Jill, an enimga who is neither totally mutant nor human, walks above futuristic Manhattan.

When it came time to shoot the live action portions of the movie, only four sets were actually built: the bedroom of the main character, the bathroom, a bar and a section of a subway station. The rest of the movie was shot on a stage entirely covered with green material. In some instances, the filmmakers elected to build a floor section on which the actors could play the scene, the rest of the set being added digitally. "It turned out that these real portions of set were no help," comments Piel. "Looking back, it would have been much easier to do it all on greenscreen. It would have saved us the hassle of matching the virtual set to the real set. The textures in the digital environments derived from still photographs or were created from scratch in Photoshop or Paint."

Motion Capturing the Gods
In term of environments, some sequences turned out to be real challenges with long shots revealing the whole cityscape. Individual CG buildings were exported from the architectural database and integrated on a shot-per-shot basis into a virtual street plan of the actual Manhattan. Both high resolution and low-resolution versions were available for this. Depending on how far the structure would be from camera, one version or the other would be selected. Matte paintings helped complete the virtual environments.

For character animation, Piel opted to combine two techniques. Motion capture was used for body language; while keyframe animation was preferred for facial expressions, lip sync and clothes simulation. "We could have done it all manually, but motion capture did help us a lot in the animation," says Piel. "As for Horus, we often shot the live-action plates with an actor, dressed up in green, playing the part of the God. He wore a headpiece that represented the falcon head of the character. It allowed the other actors to focus their eyes at the right height, Horus being very tall. The actor was then painted out of the shot and replaced with the CG Horus. We didn't use this technique all the time. In several instances, we opted to shoot the other actors alone. For example, there is one scene in which a human named Nikopol delivers a series of strong — but harmless — blows into Horus' belly. To achieve this effect, the actor playing the part of Nikopol actually hit a heavy punching bag. We then lined up Horus with the bag to create the illusion that he was being punched."

Made on a $20 million budget, the filmmakers’ goal was not to give viewers “wow” moments, but to evoke poetic images from Enki Bilal’s world.

When rendering the CG characters, photorealism was not the ultimate goal. The characters had to look like they belonged to this stylized world. Ultra realistic characters à la Gollum would have been out of place in Immortel. "We didn't have the time, nor the budget to do a Gollum anyway," admits Piel. "For example, we couldn't afford to use sub-surface scattering. When people praise Gollum's photorealism, they forget to take into account that a whole team worked on this one character for several years. The same is true for The Matrix Revolutions. I learned recently that, for the famed "superpunch" shot, they actually had one supervisor and a team of 14 CG artists working on it for no less than 14 months! Don't [get me] wrong: we were absolutely impressed by the work that was done on those movies, but one has to put it in perspective. The whole budget for Immortel was about $20 million and we still managed to create more than 1,400 digital effects shots — although the final cut only features 1,160 of them. There is certainly no `How did they do that?' scene in the movie, but I feel that in terms of design, creativity and ambiance, our work surpasses most of what is being done in big-budget blockbusters. The most important for us was not to `wow' the viewers, but to bring to the wide screen the poetry and the evocative power of Enki's graphic world. And I think that we succeeded."

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.