Designing the Future à la Bilal
Production started in the summer of 2001 with a long period of design and storyboarding. Bilal made it clear that the CGI had to be "Bilal-real" and not photoreal. It was his world that was to be created on film, not the real world. Duran's art department started to gather reference material on architecture, decoration and vehicles. "The design of the film is quite contemporary," observes Piel. "Enki wanted the look of this universe to be based on the past. He felt that it would be more realistic than an out-of-this-world sci-fi environment. For example, he had this idea that Manhattan would look pretty much the same as today, except for some new buildings and for the fact that the whole street level had been raised by 50 stories! In 2095, people walk into buildings at what used to be the 50th floor in our time. In the end, the city in Immortel has the same street plan as Manhattan, but it's ultimately a Bilal city."

All the characters were created in CG. Above left, Anubis and Bastet (center), two gods of Hierakonopolis, watch Horus carefully inside the floating pyramid.

Working from the reference material, illustrators created detailed drawings that reproduced real New York buildings. This artwork was then converted into CG models that were only half textured. "Once we had a model of each building, we printed it out and passed it on to Enki," explains Piel. "This process gave him the opportunity to paint directly on the printouts, adding futuristic or unusual elements to the buildings. When we got them back, the structures were no longer recognizable."

Meanwhile, another team led by Stephane Levallois focused on the design of the creatures. The movie was to feature three categories of characters: the Gods, human-like creatures with an animal head; the mutants, aliens or humans with varying degrees of malformation due to genetic experiments; and the "normal" humans. The former two were eventually generated by computer animation. Some of the mutants could have been portrayed by actors wearing prosthetic make-up, but Bilal thought that CG characters would better blend in with the graphic style of the movie.

Once the concepts were approved, Duran turned them into detailed model sheets — scale drawings that presented each character, building and vehicle, from every angle. The data was then turned over to Duran's modeling department where Jerome Desvignes supervised the creation of the characters, while Christine Gatto and Frederic Palacio coordinated the effort on the environments.

Immortel was entirely previsualized in 3D. Here, Horus leaves the pyramid as it hovers over Manhattan.

Paving the Way for Previs
Jacquemin Piel and his crew then started to develop a 3D storyboard with new software that was specifically written for this project. "Immortel was the first movie ever to be completely previsualized in 3D," Piel contends. "Back in 2001, it had never been done on a whole film. This previs allowed us to prepare principal photography in a very precise way. Camera moves were programmed, lenses were selected, angles were chosen, and sets were designed and directly output into construction blueprints. By the time we got on the set, everything had been thoroughly rehearsed and prepared on the computer. The only element for which we allowed a certain amount of freedom was the movement of the actors on the set. Otherwise, the previs was strictly respected. As a result, I'm proud to say that we completed principal photography only one hour behind schedule. You have to understand that we had a very tight budget, an even tighter shooting schedule and no motion control or field recorder. Thanks to the previs, we were able to complete live-action photography on time and on budget."

The previs was also a precious tool for Bilal, who wanted to cut the whole movie before one frame was shot. In fact, the film cut was constantly updated during the course of the production. "Each shot was cut in maybe 100 times," notes Piel. "As soon as we had an update of a shot, we delivered it to Enki and he cut it in to replace the older version. From one shot to the next, we could have a simple previs, actors on a greenscreen, actors with a CG background that would be textured but not yet animated, characters animated but not yet textured, final comps, etc."