Director Renny Harlin and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro plan their next horrifying shot.

A Vision from the Past
50 shots were assigned to Pixel Magic, which had a long working relationship with Jennings. They included a sequence in which the main character, played by Stellan Skarsgard, walks in the desert in the middle of a sand storm and is suddenly transported to a battlefield from another time. Tens of thousands of dead warriors appear, crucified upside down on the hills around him. "The scene had been shot with less than 10 real people as the warriors around Skarsgard," says Ray McIntyre Jr., visual effects supervisor and vp of Pixel Magic. "The rest of the army is entirely computer-generated. We had 10 different models for the digital bodies, plus the CG cross itself, all built and rendered in LightWave. The plates had been shot in Italy, but the landscape did not work for the sandy desert that was required. Thus in every shot, Skarsgard had to be rotoscoped and unwanted set elements had to be removed in order for us to add matte-painted landscapes behind him. We also generated the sand storm itself, using hypervoxels in LightWave for background elements and real elements of blowing sand for the foreground."

The highlight of the sequence is a spectacular pullback that starts tight on Skarsgard and stops two miles away, revealing the traumatic sight of the crucified army in the process. "The pullback is 732 frames long — that's more than 30 seconds of screen time," notes McIntyre. "We had two live-action plates to work from. The first one was the start of the pullback with Skarsgard photographed on a minimal set. The second plate was the very end of the pullback where the camera comes to rest, two miles away from the original location. That plate featured some real cross elements in the foreground. The in-between was totally computer-generated."

According to Mike Hardison, CG supervisor for Pixel Magic, "The first part of the job was to track the camera moves. Then, we heavily retouched the first plate, adding hundreds of CG crosses and bodies and replacing the original landscape. After that, we projected the last frame of the early pullback onto CG geometry and did the same with the first frame of the final pullback. It gave us a start position and an end position for our digital environment. Once the match-move was complete, we could seamlessly blend the two live-action plates with our digital landscape. Many layers of CG blowing sand were then added in the scenery. Each layer had hold out mattes for bodies and crosses to create the feeling of distance and depth to the blowing sand."

Enter the Gore
Pixel Magic also tackled some of the goriest aspects of the movie, the very element that prompted the studio to re-shoot the whole film. Part of these effects involved a female character that is possessed by the Devil. As a result, she has superhuman abilities that allow her, for instance, to spiderwalk on a wall. "Some of the things that she does are really extreme and CG animation was the only way to achieve them," comments George Macri, visual effects producer for Pixel Magic. "We modeled a digital double of the actress in Maya and did a Cyberscan to capture her features. The most spectacular of these shot has the character hanging upside down on a cross and then, bending up backwards, which is obviously impossible. To achieve this effect, we actually combined elements extracted from two different plates. We took the legs in one plate and the torso in the other one. For each plate, the actress was positioned in a way that allowed her to perform the move. By combining the two body elements, we created an impossible and very disturbing move. When she jumps down off the cross at the end of her move, we switched to a full CG double, except for the hair and face. Clothing simulations were done in Maya with Syflex, then the actress' actual face and hair from live-action plates was grafted onto the CG body to create the final image."

In a few months, fans will get a chance to see both versions of the films on DVD.

In what is probably the goriest scene of the whole film, a character uses a shard of glass to slice his throat open — back and forth — all in glorious close-up… To show the shard piercing the skin, Pixel Magic added a CG replica in the empty hand of the actor, and painted a CG wound. In the second shot, the actor was wearing a two-inch green band on the neck and simulated the slicing action with a harmless shard. CG artists reconstructed the missing skin by using still photographs of the actor, and painted the injury, frame by frame. "We mainly used Commotion & After Effects to paint and track the effect," observes McIntyre. "It was a very difficult set of shots as the camera was really close to the action. This said, I'm not sure all the shots will be in the final cut. It's so graphic…"

More Re-shoots
Well into post-production, it was decided that a new ending — yes, a third one — was required. The crew flew back to Rome for another three days of shooting. Since there was no time for a lot of set building, the team relied of visual effects to accomplish the scene. Kleiser-Walczak was brought in to execute some of the most complicated shots, with the remainder staying in-house. "We had our team running 24 hours a day for three weeks in order to pull this off," noted Randall Kleiser, visual effects supervisor.

Although Jennings is very proud of what he's accomplished with his team, the hard work and long hours took a toll on him: "Honestly, I wouldn't want to do it again! It was such an undertaking. I'm still very happy that we managed to deliver so many shots with so little money. This is an approach that I had already tested on previous projects. We did 200 shots on Driven that way and all 450 shots of Mindhunters too. Without an in-house unit, Renny would have been obliged to give up many sequences. So, it's a great satisfaction for me that he was ultimately able to get everything he needed."

Alain Bielik is the founder and special effects editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex.