In Watchmen, actor Billy Crudup was shot with facial acquisition markers on his face and a form-fitted helmet with blue light-emitting LEDs. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Imageworks. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. ™ & © DC Comics.

For years, they've warned that Watchmen could not be made into a movie. After all, the graphic novel from Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons is the headiest and most influential ever written: a multi-layered and wildly subversive deconstruction of the superhero with enough politics and pop cultural references to make your head spin.

Taxi Driver influenced the New York scenes in Watchmen, while Dr. Strangelove was an inspiration on the Nixon/Kissinger scenes in Washington. Photo by Clay Enos.

Yet that didn't stop 300 director Zack Snyder from diving right in to make Watchmen come alive on the big screen, adding his own layers of pop cultural complexity while staying true to the graphic novel's basic narrative and color palette of purples, greens, yellows, pinks, browns and oranges.

Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the Doomsday Clock, which charts the country's Cold War tension with the Soviet Union, moves closer to midnight.

Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), Night Owl II (Dan Dreiberg) and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) comprise the crime fighting legion that have long since retired but are now swept up in a bizarre plot to avoid nuclear annihilation.

Indeed, Watchmen is the perfect fit for Production Designer Alex McDowell (Fight Club, Minority Report, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), with its kitschy look and complex layering of time and space. If you remember, McDowell is co-founder of 5D: The Future of Immersive Design, and you can't get more immersive than Watchmen.

And Watchmen is also the perfect fit for Visual Effects Supervisor John DJ DesJardin (The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand), who is a self-proclaimed comic geek. DesJardin oversaw 1,100 vfx shots, divided among several studios, including Sony Pictures Imageworks, MPC Vancouver, Intelligent Creatures, CIS and Rising Sun Pictures. McDowell and DesJardin provide an overview of their work in the first part of our coverage, while we offer a more detailed survey of the studios' contributions in the second part.

"Watchmen is all about details... it's all about telescoping time," McDowell insists. "The editorial tool is the way to turn the graphic novel into the film; you can get so much information across in a parallel way, and we approached the design that way. So this idea that you can embed these threads and cram stuff in parallel time really came across. But Watchmen is a traditional film in many ways. And for the designer, it's the density that's the challenge: the actual complexity was logistic. "There were many, many more sets than I've ever built in a movie (around 200) because of all the layering of time and space that we had to deal with, the character threads, there has to be so much material that has to be created to carry the story."

McDowell emphasizes that Watchmen is no next-gen film like 300: to adapt the graphic novel to the screen required more of a Tim Burton approach -- build as much as you can until you require CG. "I don't think there was any question of Zack doing another 300. In a way, he used greenscreen technology on 300 because it was expedient and appropriate for that world. The decision we made in the first meeting with Zack, the translation that you needed to make for this graphic novel, was inject this kind of gritty realism into the storytelling. This was not some squeaky clean world. But it was actually the dirty world that we live in, that it was occurring in. So it wasn't appropriate to copy the look of the graphic novel because the graphic novel is, you know, graphic, by default. But if one were to think of the same kind of comparison of Watchmen to other superhero movies, it needed to be grounded in a reality that you could believe these superheroes could exist."