Speed Racer offers a new kind of digital cinema experience called "Photo Anime." All images courtesy of Warner Bros. 

The goal of Speed Racer was to re-imagine the stylistic language of anime in HD with spherical 2.5D photo elements known as "bubbles" and super saturated colors to achieve a new kind of digital cinema experience called "Photo Anime." This obviously required a lot of artistic decision making and technical ingenuity.

Two key members that were instrumental in helping to create the Photo Anime look were Darren Poe and Jake Morrison. Poe, the head of Digital Domain's compositing team (We Own the Night, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), assisted John Gaeta, one of the lead visual effects supervisors, during early HD proof of concept testing, "which pushed ideas of mashing HD performance and 360° spherical background layers into techno pop, multi planar scenes and then later on in post he helped us craft a color and light strategy for CG cars, which was really brought to fruition by his 3D composite finesse techniques. He is perhaps the best applier of 3D composite technologies found in Nuke," Gaeta commends. "He was masterful at experimental and designer focus, motion blur, textural 'look' (grain free, noise free, beautiful and scrubbed, super clean) and 'Techno Color' enhancements, allowing us to get close to the idea of a Photo Anime feel."

Meanwhile, Morrison (digital effects supervisor on 300 and CG supervisor on The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions), who also worked closely with Gaeta, spearheaded the in-house compositing team called Exhaust. He not only participated at the front end with HD proofs, but was also the top executor of making whole scenes with designer "Faux Lenses" out of bubbles and HD. "He did hundreds of shots, which became the nuts-and-bolts stylistic drama inventory -- essentially our Pop Art version of Sin City," Gaeta adds.

For Poe, the early 20-shot proof of concept test was invaluable in figuring out with the Wachowskis how the stylized look of Speed Racer would work in HD: "Basically, they booked out some studio stage space [here in L.A.] and hired some actors and shot them on greenscreen and did some realtime compositing. I was pulling their HD footage using a codex, which is an HD realtime capture system. I was directly wired into that using Nuke as well, so I was pulling the footage as they shot it over to a workstation and taking these spherical bubble backgrounds that they had shot doing comp experiments on the fly: color and image scrubbing and multi-planar treatments. So I sat with them as they were shooting that stuff. The brothers went back and edited a sequence together and delivered that footage to us here at DD.

"And then working with a matte painter and building a multi-level 3D bubble environment of this city behind a penthouse and putting things on cards, which would normally be 3D objects in the scene but having them not have proper parallax. And finding a way to mix that with the live-action stuff to have it look kind of right but still have the look of anime. So, it was basically an experiment to see where the interface of 3D and 2D needed to be for the footage to be able to exist in this world without looking totally bizarre."

They also experimented with how to treat the color to get the super saturated look that they wanted back on film. Poe says that was quite a challenge. "We had to be mindful of the gamut of film but really pushed the color saturation as far as we could and did a lot of profiling of film stocks and HD material and plotting out the curves and figuring out how to enhance the look. The goal in the early test was to find a piece of film that looked almost identical to HD footage. Film has some limitations compared to HD in terms of color saturation. There were some areas where we could never get the film to look exactly like the HD, but we did a lot of mathematical plotting and analysis of inverse transforms of HD and film color matrix to try and get a 1:1 match."