The challenge of the Darwin sequence was to create a full CG environment, including terrain, period buildings, vegetation and a wharf full of ships of all shapes and sizes. Courtesy of Animal Logic.

The port town of Darwin is another focal point of the film, beginning as the commercial hub to which the cattle must be delivered and later as the scene of an attack by the Japanese.

Created by Animal Logic, the Darwin sequences required a broad spectrum of techniques, says Emmanuel Blasset, 3D supervisor at the Sydney-based facility.

To handle the workload, Blasset says they put in place a system the facility first used on 300, in which a "creative hub" of artists very quickly blocks out shots, interacting with the client to nail down the shot as quickly as possible.

"That's the most important part on these kinds of projects," he says. "If there is any kind of creative uncertainty, because the nature of the shot has changed, we always would go back to this creative hub, which would allow us to solve it as quickly as possible."

The challenge of Darwin was to create a full CG environment, including terrain, period buildings, vegetation and a wharf full of ships of all shapes and sizes. "It was very important to get the scale and the immensities that Baz Luhrmann was after, so we needed the wharf treated almost as a character," Blasset notes. "From a framing point of view, it was very important to help the storytelling by helping the way the eye is drawn through the shot. And large shapes within the frame really help toward that end, and Baz used the ships and the wharf to that extent."

Blasset says Animal Logic pushed some of its technical capabilities in such areas as atmospherics, applying a number of SIGGRAPH papers to ensure the atmospherics of the sky were correct.

The facility also used a light stage that allowed it to capture materials under any lighting condition they wanted. "It would capture those materials and extract shading models," he continues.

For creating Darwin, a tool called City Builder was developed to implement a more procedural, eye-level approach to creating the city. Courtesy of Animal Logic.

Pipeline wise, Blasset says Animal Logic works in parallel as much as possible, with elements being built while they're being blocked out and changes being constantly updated to all departments as work progresses. "It's about minimizing the delays between each department, minimizing communication and really maximizing the amount of creative cycles we can have," he says.

For creating Darwin, a tool called City Builder was developed to implement a more procedural, eye-level approach to creating the city. "You can draw streets and define areas where you say, well this area is more industrial, this area is more commercial and this one is more a resident area," he says. "You define parameters: density, size of blocks, any of the different props you would include in those areas. And we can manipulate the streets and manipulate the overlapping zones and it will do a first pass of the layout for the artist."

While Animal Logic has been on the project 18 months, since before principal photography began, most of the work was done in the last five or six months using a crew of about 80 people to create 185 shots.

"Compressing the schedule on a visual effects company is only a problem if you don't cater the way you work to handle that," he concludes. "Six months doesn't sound like a lot but it was a huge amount of time for a typical visual effects project."

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comic book blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.