More shots from the stunning crash in Beverly Hills.

Legato worked with Technicolor to break down the process in a way that could be emulated digitally. “Recreating it was a lot of work. I went through the history of Technicolor, imitating what they did in the lab. We basically printed out three-color strips on transparency material that we could hold up to the light. When we took one away, we could understand what the two-strip look was. I was so blown-away by the cleverness back then - that somebody could come up with the idea of taking three pieces of black-and-white film and put the appropriate color filters on them. It’s still black-and-white except that the colors record differently on the different black-and-white and gray layers. Then you combine them together with ink and you create a full color picture. It’s like a magic trick. Not many people in America would know what that look was, but Marty knows. So I matched it as closely as possible.”

Looking back on the painstaking attention to detail that went into The Aviator, Legato admits, “I adored everything about it.” He cites the aerial battle in the virtual environment “as probably the sequence that I’m most proud of. Every shot in the sequence looks pretty believable, like the real thing — at least as close as we could get.”

Ellen Wolff is a Southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the Website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.