“What I found is that people become more creative when you give them limitations and they did some amazing work,” he continues. “If an artist wanted a tree be a black silhouette against a white sky at night, it was easy to do because we would put a volumetric light back there that would rim light the trees, but would also fill up the air with light and therefore create the comic book silhouette. If our camera shook and if we panned across a light source, we’d have a little aperture flare come in from the light that is just hiding off the frame. We were going through a lot of manual effort to put in the kind of artifacts of live action filmmaking that we wouldn’t be able to control if we were doing it for real. So what that means is that we achieved the stylization look, but we worked through real world limitations to get there.”

The Orphanage had to push themselves to get the look of this noir dripping tale.

Like the other houses, Maschwitz says their creative freedom on the film was an amazing opportunity. “I actually don’t do a lot of vfx supervising for anyone other than Robert. Working with him is that rare collaboration because he is so open to working with others and he can do that because his own vision is so strong and he doesn’t have to micromanage. His vision of a film is broad is enough to encompass other people’s ideas. Every time we had a question about how something would look, Robert would very politely say, ‘Go look at the comic book.’ They shot essentially every frame of the comic book, and used that as a starting point and branched off from there. Frank was the one more interested in branching off and doing different things and Robert was really the stickler. We were handed a bunch of green screen material and we were charged with reuniting all that with the comic book images that inspired the angles and lighting.

“I also think Robert allowed us to push the Sin City look maybe farther than the other sequences because ours was last and by that time, the audience was going to be in it. We had a lot of conversations on how far we get to push it and the rule became to do what Frank does when he draws the pages, which is that he pencils in the whole thing in complete detail and then he goes through a lighting phase where he brings out the ink and he may black over huge areas, but you can tell in the final image that it is an abstraction of something that is real. It’s the beauty of black and white, which forces you to participate by filling in the missing information.”

Getting that look means The Orphanage had to push themselves into new areas of R&D. “We pulled out every trick in the book, from adding little bits of camera shake to aperture flares and even making our dolly speed slightly uneven with relationship to the actors. We would maniacally horde our reference for things like when what a Ferrari headlight looks like when it’s six inches away from a Panavision lens, or what snow looks like when it’s kicked in your face and it’s backlit by taillights. My mantra to the artists was open the lid to your computer and pour some dirt into it. Robert would see the shots and he knew we were working overtime to make things work. The falling snow is a perfect example. There were a bunch of really fun things that we knew were going to be hard, like splattering blood and simulating vehicle animation, but the one thing that snuck up and bit us was snow. It’s quite a feat to do motion blurred snow with depth of field that can be properly backlit and interact with an environment that may be coming from any number of sources. You have 3D snow that has to be lit and fall, land gently on something that doesn’t exist and disappear in a graceful way and it’s in every single shot! We tried using stuff that we already knew how to do to achieve that and kept hitting walls and halfway through the production we implemented a Houdini Mantra pipeline to simulate and render the snow. It’s the first time we’ve ever used Houdini and it won’t be the last. It wound up being one of those great things that the extra effort paid off in spades.”

Discussing their delivery timeline, Maschwitz adds, “We were in Austin during the second week of July and we were in full shot production from the end of July and we delivered final shots in early February. It was a mountain of work,” he sighs. “It was 560 shots. It was broken down between 3D artists doing full digital environments, compositors and matte painters and a lot of crossover responsibility and a whole team just to do falling snow. We also delivered HD masters during the whole process, knowing full well that when they started the HD assembly that there would be changes, which was a pleasure to go back and do.”

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.