To provide a visually realistic approach, the "Bodyflight" sequence was a sophisticated combination of CG and live action.

Once they had shot all the work they used a process called volume carving, which is a hybrid of a lot of techniques: like a pastry cutter, it cuts out everywhere that it's not. A matte of the actor's silhouette for each camera view is projected though a voxel grid that encloses the region occupied by the actors. The value of the projected matte is assigned to each voxel, such that a positive value indicates that the voxel is within the silhouette and a negative value is outside the silhouette. This process is repeated over all cameras, where the minimum projected matte value is persistent for each voxel. Ultimately a mesh is generated from the grid using the zero point level set which represents the surface geometry of the actors, and with projected textures the performance can be used to composite into the final shot.

On several occasions Forster wanted to go outside of the captured areas; fortunately the team, led by CG Supervisor Kripac, also took the traditional route of cloth and hair simulations and body tracking in parallel. Double Negative's proprietary, hair system, dnHair needed to be extended to deal with the velocity of wind that the characters would be exposed to and avoid the hair looking too much like it was crisp, clean and freshly blow dried. The team was able to use digital doubles to realize this and the footage shot in those cases was used to capture motion and apply to the digi-doubles and body tracking was used to match the whole of the sky diving sequence with digital clouds, cloth.

The fiery fight at the ESO provided its own set of challenges for MPC (under the vfx supervision of Angela Barson). MPC had to destroy a hotel with a series of explosions. The external plates of the hotel were shot on location in Paranal Chile while the internal shots were filmed at Pinewood. A small section of the hotel façade was built at Pinewood to be destroyed and used for close up shots.

All of the wide external plates were shot clean in Paranal and MPC did the full destruction in post. 2D elements of fire, smoke, embers and explosions were incorporated with digital matte paintings and 3D debris to give the final look.

The fiery fight at the ESO provided its own set of challenges for MPC, which had to destroy a hotel with a series of explosions. Photo credit: Karen Ballard.

The interior shots that were filmed at Pinewood had a lot of practical special effects fire and explosions. MPC had to enhance these shots to make the actors look more in danger. The work consisted of adding additional fire, debris and explosions to the practical on set special effects, as well as making the ceilings and walls look charred and broken.

The MPC matchmove crew built basic models of the interior and exterior of the buildings as well as basic models of the main actors. These were used to enable the CG debris and breaking glass to properly interact with the set and the actors. General Medrano’s room sequence was shot using interactive lighting, but little real fire or smoke. All of these elements, including scorching, fire, smoke, ash, sparks and heat distortion, were added in at MPC. Steam was also added coming from Bond and Camille’s clothing.

"The observatory is a beautiful location, but it was very fragile and they wouldn't let us do much with it," Haug explains. "We built this big four-story set for them to climb out of and all the explosions were full scale and just placed back onto the hotel itself. MPC used a little bit of Flowline [from Scanline] for flying debris, but in the end, most of it were elements we actually shot of smoke, of fire. There was intense pressure to figure out how to get through it so fast because they came in really late. It was the last thing we shot, everything was coming to a head, and that sequence, frankly, was the last one to get written. It got put at the end because it had to be. It was really meant to be a big, practical flame. And what we mostly did was rev up the intensity when it fell off during the parts of the shot that we were using. At the beginning of the shot, they were generally always great, but then the sprinklers go off and they have a tendency to dampen everything down. And so we'd bring it back up to the original intensity. And there were a couple places where they got really close to the fire but not close enough to look good, so we brought it a little closer. And there's the final sequence when they're trapped inside, where, again, the biggest problem was making them feel really trapped. There has to be proof of that so we brought the flame within inches of them just to make sure there was no doubt in anyone's mind."

In terms of the water element, the boat sequence (handled by Machine FX and supervised by John Lockwood and Steve Street) turned out to be easier than expected, according to Haug. "The biggest shot is the one where he rams General Medrano's boat, done in multiple parts. I think it was the first shot that Dan ever talked to me about. The initial plate was shot in Panama and the jet boat that comes in and flies around Daniel was a tricky one because when you're doing boat to boat like this, it's pretty uncontrollable. We got one that was good and then we matched that angle with another piece attached to a boat that actually rams Medrano's boat and then we matched that same angle with a stunt on dry land with the guy getting yanked off to the end of the rope and falling to the end of the boat. We put it on a slider so it looked like it had impact. And then Machine just took those pieces and put them all together."