Falling trees during the earthquake was the most challenging sequence, requiring greenscreen, particle work and CG dust, debris, ash and snow rising up from the ground.

MF: Although I'm famous for saying that I just don't want to read another post-apocalyptic script, when I heard it was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I didn't mind the exception. And then when I read the script, there is no mention of what the apocalyptic event was and nobody tries to convey 10 years after, so it was quite different from anything else, and it was just really the setting. And that leads me to the fact that it is very spare. As John said, there are three main characters: the man, the boy and the environment.

BD: So, what did your work consist of?

MF: There were a few little CG things: we had to build some billboards and street signs and there is one bug that needed to fly away on command. But we mostly had to remove bugs from the film. And then there's a falling tree sequence where there's a bit of an earthquake happening. That's the other thing: it's a lot about weather and John wanted a constant reminder that it was very volatile. Always gray, always dark, often rainy, often thundery, often in the midst of an earthquake. And at one point in time, they get caught in an area with very tall trees and an earthquake begins, so we downed a bunch of trees and shot them over greenscreen so it looked like the tree was falling only a couple of feet from them with the composite between the two. Which also required some CG particle work. And every time the trees would hit the ground, the dust and debris and the ash and snow would have to rise up, so that was all CG. There was some attempt on the set to spread ash and snow around, but that needed to be enhanced in almost every case to fill out the shot, so there were a lot of environmental set extensions.

The environment was the third character, which meant using vfx to help convey how volatile the weather was in this post-apocalypse.

MF: Between Nuke and Photoshop and Maya, we're all pretty standard. We used all the same tracking software and I don't think there was anything hugely proprietary or new or whiz bang.

BD: Talk about Dive becoming involved because of the Pennsylvania shoot.

MF: Dive is a relatively small company and the film came to Pennsylvania because of the tax incentive. And I think John and the whole production team was surprised to find a visual effects house there that they would be able to include because they had to reach a 60% level to qualify so being able to do the editing and the visual effects in Pennsylvania assured them of getting the tax break. But my idea in setting up the company was we would remain a small, core group, and that I would constantly rely on people who I now know all over the country who have left ILM, Digital Domain and Sony and they're moving back to Iowa and other places and living where they want. They have a machine at home, so we relied half on established companies in other cities in New York [Brainstorm Digital], LA [Crazy Horse Effects, Eden FX, Space Monkey] and Toronto [Invisible Pictures], and I would say the other half outside of Dive was done by what I call garage people. And that's really our whole methodology and the pipeline that I plan on using a lot. I can stay vital by staying small and having all these resources.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.