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Leave it to David Fincher to push the digital envelop ever so slightly in The Social Network with two simple VFX techniques to enhance his storytelling. For instance, he suggested a "hockey mask" face projection method to create the illusion of the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer), the arch rivals of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). In addition, to create the illusion of miniaturization for the twins during their dramatic loss in the famed Henley Regatta in England, the director recommended a new select lens effect based on tilt-shift photography.

To help with the face projection, Fincher enlisted Lola Visual Effects (under the supervision of Edson Williams), which worked on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. They first thought of utilizing Paul Debevec's Lightstage method, but it proved unworkable with the Red camera.

"So we developed a similar system using traditional lighting (12 kinoflo 400s and 8 bi-color litepanels) and DMX stage lighting software," Williams explains. "We wanted to use the Red because the movie was shot on Red and it also gave us a higher res and better dynamic range. We're able to shoot realtime, 24-frames-per-second, with four Red MX cameras running, using a stand-in to match the lighting of the offline.

"We had the body double [Josh Pence] sitting in a dental chair with head restraint to minimize movement. During the shoot, Armie and Josh acted normally. We tracked about half a dozen dots on Josh's face. No HDR was needed: this takes time and can break the mood of the performance. In editorial, Fincher chose what take he wanted and we sent it offline to Lola. During evaluation, we analyzed the offline and determined main keyframe locations. During his performance, Armie watched the playback of the offline on the monitor wearing headphones; Fincher gave very precise directions for Armie's performance [enabling subtle nuances between the twins]; it took 10-20 minutes per shot to capture. We tracked Josh's face using PFTrack and then swapped his 3D face with Armie's. For the pre-grade, using Maya, we projected footage from the Red cameras onto a cyberscan of Armie's face. Back on Flame, we composited the face we received from the 3D department."

This method was used for 20 shots, with nearly 100 additional shots required for other split-screen work involving Hammer since they were unable to shoot at Harvard. Michael Watson, a camera operator on several Fincher projects, helped with technical aspects of the Red and the lighting as the internal DP. Since the flesh tones of Hammer and Pence are different, this required some additional tweaking. The process worked really well, according to Williams, allowing Fincher to get a very controlled performance in a very efficient manner.