“The critical point for Robert was that he wanted to follow the style of the book, but when you are looking at the pictures in the comic book, it’s not something that you can transpose on screen right away,” Leduc admits. “The style of Miller is black-and-white, with no gray scale at all. I remember we had a lot of discussion, lighting-wise, because it’s all drawings. When somebody is drawing, you can put highlights here and there and those are sometimes impossible to recreate on film. I was really nervous at the beginning because it was a black-and-white movie and we aren’t used to dong that, plus the vfx were the other way around. Normally, when we are doing effects, it’s more of a CG character over a background and this project is the other way around: it’s a real character on CG. In [Robert’s] mind, the movie was a super high contrast movie with no detail in the black or white. In his mind, it was supposed to be really close to the book, but it did change during production as we began to show him stuff.”

As the style began to evolve, Rodriquez settled overall on a very stylized look that incorporated black-and-white, photorealism and even object specific colors that were used randomly throughout all of the stories. Leduc explains, “The original elements were all in color, but in the compositing, they were finalized in black-and-white. Not knowing the final style, it was hard to plan everything ahead. We were trying to define things and environments in black-and-white and it was really, really difficult. At some point, we made the decision to do everything in color because we are more used to it. We did the environments in color and then peeled the color and it was much easier for the artists. It allowed us to decide that if we wanted to put back an object in color, we could just create a matte…but it didn’t happen,” he chuckles. “He made the decision to put color mainly on character — eyes, colors, hair.”

While working on the visual style, Leduc says they also had to settle on determining the technical details for the actual shooting in order to help in the post-production process. Physically, Rodriquez decided early on to keep the actor interaction with their environment as limited as possible.

Bold red flashes play a key role in the style and mood of Sin City.

“In our part, there is a bed in the opening. We call it the art bedroom. The bed was actually part of the shooting and real. We decided at the beginning to make all the interaction objects, anytime the actor was touching something, it was part of the set. It’s one of the toughest parts of vfx — contact. The bed, chairs, tables were part of the set, but not the floor or walls.” As for the cinematography, Rodriquez elected to continue working on video by choosing to shoot Sin City in HDSR, a format Leduc was pleased about. “My part at the beginning was to find ways to do the shooting to be able to generate the visuals after. This wasn’t my first HD movie, the third or the fourth one, actually. Technically speaking, I prefer to shoot something more flat so I can add the contrast after. To satisfy us both, we made the decision to use two monitors on set. One to show the real output of the camera and another one in black-and-white, in high contrast, looking closer to what Robert was expecting at the end. It helped a lot. The new HDSR have a lot better resolution than the HD cam. It’s 444 recording RGB, which means better keys and extraction and less noise. Technically speaking, it’s a lot better system. It’s closer to the definition scanning from film.”

Having worked with Rodriquez before in the format, Leduc says they had already worked out a lot of the technical shooting issues on previous projects, which made this process easier all around. “Robert is a strange man,” he laughs. “He likes a lot of technique and he is an artist at the same time. He always wants to understand what is happening and how to do things. I remember working on Spy Kids, I was always explaining things how to get certain effects. Now on Sin City…he knows what to do and he was really aware. I was on set for the beginning of the shooting, and in less than a month, I was back home and he shot it by himself.”

Back at Hybride, Leduc says they were left to their own devices on how to create their segment. “One important thing was that Robert decided not to involve the three houses apart from the technical specifications so we all worked the same way. It was part of the style. The design was really open. In Robert’s mind, everybody was able to design the direction, while he was controlling the direction at the same time. He needs to see stuff to make decisions, so seeing stuff from all the vendors, he put together the overall direction. Some scenes Robert was very specific on the directions and other scenes, it was up to us. It’s nice, but scary. Sometimes Robert didn’t even know what would be the final result. We did exchange the technique of the rain but we didn’t talk about the snow for my part. He did send to me shots from other vendors showing me what he liked and it was faster for him because there was so much stuff. He did that at the end with all the vendors.