Chun-Li trains with her master, Gen. She must fight the evil Bison to save her kidnapped father. VFX Supervisor Marc Kolbe worked with the director to make sure the shots were necessary fixes to fight scenes.

Because of the high degree of hand-to-hand fight scenes, a large percentage of Kolbe's work involved digital wire removal. On-set fight choreography would be shot with the actors working in wire harnesses, allowing for an increased range of movement and a chance to simulate fighting moves that would be otherwise impossible. Afterward, artists went in frame by frame and removed the wires digitally. On set, everything had to be shot with the idea that anything extra appearing in front of the camera would have to be subtracted later.

"Wires get in the way," explains Kolbe, "[So] you work closely with the action director and the DP. If all of you are on the same page, it can be painless. If not, you can get stuck with a lot of fix-it shots or shots that are more complicated than they should be. There's nothing worse than a wire cutting across the actor's face in a close up."

To this end, a major part of Kolbe's production work involved staying in constant communication with Director Andrzej Bartkowiak and the Action Director Dion Lam. Even though Kolbe didn't get to Thailand until five days before shooting began, the creative trio had a clear-cut "stitch in time" mindset, with all three understanding that, even under the best of circumstances, it's better to shoot with the vfx shots carefully planned in advance than to just assume any rough patches can be fixed in post.

Though the wirework removal was the most intense part of more than 300 vfx shots in all, there were a number of other complicated digital additions that had to be completed in a very short six-week period, including compositing work for greenscreen window replacement.

Warrior and assassin Vega goes into attack mode. The in-house team was aided by EFX, Sony Imageworks in India and Avatar VFX in L.A.

One sequence involves a state-of-the-art prison cell where a wall is meant to be made of video screens that simulate full-length artificial windows with adjustable views. The characters switch between a city setting and a nature setting, changing the view mid-scene. To accomplish this, greenscreen was utilized during shooting and later composited with the appropriate background. Another scene in an Internet cafe involved a similar but far more subtle effect, replacing monitors that were shot blank with different simulated screens, everything from videogames to Web browsers.

One effect that Kolbe ranks among the most difficult is Chun-Li's "Chi Ball." In the Street Fighter videogames, several characters employ a fight move called a hadouken or "surge fist." Meant to represent a wave of spiritual energy, Chun-Li is able to call upon this fantastic ability through intense concentration.

"We needed to come up with a 'make it look different' look," says Kolbe, who had to create an effect for the Chi Ball that would reflect the videogames while still feeling natural against the film's real-world environment.

"[The fantastic and the realistic] both can present their own set of problems. To me, fantasy can be harder since there are no limits to what your mind can come up with. But the questions, 'Is it interesting to the audience? 'Does it make the story better?', come up all the time. With the Chi Ball, we had so many iterations, I wouldn't say that one was better than the other. They were just different."

In the end, the Chi Ball appears in about 50 shots split between two different sequences. The team ended up using a look all their own rather than one directly inspired from the original game, an approach that was used for many aspects of the film in the hopes of creating an entirely new Street Fighter cinematic universe.

"I hope the true gamers are OK with how it came out," concludes Kolbe, who admits that the balance of time and money plays an unfortunate factor when it comes to trying to be a vfx perfectionist, "You can get caught up with never finishing a shot. You just run out time and money."

Silas Lesnick is a freelance writer and critic. Now living in L.A., he graduated from Emerson College with a degree in media arts and has spent time working with the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C.