"That became in terms of rigging, two very different things. We called them riglets. Rather than traditionally placing your joints and bones inside a piece of geometry, you could rebuild a whole rig with small tweaks. You'd go from one shot where a couple of legs grow out, which would have one specific rig for that shot. We would have to rig it slightly differently to keep the transformation going, but the end result was very much a traditional animated rig when it's full formed. And on top of that, for each shot we would go in and actually animate deformers going through an extra layer on top of the skin. So when something grows we'd have bubbles and bones popping out."

The customization, meanwhile, was done with Image Engine's open source graphics library called Cortex developed by John Haddon, which includes C++ code bound into Python and tied into Maya.

"For me, what was most important was to get as good a plate as possible and to film it as good as possible," Kjolsrud emphasizes. " I got involved with costumes and special effects and stunts and came up with plans for shooting as much realistically as possible. Pulling out cloth with little wires and things and trying to get as much in camera, even knowing that for it to work with animation we needed to do a cloth sim of that anyway. But at least you have something that works in the frame and it's lit really nicely."

Bill Desowitz is former senior editor of AWN and editor of VFXWorld. He has a new blog, Immersed in Movies (www.billdesowitz.com), and is currently writing a book about the evolution of James Bond from Connery to Craig, scheduled for publication next year, which is the 50th anniversary of the franchise.