Director Zhang Yimou brings us another action-packed fantasy from China with Curse of the Golden Flower. All images © Sony Pictures Classics.

In the short span of two decades, director Zhang Yimou has created a sea change in Chinese filmmaking. With his bold visual style and poetic approach to the depiction of martial arts battles in films such as The House of Flying Daggers and Hero, he’s fashioned a fusion of beauty and violence together that now serves as his unique visual signature in the landscape of international cinema.

Likewise, vfx have become an integral part of bringing his breathtaking sequences to life, as seen in the intense wirework sequences or stunning CG created weaponry hurling through the air toward its mark. For Yimou’s latest film, Curse of the Golden Flower goes back in time 1,000 years to the flamboyant later Tang Dynasty. Against the backdrop of the dysfunctional Imperial family, a tale is woven out of their secrets being revealed and the parallel coup d'état and subsequent battle raging outside their palace walls. The epic climactic battle, brought to life in resplendent scale through the coordination and direction of visual effects supervisors Frankie Chung Chi Hang of Centro and Angela Barton of Moving Picture Co. (MPC) serves as the ultimate visual metaphor for the entire film.

Both Hang and Barton were brought onto Curse to take care of the disparate visual effects needs for the film. Under Hang, Centro’s Computer Graphics department has become a powerhouse visual effects source for Asian cinema. He supervised Kung Fu Hustle and A Man Called Hero. “Mr. Bill Kong, the producer of Curse called us up one day and asked us if we would like to take on this project,” Hang says about how they were approached to work on Curse. “After a few weeks, we met with director Zhang Yimou and Tony Ching, action director of Curse. They gave us their visions on the visual effects. We were so excited and accepted this new challenge.” Hang’s team was then assigned the task of focusing on their expertise, the complex wire removal work for the confrontation sequences.

For the other myriad of visual effects, Yimou hired MPC and Barson to coordinate the other shots. “They wanted MPC for the expertise and experience we could bring to the big CG army shots. He was attracted to us because of our previous work involving CG armies in Troy, Alexander and Kingdom of Heaven,” Barson explains.

”He wanted the highest standard of vfx work so that it wouldn’t detract from the overall quality of the film. Yimou had a clear idea of what he wanted right from the start. The initial concept art and storyboards conveyed the strong sense of colour and the mood of the shots really clearly. It was a great experience just going out to China and meeting with Yimou and his team. All the way through, Yimou wanted the vfx shots to blend seamlessly into the surrounding live-action shots, it was critical to him that the shots looked real.”

The final attack on the palace is the signature effects moment of the film.

With that mandate from Yimou, Barson says they developed their strategy. “We decided at the beginning that we would previs all of the big vfx shots. A small team back at MPC worked on this for several weeks so that we had a clear idea what was needed by the time the shoot began. This previs was critical in order to be able to plan the logistics of these shots -- we were dealing with 800 extras, multiple costume types and an enormous set, so we had to know exactly what was required before turning up to set each day.” With the Centro team, Hang did the same. “We would bring some references and rough 3D animatics to show Zhang Yimou. He wanted the vfx to be more realistic and believable.”

Due to the nature of their assignments, it ended up that Hang was present on the set for the entire shoot. “My team and I were taking turn on the set,” he offers. Meanwhile, Barson and her team only needed to be onset for a minimal amount of time. “I was on set for about five weeks. I was only on set when they were shooting at Hengdian for the exterior palace scenes. The set was stunning. We spent the first morning just walking around, overwhelmed with the size and scale of it. Then we had to measure and photograph the entire set, as we knew we would have to be recreating some of it in CG. That in itself was a huge job. We'd photograph the set during the day before shooting began -- when it wasn't torrential rain -- then usually film throughout the night.”