Because filming wasn’t allowed inside a Catholic church, Rainmaker UK created previs, wireframe and textured CG models of Saint Sulpice. All images © 2006 Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. All rights reserved.

Of all the super-sized blockbuster films opening this summer, the one least likely to immediately conjure up visions of CG flights of fancy would have to be the theatrical translation of Dan Brown’s international bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (which opens May 19 from Sony Pictures). While the book is a brisk-paced, religious-themed, page-turner, it’s also a very narrative heavy story that progresses over the course of many erudite conversations among scholarly characters Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) and Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen). They spend the bulk of the novel and script talking about religious and historical events of note that end up unraveling the mystery of the true nature of The Holy Grail. It’s definitely not the kind of story that lends itself to the expected summer fare of over-the-top car chases, alien battle sequences or superhero sequences. Yet Da Vinci Code utilized the varied expertise of five separate visual effects houses, including Moving Picture Co. (MPC) and Rainmaker UK, the new London facility for the Vancouver-based studio.

Mark Breakspear (left) of Rainmaker UK and MPC’s Gary Brozenich created many special sequences and the bridging work for Da Vinci Code. The vfx are mainly invisible and woven into the story.

Director Ron Howard employed a wide range of subtle visual effects in the film, mandating the various houses (which also included The Senate, Brainstorm Digital and Double Negative), through overall visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton, to bring it to life without overly focusing on any of the CGI sequences used to support the narrative. Mark Breakspear, visual effect supervisor at Rainmaker UK, explains, “It’s not your typical visual effects movie. There are visual effects in it, but they are so woven into the story that they come and go.” Gary Brozenich, visual effects supervisor at MPC, concurs, adding, “I think the real challenge was that it was broken down into very challenging large shots, but very small sequences. Sometimes they were so complex, you would build a pipeline around them for a large show, where here we were creating huge numbers of assets and strong rendering pipelines around single shots.”

For Rainmaker UK, it was their company’s subtle work on the thriller Firewall that got them the Da Vinci gig. Breakspear details, “We had to build a model of Seattle and it was all filmed in Vancouver. We were filming out of Harrison Ford’s office and it had to be rainy Seattle. We had the rainy bit down because it was Vancouver, but to get the rainy Seattle part we had to go in there and basically rebuild the view out of his window. It’s a technique of textures and combining them with CG and getting this nice in-between process. It gave us an interesting way of making something completely photoreal.”

Bickerton was familiar with Firewall and asked if Rainmaker would have a look at a sequence in Da Vinci Code. “There is quite a dark part of the book where Silas the monk (Paul Bettany) is killing off all the keepers of the Holy Grail. He believes that each one of them has told him where the Holy Grail is and they’ve all told him the same thing, but they are lying. He goes to the church believing he knows where the Grail is buried, in a specific point in this church in Paris. He breaks a hole in the church floor and pulls out this tablet that has a quote on it from the Bible that says, “Your journey ends here.” He murders a nun in the church believing she is in on the ruse and obviously the Catholic Church didn’t want us to do that in their church. Fair enough,” he offers. “So we thought a lot about using different churches, but in this sequence they really wanted to be as truthful to the book as possible. This church is so unique in the way it looks. The architecture is really unique to the church and they wanted to use it.”

The solution? Using CGI modeling to recreate the insides of the churches, using the techniques they created in Firewall. Breakspear offers, “Angus really backed us the whole way and really wanted Rainmaker to work on it. Angus gave us a few pictures of the church and we created a test to show him the kind of things we were thinking of. He showed it to Ron Howard and [exec producer] Todd Hallowell and they were like, “Great!” We did the entire job in our London office. We crewed up for that and I went over to London and supervised the job.