This digital fly was just one of the CG creatures created for the film. © 2004 Morgan Creek. All rights reserved.

One of the issues with the Harlin version was that it had been entirely shot in Rome. As the action was supposed to take place in the Middle East, Jennings' crew had a lot of location work to do. They produced about 50 matte paintings for static scenes and 20 CG environments for tracking shots. "We didn't have to go to the Middle East to capture background plates," reveals Jennings. "We had all the plates we needed in the Schrader version, which had been partly shot in Morocco. The problem was that we were not familiar with the footage and it took a lot of time to find the right plates. In some instances, we managed to find empty shots of Moroccan scenery that we combined with the new live-action plates. In many cases, though, we had to paint out the actors and some elements before we could use the images as background plates. Fortunately, both versions had been shot in sunny conditions by the same cinematographer. The footages actually matched up pretty well."

The opening scene of the movie features the most elaborate 3D matte painting created by Jennings' crew under the supervision of Timothy Clark. The scene starts with a long shot of the Gizah pyramids in the 19th century. Then, the camera drops down to a street set and catches up with the actors. The key aspect of the shot was to track the camera move on the live-action set, a task carried out in Boujou. After that, CG artists worked out the camera move backwards, starting from the first frame of the plate, and generated a digital environment that perfectly blended with the real set.

Many of the landscapes were retouched.

Besides retouching landscapes and backgrounds, Jennings and his crew tackled many other "invisible" effects such as breath enhancement. Whenever a demon appears in a scene, the air around the characters becomes very cold, which makes their breath visible. Supervised by David Crawford, the effect was created in After Effects as a particle animation and added in 150 shots in which the camera was moving. For some rare static shots, real breath elements were photographed on a black background and composited in.

Of Fangs, Claws and Wings
Wild animals play an important role in several scenes in the movie. "There's one sequence in which a character is attacked by five hyenas," says Jennings. "Harlin had tried to get some footage with real hyenas, but they just stood there in front of the greenscreen. So, they shot the plates with the actor pretending to be attacked and relied on CGI for the hyenas. Meteor Studios created those shots, using dog footage and documentaries as a reference for the animation. During plate photography, the crew had used wires to pull the actor's costume in order to simulate the presence of the hyenas biting the character. The animation of the digital hyenas was then timed with this practical effect."

Meanwhile, Jennings' unit had its own load of animals to deal with, namely flies and crows, two species traditionally associated with the Devil. Featured in more than 100 shots, a swarm of thousands of flies was animated in Houdini as a particle animation with a layer of behavioral animation. As for the crows, dozens of hand-animated CG birds were used to complement the handful of real animals that had been photographed on the set.