Visual effects supervisor, Paul Franklin, enters Gotham City. All images courtesy of Double Negative. © 2005 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved.

For its most ambitious project to date, London-based Double Negative created more than 300 vfx shots for Batman Begins, led by in-house visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin. This necessitated revamping its design facility, creating a new working pipeline and installing new infrastructure to handle the workload. Franklin tells comic expert Danny Fingeroth how Double Negative helped to seamlessly create Gotham City and its role in digitally assisting with many of the other Bat happenings.

Danny Fingeroth: How did the visual effects you worked on help to make Batman, a superhero who’s not actually superhuman, seem bigger than life?

Paul Franklin: The key thing for this movie, throughout production and post-production, and in every aspect, is that [director] Chris Nolan really wanted this to be very much grounded in some sort of believable reality, rather than existing purely inside some sort of graphic world that could only be achieved through the use of computer animation or whatever. And he always wanted to make it feel like that you might actually go to Gotham, that Gotham might be a real place and that somebody could really do the things that Batman was doing.

So, particularly with our work for creating the character of Batman, the majority of what you’re looking at on film is real stuntwork. It’s either Christian Bale dressed as Batman, or his stunt double, Buster, who did some incredible stuff. And there was some amazing work put together by the stunt crew for the show. But there were a few moments where we used digital effects to basically extend what the stunt crew had already achieved, and just basically carry the action off in ways that perhaps are a little bit too hard to rig at the moment. For instance, Batman is equipped with various types of high technology that he uses in his battle against crime. He has the ability to fly — or, to be more precise — to glide, with the aid of the Bat-cape. And the special effects guys put together a really impressive flying rig for Batman. But one thing that it wasn’t really capable of doing was deploying in flight. So, for instance, when Batman jumps off the top of a building and goes down the side of a building, and then his loose-flying cape suddenly deploys into the hang glider shape, bat-wing shape — that’s something we achieved digitally, through digital stunt double work. But, at every point, Chris Nolan was really, really keen that it shouldn’t look like this guy has suddenly sprouted wings and is able to fly like a bird-man. He basically is now turned into, say, a hang glider or a parasail, or something like that. And so that effect was based on: what might it be like if this guy was equipped with some kind of high-tech parafoil? How might he fly?

DF: Well, you certainly achieved that.

PF: Batman’s not capable of incredible muscular feats that would require him to be superhuman and have unbelievable, godlike strength. But he’s equipped with this incredible Kevlar body suit that has an endoskeleton, and all this sort of stuff. So that’s the type of thing we were doing. And in order to make that all work, we had to, first off, make very, very detailed models of Christian Bale dressed as Batman in the Batman costume. We had to study the Batman costume so we could reproduce it with fidelity in the digital world, so that you wouldn’t notice the difference between the digital Batman and the live-action Batman. Because we actually cut seamlessly within a couple of shots from a stunt double to the fully digital Batman. We wanted to make sure that was seamless, because we didn’t want it to certainly look like it was turned into an animated character at that point. And then, when we we’re doing the stuff that we’re doing as digital effects, we’re always basing it on some sort of actual reference. So, for example, for the shot in the movie, where you see Batman dive down the side of a building and then deploy his wings and “fly,” it’s an entirely digital shot. We actually had access to Buster, and he and the stunt crew staged the special reference stuff for us. Buster went up on top of one of the large buildings inside the giant set in Cardington, which is about eight stories high, and did a wire jump off the side of the building — which he repeated 10 times.

We mounted 10 video cameras manned by members of the Double Negative visual effects team, and recorded Buster from every possible angle doing this repeated action. He did it with and without the bat wings, so we could get a feel for how he might fall, and how the wings might behave in the slipstream. So all our stuff was always based on some sort of actual reference that we always have.