Digital Domain supervised over 260 shots in Aeon Flux. Courtesy of Digital Domain. All images © 2005 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

Utopian societies have always been a popular theme in science-fiction movies. Inevitably, the plot introduces characters living a perfect life in a perfect world, until one rogue individual uncovers the hidden truth behind this dream society. Major feature films based on this theme include THX 1138 (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), Demolition Man (1993) and The Island (2005). Paramount’s Aeon Flux (opening Dec. 2) follows the same plot pattern, with a few twists of its own. It is the year 2415. A deadly disease has wiped out the majority of earth’s population, except for one walled city, Bregna. In this protected environment, the population lives a perfect life, completely isolated from the outside world. Some individuals, though, believe this perfect society is hiding a perfect lie. One of them is Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), a top assassin for the rebellion against Bregna’s rulers. During the course of a mission, she unveils the hidden side of Bregna…

As always in a movie depicting our future world, the major challenge is to visualize it in a convincing and innovative way. For Aeon Flux, director Karyn Kusama chose to portray Bregna as an organic world, one that is less hardware-driven. She based the look of the city on the clear, unbroken lines of the Bauhaus architectural style. Indeed, a large part of the movie was shot on location in Berlin, Germany, in and outside many landmark Bauhaus-style buildings. Having found real locations to serve as a suitable backdrop for many scenes allowed Kusama to limit visual effects to a reasonable shot count.

Initially, the entire project was awarded to Digital Domain where David Prescott and Jonathan Egstad supervised over 260 shots. “Interestingly for a futuristic movie, it features very few environmental effect shots,” Prescott said. “What we did was to extend the real locations with matte-paintings, or incorporate real buildings into 3D environments. This included the sequence in which Aeon and Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo) break into a government complex. The plates were shot at an animal shelter in Berlin and this building later formed the basis of the environment. Using Maya, we built on top of it, added a giant compound in the background and many structures in the foreground.” The images were then rendered out in RenderMan with some elements rendered in Houdini’s Mantra. The various layers were composited in Nuke with compositing supervisor Sonja Burchard overseeing the project.

Organic Technology
The government complex is surrounded by a no man’s land equipped with unique security systems. These included grass that, upon contact, becomes as sharp as a razor blade. This unusual device was part of the organic approach implemented by Kusama and production designer Andrew McAlpine for all Bregna’s technology. Everything had to be based on organic material, rather than on hardware, which led to unique designs throughout the movie. The sharp grass effect was created first by animating CG grass in Houdini, and then, by compositing it into plate elements of the real “stone” garden location. The elements were then combined with CG extensions and matte-paintings.

The sequence also included a shot in which the characters approach the entrance to the government complex, a crane move reveals another major CG environment. For this shot that was added late in postproduction, Theron and Okonedo were filmed on a greenscreen stage entering a doorway. “We didn’t have any location plate beyond the foreground greenscreen element for this environment,” Prescott continues. “Using photographic reference material that we had shot in Berlin, we were able to reconstruct the building and then, extend it with CG additions and extra features that were designed from scratch.”