The tri-camera methodology developed for Lord Marshal was later applied to Aeron, an alien character played by Judi Dench, to make her appear transparent. Photo Credit: Universal Studios.

Gone with the Wind
The tri-camera methodology developed for Lord Marshal was later applied to Aeron, an alien character played by Judi Dench. Although she appears in a human form most of the time, Aeron becomes transparent when hit by a strong wind. “The wind brings her back to her original alien form, a shape made of smoky material,” 2D Lead Mike Ellis reveals. “The more wind, the more transparent she becomes. We did a cyber scan of Judi and shot the plates with tracking marks on her face. Then, we replaced her with a CG double that was animated to follow her every move. It was filled up with volumetric smoke and particles that were all contained within the volume of her body. However, in our first attempts, the effect looked too flat. So, we added an extra layer revealing the rear side of her body through the smoke. It gave us a sense of depth for the character and made the effect much more interesting.”

Besides character-related effects, Double Negative handled several complex shots involving spaceships. One of these shots was more than 800 frames long. “In this shot, the camera follows a ship as it flies above water, over sand dunes and finally reaches a massive city,” Kjosrud recalls. “The whole journey is completely synthetic. The water was generated with proprietary software that we had developed for Below and then refined for the Nautilus shots of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The city was a matte-painting created in Photoshop and projected onto 3D geometry. As for the ship, it was a CG model that we’d built and later sent to Rhythm & Hues for their own sequences. We started designing the shot on the very first day of the production and kept working on it until two weeks before the film’s release. At the beginning of May, the animation was still not locked in. It just kept changing and evolving. Ultimately, this one shot was nine months in the making.”

A great deal of compositing work had to be down to transport actors like Vin Diesel and Alexa Davalos into the miniture sets. Photo Credit: Joseph Lederer.

Welcome to Hell Prison
While other facilities had work spread throughout the film, Rhythm & Hues’ work focused on two major sequences. “We did 135 shots for the film,” observes visual effects supervisor Mike Wassel.” The majority of our work appears in the Crematoria sequence. Riddick finds himself captive in a prison buried below the surface of the planet. During the day, the surface temperature of Crematoria rises to 700° and at night, falls below -300°.”

The main area of the prison, a 200-foot deep pit, was created via a combination of set elements and miniatures. Live-action plates were shot in a two-story high set built on stage in Vancouver. The upper levels were later realized as a 1/8-scale miniature, while the deeper lower sections were built at 1/16-scale. Both were later composited with the live-action plates in order to extend the set vertically. “The different levels were populated with CG prisoners rendered with our in-house software,” comments Wassel. “Most of the tools we used on the show are proprietary. Rhythm & Hues also created the Hell Hounds, dog-like creatures that guard the prison.”

One tricky hound shot had Riddick hiding behind a waterfall only to be discovered by one of the creatures. “The shot in which the hound slowly pushes its head through the water was very challenging. During preproduction, we shot video reference of a dog-head mannequin moving through the practical waterfall. But for the actual shot in the film, we photographed the background set clean. With the video reference as a guide, we used software developed here at Rhythm & Hues to run the fluid simulation. That simulation had to run for nine days, but it gave us an accurate motion analysis of how the water interacts with the dog. From that data we created several layers of elements, which were composited with the live-action plate.”