One of the digital touches added to Chicago to transform it into Gotham City was the monorail system.

DF: Are there any scenes you worked on that are obviously vfx?

PF: With visual effects work, you have stuff that ranges from big, key moments — like, say, the end shot of the movie, or that big cityscape or any of these big establishing city shots of Gotham where we’ve extended the scenes, and that’s obviously stuff where people will probably notice that something was done. But then you go all the way down to the other end of the scale, where you’ve got straightforward things like wire removals, where you’re just taking out wiring and things like that and preparing the background, removing a bit of camera apparatus, which you didn’t want to see, that sort of thing. That’s obviously stuff that people might not notice that there’s any visual effects work.

DF: But, say, the scene on the glacier — were there any visual effects done on that?

PF: The big moment in the scenes in Iceland is when we establish the monastery for the first time, where you see the monastery on the side of a mountain through a snowstorm. And the monastery is a miniature, of course, because there isn’t a real monastery that looks like that, and there certainly isn’t one in Iceland.

But everything that you’re looking at in terms of the environment in those scenes, with the snow falling, all that sort of stuff, that’s all been created digitally, as well. I’d say that’s an example of scene effects where people wouldn’t notice that something was going on. Perhaps the best moment for that is, at the end of that whole sequence where Bruce Wayne is walking towards the private jet parked out on the runway. That was actually shot at a rather rainy airfield north of London, so surrounding the plane was just flat, green, rolling fields, and some housing in the far distance. We replaced the background with a digital matte painting, which I think is pretty seamlessly integrated there. It makes it look like you’re still in the Iceland environment.

DF: Were there any visual effects you tried for in the movie that didn’t work and couldn’t be used?

PF: I’d say no. There wasn’t really anything that we tried that didn’t work out, because we were in a very lucky position on with this film. We got involved on the movie right at the beginning, during preproduction. We were involved in all of the pre-planning phase, so we were able to actually sit down with the guys and work out the best way of going about shooting things, and what kind of material we needed to get, and what kind of tools that we needed to develop. We then were able to have a good, solid six months of research and development here at Double Negative, where our programmers worked like the blazes and developed this fantastic new suite of tools, which allowed us to do the show. This pretty much allowed us to accommodate all of the different things that then happened as we went along through the film.

So we moved from a position where, at the outset of the film, Chris was pretty adamant that he wasn’t going to have digital cityscapes, certainly not entirely digital cityscapes, in the film, to a position, at the end of post-production, where Chris is approaching his final cut of the film and is coming up with new ideas for shots, and we’re able to generate them entirely digitally, because obviously there is no opportunity to go out and shoot new material at this point.

DF: So his original vision was to do things completely naturalistically?

PF: Or to restrict visual effects to things like matte painting extensions of cityscapes and for backgrounds, and whenever we were looking at foreground architecture, to always have that as real stuff in-camera. But as the film progressed, I think Chris became more and more comfortable with what we were doing and what we were able to give him. And he would ask for something and we would give it to him, not come back and say, “Well, we can’t do this, and we can’t do that.” Because we’d had this long period to plan and decide how we were going to approach things. He became pretty confident we could achieve the things he was after. So we ended up with sequences in the final reel of the movie, in the train sequence, where we’re cutting back to back between completely CGI shots for about five shots in a row, at one point.