The Phantom of the Opera is here! © 2004 Warner Brothers. All rights reserved.

Director Joel Schumacher brings Andrew Lloyd Webber’s haunting love story, Phantom of the Opera, to the screen with the grand scale and elaborate production values of a classic opera production. Ornate sets, lavish costuming, unforgettable musical performances, sweeping camera moves and subtle visual effects all contribute to the film experience. Cinesite U.K. provided the bulk of the visual effects for the movie, including miniatures, tracking camera moves, compositing and rough previs. David Jones supervised the work in the U.K. for senior visual effects supervisor Nathan McGuiness, owner of post-production house Asylum in Santa Monica, California, which completed more than 150 shots for the film, including the breathtaking opening in which a postcard comes to life.

Phantom was shot in London with no studio being large enough to accommodate the 40-foot long falling chandelier the story required. As a result, Asylum used the inferno system to composite the chandelier into necessary shots.

“Discreet’s lustre system is the beating heart of our film workflow,” McGuinness explained in a release. “We used lustre to time all the visual effects shots in The Phantom of the Opera, in order to create continuity. With lustre, what you see is what you get on film. It enabled us to control and maintain the director and director of photography’s vision. After the effects shots had been timed with lustre, they went to our inferno stations, where eight-10 artists worked on the effects simultaneously.”

Visual effects were used to achieve the majestic exterior dimensions of the Opera House and its fiery destruction during the dramatic conclusion of the story. They were also used to create a chandelier element — using both the real and miniature chandeliers — for the most violent swinging during the interior destruction. Working out of the Cinesite Shepperton facility, model supervisor Jose Granell collaborated once again with production designer Anthony Pratt to accomplish the director and designer’s vision. An art department liaison served as model unit art director to keep continuity between the departments.

For the exterior shots, the art department in reality only built the square and entrance of the Opera House. Miniatures were used to extend the building past the top of the columns. A majority of the models were built at 12-scale. There was a 1/4-scale chandelier that was used in the transformation of the chandelier from its damaged state back to its earlier glistening glory. For the ending, when the fire blows out the glazed windows, 1/4-scale window elements were match-moved and then were reduced down and tracked into the 12-scale model. That was done primarily for the flame, debris and glass window elements that worked better at the larger size. Granell thinks that most audiences will fail to notice the miniature work. “I know the shots inside out. Even looking at them yourself and it’s your own work, you wouldn’t really know. The things that suggest it [visual effects] to the industry…your peers look at a shot and they see that camera move is vast, so they know it’s probably not for real. Something is going on.”