The Miami sequence, meanwhile, involves a helicopter with a large magnet on the bottom, which picks up an armored vehicle on the streets of Miami and then flies into a building with a Dunkin Donuts sign on top of it. "Again, a really nice, challenging sequence, with the main part of the job being hard surface CG," Hughes explains.

In fact, the last major component Image Engine worked on was the jet sequence involving exploding planes and "all kinds of fun and games," according to Hughes. "It's a comp and effects artist's dream and the chance to show off."

Image Engine utilized a small crew of about 25 and it relied on its well tested pipeline. Nuke is now well integrated in a workflow that primarily consists of Maya and 3delight. "The larger pieces of jets blowing up were animations done in Maya," Hughes adds. Image Engine certainly could've done full CG fluid explosions, but the stylistic choice was to do photoreal vfx in a comic book kind of world.

Steve Garrad, Image Engine's Visual Effects senior visual effects producer, admits that it "did get a little hairy in the end because it was very tight in terms of delivery. Everyone loves to carry on editing these days, and that never makes our life easy. But, in fairness to the guys at Dark Castle, we started the big explosion shots early and they kept them in. In fact, Joel [Silver] liked them so much, he added another one toward the end, so we turned over another shot of a plane exploding in a week. I always think that jobs are at their most efficient and everyone's working at the best right when you come to the end."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.