It was important that Get Smart's vfx aesthetic retain the spirit of the original series. VFX Supervisor Joe Bauer is most proud of "The Corridor of Doors" effect. Courtesy of Zoic. All images ™ & © Warner Bros. Ent.

Reinvention is all the rage in Hollywood and that's especially the case when it comes to the latest slate of summer popcorn movies. Everything from TV series to comic books is fair game for big screen inspiration nowadays and that's especially true when it comes to classics that can be made "brand new" for new generations. And that's exactly why Mel Brooks and Buck Henry's seminally silly, '60s spy spoof, Get Smart, was ripe for a revamp (now playing). Looking to contemporize the classic sitcom, Warner Bros. and director Peter Segal cast funnyman Steve Carell as bumbling Agent Maxwell Smart and the lovely Anne Hathaway as his brainy partner Agent 99. Together with their team at CONTROL, they battle the forces of KAOS, who want to take over the world.

While the low brow gadgets of the '60s had a lot of charm, i.e., shoe phones and plastic Cones of Silence, today savvy, modern audiences expect a lot more bang for their bucks so it fell to Get Smart Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Bauer to upgrade Max's onscreen spy world. "I received a call from Chris deFaria at the studio [Warner Bros.] and he said there was a movie he wanted me to do," Bauer says about how he was approached to work on the film. "I did Jon Favreau's second and third films, Elf and Zathura, and maybe based on that they brought me in. I met [Producer] Michael Ewing with Pete [Segal] and we just talked. There was a very limited budget but they wanted it to feel like a big James Bond film. Fortunately, I came into visual effects with one leg in practical and one leg in the digital so we talked in rough terms about how to use both to best effect for the movie. We were all on the same page so they brought me on."

With a production budget of approximately $80 million, Bauer says from the beginning they had to prepare for a very lean post budget. "The original marching orders were to do everything as inexpensively as possible," he explains. "There was a pot of money and they had a cast they wanted to get. It's a pretty A-list cast so by the time you spend the money above the line there isn't much below. And when we first broke the script down it looked like there would be 300-340 shots. By the time we were finished we did over 810 for almost the same money."

Preparation was key, and Bauer says they planned extensively with previs so there weren't any big surprises as production moved forward. "There was not an extravagant amount of time to shoot the movie and there are some big action sequences that were broken off into second and third unit. We opted to hire a previs house, P.O.V. [Persistence of Vision Digital Ent.], and we identified the main action sequences and then prevised them out completely first from boards to camera moves, coverage and action. That was broken up and distributed to the units so everyone was working from the same template so when all the pieces came in -- it fit. It worked out well for us."

Still the shot count ballooned to double the budgeted size, which meant Bauer had to outsource the plethora of work to several post houses that would help them stay within budget. "We happened to go into post production during a time when everybody was slow so they were anxious to work with us," Bauer details. "It was a high profile film so we got great prices for what we were asking for. And right out of the gate we were using the best vendors that we could get for the money we had. Some of the vendors I had used on films with larger budgets so I knew what the quality would be: Digital Dimension, Rising Sun Pictures, Pixel Magic, etc." The rest of the vendor list also included Zoic Studios, EdenFX, elementFX, Look Effects, Amalgamated Pixels and Moneyshots.

In terms of the visual effects aesthetic for Get Smart's update on film, Bauer says Segal wanted to honor and retain the spirit of the original series. "They wanted to feel like we were still in the same world of technology although with upgrades, as we called it," Bauer explains. "For example, 'The Corridor of Doors' had to have the same feel, so we watched the original series opening again and again just to get a cadence. In fact, we played the music back from the original series just to get Steve's walk cadence right and the timing of the doors in relation to the music. We did upgrade the technology. We kept it non-electronic as if it were originally installed in the late '50s/early '60s and had been periodically upgraded but not modern yet. It's still brushed stainless steel and mechanics as opposed to electronics. Also, once it was decided that the art department wouldn't build the whole [corridor set] because it was cost prohibitive, and it fell to visual effects department, then it wasn't a big deal to add functions to the doors and make them more interesting. The main things we had to do were make them feel hydraulic, heavy and complex just because it was fun to watch.

"Actually, I'm most proud of The Corridor of Doors. They are iconic and don't feel like they are an effect. And the sound department did a fantastic job to make it look real."

With such a large shot count, Bauer says they got to do a little bit of everything for the film from the most mundane removals to complicated environment builds. "There were CG environments, like there is a big fight on top of a bakery in Moscow," Bauer continues. "It was a big build set that was surrounded by a black cyc. When we were shooting in Moscow we took a bunch of stills from the top of a building in basically the right location from sunrise through sunset and dark and we ended up doing a digital cyclorama. We could put in the city in each of the shots after the fact.