Night Watch has shaken up the Russian movie industry. The sci-fi feature is the highest grossing film ever released in post-soviet Russia. All images © 2005 Fox Searchlight.

Russian cinema is certainly not known for its science fiction or fantasy movies. Yet, it did produce two minor “classics” of the genre. Both directed by Andrej Tarkosky, Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) were typical of Russia’s traditional cinema: tortured characters, convoluted plot, very slow action. That was until director Timur Bekmambetov decided to shake up the whole movie industry with a feature film that was unlike anything that had ever been done in Russia before. Night Watch (released by Fox Searchlight on Feb. 17, 2006) is the Russian answer to The Matrix, as much as Solaris had been a reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The response of the Russian audience has been more than enthusiastic: boosted by a marketing campaign of unprecedented scale, Night Watch quickly became the highest grossing film ever released in post-soviet Russia.

The plot echoes the classic theme of supernatural beings conducting a secret war behind the curtain of human history, as seen in films such as Highlander (1986), Blade (1998) and Underworld (2003). In Night Watch, this secret war opposes two different kinds of vampires: the Forces of Light and the Forces of the Dark. Centuries ago, a truce put an end to the open war that had been raging between the two forces. According to this truce, the Forces of Light would secretly rule the daytime, while the Forces of the Dark would be free to roam at night. Ever since, “Watchers” with special powers have been monitoring the activity of the other side, trying to interfere with its schemes to seize complete power…

Building a Giant Virtual VFX Studio
The most unusual aspect of Night Watch — by Russian standards — was the exceptional scope of its visual effects. Producing several hundreds digital effects shots in an industry that had never produced any “visual effects movie” represented a major challenge for the director. The task of putting Bekmambetov’s vision on screen was assigned to visual effects supervisor Vladimir Leschinski. “It is true that we didn’t have much experience in terms of vfx for feature films, but when we started Night Watch, we had more than 10 years of experience of creating CGI for commercials, Leschinski says. “So, there was a real pool of talents out there. The problem was that there was no existing structure that could handle the whole project. So, we decided to gather 16 different vendors and several freelancers, all based throughout the country. The work was split among them based on the know-how of each studio and each freelancer in a particular technology or in certain types of vfx.

“We didn’t use the western approach of awarding complete sequences to individual studios. Instead, we turned the whole Russian effects industry into one giant virtual studio in which everybody was doing what he did the best on any given shot. It meant, for instance, that one artist in Saint Petersburg would rotoscope and match-move a shot, another one in Ukraine would do the character animation for the same shot, and the whole thing would be put together by a third artist in Moscow.”

VFX supervisor Vladimir Leschinski (left) and vfx producer Alexander Gorokhov turned the Russian effects industry into one giant studio. They managed 16 vendors and several freelancers, all based throughout the country.

With so many different studios and artists involved, virtually every software package available was used on the movie, sometimes simultaneously on a single shot. “There was one sequence with the subway in which the camera follows the train on a bridge while a flock of crows forms above it,” observes vfx producer Alexander Gorokhov. “For this sequence, we had one vendor using Maya to create the train, another one using 3ds Max for the bridge and the surrounding rocks, and a third one creating the crows in Softimage! Obviously, this created serious problems as we had to learn how to translate animation files from one package to the next.”

All the vendors and freelancers worked on Windows NT workstations, the standard in Russian vfx industry. With artists based in distant locations and with different time zones, communication and file sharing became a critical aspect of the project. “The main challenge was to establish a proper technical connection between the studios and the headquarters,” Leschinski adds. “We had to install a high-speed Internet channel in the main office, and a couple of servers with huge disk storage. All the work was done through the Internet. The vendors had all the data they needed to produce the work, including edited shots, references and animatics. After working on the shots, they uploaded dailies on the server.