Before.

After.

This required a lot of R&D for new projection mapping techniques and moving the assets around in the compositing realm, allowing for quicker turnaround.

"When you do something in 3D, you can never see it in real time," Weigert suggests. "You have to wait for the picture to render, then you have to wait for all the frames to render to then put it into comp and then to see the results. So we tried to move away from that and do as much as we could with projection techniques in Fusion, which was the software of choice for this project. And we together worked with eyeon to develop new tools, one of which was full 3D water as a compositing package inside Fusion, so we had almost real time feedback on our water of the River Thames; we did 3D backgrounds with projected images must faster. For instance, we'd only render a still frame in the 3D package and then re-projected that in Fusion. And we'd use that and add camera moves.

"We wanted those shots to look as real and as immersive as possible. Roland likes to create these shots to put things in perspective and guide you and give you a sense of scale."

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.