Director Karyn Kusama shot a large part of the movie in Berlin, Germany, in and outside many landmark Bauhaus-style buildings. Using real locations allowed the filmmakers to limit visual effects to a reasonable shot count. Courtesy of Digital Domain.

Interior scenes of the movie also feature many CG extensions, most especially when Aeon enters the Relical, a flying monument with a hidden secret. A small section of the Relical interior was built as a live-action set. The rest was a CG environment that was built in Maya for the set itself, and in Houdini and NUKE for the holographic projections. Another challenging CG environment was built for the sequence in which Aeon attacks a ground-based surveillance facility. She discovers live surveillance images of the Bregna people “projected” into a pool of water, another illustration of Bregna’s organic approach to technology. “Aside from Charlize and the surveillance source imagery, the entire room is computer-generated,” Prescott recounts. “In the movie, the images are formed in the pool by drops of water that carry the visual information. It meant we had to create the surface of the water, the puddle and the drops, and all this had to be synchronized with different footage appearing at every drop. The most difficult aspect of the sequence was to make it look like the images were part of the water, and not some sort of monitors submerged in the pool. Most of the CG animation was created in Houdini.”

Hand in Hand
Assisting Aeon in her mission is Sithandra, a medically-enhanced girl who has hands for feet. Two different techniques were used to create it. On wide shots, a stunt double was photographed wearing prosthetic hands (created by Kevin Yagher) on top of her real feet, and her heels were later painted out. “For tighter shots on the character, we shot Sophie wearing skin-colored stunt shoes equipped with markers,” Prescott explains. “She also wore a circular prosthetic scar to represent the junction between her legs and her hands. We used that line as the replacement mark: everything below it was replaced by CG animation. We first tracked her feet and match-moved the CG hands, so that they followed every move of the legs. CG supervisor Darren Hendler then used proprietary shaders using sub-surface scattering to render the hands.”

To create the “fands” in wide shots, a stunt double wore prosthetic hands on her feet, and her heels were painted out. Courtesy of Digital Domain.

Ultimately, the major challenge with the “fands” effect was more artistic than technical. “The anatomy of a foot and a hand are so completely different that we struggled real hard to figure out how a hand should land on the ground, and trying to get the anatomy of a hand to fit within a foot space,” Prescott explains. “It ended up being a lot trickier than we had originally thought! We had shot reference footage of a stuntman in Berlin who could do incredible things walking on his hands. We asked him to do actions that corresponded to various scenes in the movie, and later studied that motion to incorporate the same kind of dynamics in the animation.” Several close-ups on the “fands” were created by filming the stuntman with his arms covered with prosthetics to make them look like legs; others required a fully CG approach.

Right from the beginning, Digital Domain knew a digital version of Charlize Theron would be needed for stunt work that couldn’t possibly be performed live, but they weren’t sure for how many shots. To this purpose, the actress was digitized and photographed in high resolution. In order to capture a maximum of information, a cast of her face was also produced, which was later scanned to complement the scan of the real face. This enabled CG Aeon look development lead Francisco Cortina to build a highly detailed replica of Theron that could be used in any kind of shots, such as in the scene where Aeon jumps on top of the Relical. In several shots throughout the movie, Digital Domain only used the CG head and composited it over a stuntwoman’s head.