Peerless was asked to take an abandoned Royal Air Force airfield and create a busy international airport. All images © 2006 Danjaq LLC, United Artists Corp., Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. Courtesy of Peerless Camera.

For more than 30 years, the James Bond franchise almost exclusively relied on elaborate practical and miniature effects to shoot their most spectacular action sequences. However, when Pierce Brosnan took over as secret agent 007 in 1995, the saga progressively incorporated digital effects into its arsenal. This approach reached a high point with Die Another Day (2002), a movie that featured an invisible car, 007 surfing a tsunami, a high tech satellite and a destructive energy beam. Way too much, according to most reviewers. Even though Die Another Day ended up being the highest grossing Bond movie ever, producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli embraced a more back to basics approach with Casino Royale (Columbia Pictures/MGM, Nov. 17), based on Ian Fleming's first novel. The gamble has since paid off beyond expectation along with the controversial signing of Daniel Craig as 007, as Casino Royale has topped Die Another Day as the all-time franchise hit with more than $500 million worldwide.

For this origin story, director Martin Campbell wanted to limit the use of digital effects to an absolute minimum, bringing the franchise back to its hard edge, low-tech From Russia With Love days.

To this purpose, they enlisted visual effects supervisor Steve Begg, a seasoned expert in miniature effects (Batman Begins). The results are so impressive that Casino Royale has been shortlisted for a VFX Oscar. "When I came in, the original idea was to do as much in-camera as possible. This, of course, is not exactly what happened. They had initially planned for about 60/80 digital vfx shots, but I knew this would go up in post-production. Well, it eventually went up to 580 shots. Still, there was a lot of traditional model work featured in the film, and the stunt work was all for real, albeit assisted by wire and rig removal."

The visual effects were originally all assigned to Peerless Camera Co., a London-based vendor that had provided digital trickery for Legend of Zorro, Campbell's previous directorial effort. When the shot count grew substantially, Begg and visual effects producer Sharon Lark brought several other British vendors in. In the end, six facilities worked on the project:

Peerless Camera Co.: 430 shots
Double Negative: 50 shots
Cinesite: 30 shots
The Moving Picture Co. (MPC): 20 shots
Base Black: 20 shots
Fuzzy Goat: 20 shots

The extensive physical effects were created by Bond veteran Chris Corbould, while the model work was directed by Begg.

Creating a Sense of Danger
The movie opens with an extensive chase sequence in which Bond runs after a terrorist in a construction site. Both end up fighting on a crane arm, high above the ground. In the first part of the sequence, the terrorist is seen watching a fight between a cobra and a mongoose. The two animals were shot separately on greenscreen, with animal wranglers trying to get an appropriate performance, and then composited together in a clean background plate by MPC. For the chase itself, the stunt team used many different rigs, cables, harnesses and airbags that all had to be hand-painted out by very patient artists at Peerless Camera... The team there included president and visual effects consultant Kent Houston, visual effects supervisor John Paul Docherty and digital effects producers Diane Kingston and Marianne Speight. Some of these shots proved to be very challenging.

Peerless used the Panavision Genesis digital camera to shoot background footage of the Miami airport. This material was used as reference for matte paintings and as an element dropped directly in the background of the airfield plates.

"There was one moving helicopter shot, in particular, in which the camera was circling the action with water in the background," head of CG Ditch Doy recounts. "During this shot, the characters make a huge jump from one crane arm to another. The stunt was performed for real, but both stunt doubles wore a safety harness that was connected to a third crane that was sitting in the middle of the frame. Our 2D artists had to remove the crane and painstakingly reconstruct the background, and the water, as there was no clean plate available. We also had to do some 3D work to create a proper perspective change on background rooftops that had been obstructed by the third crane. It was a huge endeavor. Our artists did a brilliant job and the shot looks amazing."

Tighter shots on the crane arm fight were photographed on a partial set built on a rooftop, as to provide an aerial perspective in camera. In many instances, Peerless digitally extended the crane arm, and also created a ground view. "For safety reasons, we could never take a clean plate of the entire ground," Doy adds. "We always had the base of the crane in the frame. So, in order to build the ground, we had to patch various pieces of background plates together. Whenever this 2D approach didn't work, we used a 2½D option. We also built several 3D buildings to extend the construction site and create the appropriate perspectives." For this type of work, Peerless Camera mainly used Maya associated with mental ray. All the shots were composited in Shake and Inferno.

Creating an Airport in the Computer
The next big action sequence involves a car chase at Miami airport where a terrorist is trying to blow up a new airplane that is being introduced to the medias. The sequence was mainly shot at night at an abandoned Royal Air Force airfield. Since the location was situated in the countryside, there was no human activity anywhere around, which translated into pitch-black backgrounds--hardly suitable for nighttime Miami. Therefore, Peerless was asked to create a busy urban environment for the entire sequence, also adding extra hangars and terminal buildings to the airfield to turn it into an international airport.