Check out The Shutter Island trailer and clip at AWNtv!

The multi-talented Rob Legato, who created what he calls "Jim Cameron Capture," the extraordinary virtual cinematography system that allowed the director to shoot Avatar as if it were real, reunited with Martin Scorsese to make Shutter Island.

Adapted from Dennis Lehane's page turner about a web of deceit inside a fortress-like hospital for the criminally insane off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954, the visual effects supervisor helped Scorsese conjure a B-movie feast -- and much more.

"It was so fascinating to work on the movie," Legato suggests. "My version of what Marty was doing is that this is his version of Vertigo: not doing Alfred Hitchcock, but it's a very mature work that delves into the psyche of someone above and beyond the plot. And that's Marty's favorite Hitchcock film as well."

Shutter Island contains nearly 650 artful vfx shots, which were divided between The Basement (run by Legato and partner Ron Ames), CafeFX and New Deal Studios. CafeFX added cliffs and water and did compositing work; New Deal Studios built the miniatures, including the lighthouse and the mysterious Ward C.

The movie starts in the fog, and it conveys the notion that perhaps we're coming out of a dream. "I was the second unit director as well, and I had three boats with Navy jet foggers on them and blasted the crap out of the water and made sure I was driving in the direction of the wind so that the wind would let the thing emerge from this cloud of smoke," Legato explains. And when it didn't cover all the way, I had a Flame artist come in and patch a few areas so that it was a complete fog bank. And it has an appropriate artificial quality to the way the CG was done. There's a fine line between making it mostly look correct but not all correct, so it has a Hitchcock quality to it, though it was never stated directly.

"As far as the island itself, it was very difficult to make a matte painting that didn't look like a matte painting. We shot a real island in Maine and then added our version and Marty kept saying, 'Don't make it look like Skull Island.' And where we shot a lot of the cliffs in Maine for the second unit and visual effects work we used to populate the island. It's really more the art of it than the technique and that goes for the whole movie.

"We shot at [the defunct] Medfield State Hospital and 'islandized' it to make it look like the same property and made the cliffs show up there and the lighthouse. And we had rocks that were built in Canada to shoot these various pieces. Again, Marty didn't want to do anything outrageous with helicopter camera moves. He'd rather do almost locked off pieces for an effect, not for anything else.

"The hard stuff for us was trying to integrate the miniature lighthouse that we did into real water. And anytime you work with Marty, you look at all the references in his visual canon and then, when you think of things, you tend to fall into these visual compositions and these ideas. That's his subtle direction. You subconsciously do what he does, which is to come up with this stuff but not as homage to Hitchcock like the commercial we did (The Key to Reserva)."