The biggest challenge for Hancock's vfx team was how to make Will Smith look like the kind of hero no one wants to be saved by. All images courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

How do you make a larger-than-life superhero come across as less than super on the big screen? It sounds easy unless you have the ever charming, international phenom Will Smith starring as the troubled "hero." And how do you make the biggest box office draw in the world look like the kind of hero no one wants to be saved by? That was the challenge for Digital Effects Supervisor Ken Hahn and Visual Effects Supervisor Carey Villegas of Sony Pictures Imageworks on director Peter Berg's new action-comedy, Hancock (now playing from Columbia Pictures).

Working under the designs of the legendary John Dykstra, Imageworks took on the bulk of the vfx creation for this film which looks at what happens when the good guy has a lot of "issues" to work through. Hahn and Villegas talk to VFXWorld about how they dealt with all the epic sized demands of one of this summer's most anticipated blockbusters.

Tara Bennett: What were your roles on Hancock?

Carey Villegas: I came on after the shoot which is sort of late in the post-production process to help out with some of the more complicated shots and sequences. We just tried to make sure that our visual effects were in line with the style of Peter Berg's film.

Ken Hahn: My primary responsibility from day one, once we were awarded the project, was breaking down the scripts, bidding it, cleaning up who we needed based on the initial script. I did some on-set work along with John Dykstra, who was the show's overall visual effects supervisor, and then overseeing the technology aspects back at Imageworks.

TB: Hancock isn't your typical superhero film so what was Peter Berg's vision for how to bring this atypical story to life through visual effects?

The train sequence required choreography to make the effect of havoc caused by Hancock work.

KH: I remember from the very beginning you could tell it's not the typical, classic superhero film, where he's got a really nice outfit or he battles a true super-villain. Hancock has his own inner demons. It's funny because when I first read the script it wasn't a visual effects gore-fest. It wasn't a crazy amount of stuff but just a few choice sequences that had some cool moments visually. Of course, once we started shooting… there weren't any storyboards for this film and it was all done as animatics. Pete Berg thinks straight off the top of his head as different ideas would pop up. He would say let's do this and that, which is great. I love that sort of spontaneity of ideas but with visual effects we don't respond as quickly to those kinds of changes. They take time with R&D so that turned out to be fairly challenging… adapting to his style of working.

CV: For me, the biggest challenge of that is that he has a very unique way of working. His photography is very high energy. He thinks fast and moves fast so we had to keep up with him. If you watch his films from the past, they have a very specific style with frenetic camera movements, with long lens shots with snap zooms. It's a really handheld style that has a lot of energy. We have had to learn to adapt to that over the years because things have changed so dramatically. We try to get away from motion control and slowing down the process and production. We're trying to be an invisible part of the filmmaking process.

TB: Did you know you could take on the majority of the work from day one?

CV: At Imageworks, we have a lot of deep resources here so typically we have the capacity to handle large amounts of work. There are some types of work that we do farm out like basic comps were farmed out to Luma Pictures and X1FX. But we try to take on the meaty stuff and the bulk of the heavy effects work and then place less complicated shots to other facilities.