Prods., was the overall visual effects supervisor, who collaborated with CIS Hollywood, CIS Vancouver, Luma Pictures, Pixomondo, among others, in pulling off Gondry's vision for The Green Hornet.

There were 650 shots, a topsy turvy production schedule, some fancy visualization of time and space, lots of bluescreen and plenty of mayhem to roto & comp, not to mention 3-D conversion.

"Instead of finishing last summer, it was pushed to the end of the year," Dixon recalls. "Then about half-way through the extension they made the decision to do the movie in 3-D. So all of a sudden, instead of having six months too many, we had six months too few. There was a big period running around to get stuff finished so it could get into the 3-D process [with several companies involved, including Stereo D and Sony Pictures Imageworks]. Luckily, we got a lot of amazing work from everybody, but we spent a lot of time managing expectations and trying to maintain everyone's enthusiasm so we could get the best work out of them."

Hammerhead did the bluescreen driving in the Black Beauty and used stunt car footage to shoot plates that allowed them to have every moment covered. That gave the editorial department a lot of flexibility. Hammerhead also did the green gas, which works as one of the funniest gags, thanks to the antics of Seth Rogen as Britt Reid/The Green Hornet.

Luma Pictures did most of 3D work: the flipping of the Black Beauty, set extensions in the printing press melee and the backgrounds for Reid and Kato popping out of the ejector seat with the floating parachute.

CIS Vancouver provided 80 shots, including greenscreen driving comps, re-speeds and paint clean-ups in a major car chase. In addition, they helped out with some roto work for Stereo D's dimensionalization.

But the most challenging and fascinating work involved Kato's unusual fighting abilities in three sequences by CIS Hollywood (under the supervision of Greg Oehler), which Gondry dubbed Kato Speed & Kato Vision.

"It's a crazy split time where everybody's going in different time frames," Dixon suggests. "And Michel Gondry was trying to illuminate that this guy had special powers of perception, and the idea was that Kato is like a hummingbird: he sees the world a little bit faster than us so he can react faster, and also has the ability to size up the threats, process what it means and then react to each threat in a very efficient way.