Darren Poe and Jake Morrison experimented with how to treat the color to get the super saturated look that they wanted for the film. 

After testing, the Wachowskis were sold on shooting in HD with the Sony F23 camera, which offered, among other things, great depth of field and superb color saturation.

"I went to Berlin in August toward the end of the shoot, and did something similar to what I did in L.A., which was take the cuts that they had shot, work with the matte painter there doing the stylized bubble paintings and also their previs artists, and put together test comps of different types of footage," Poe continues. "One of the big focuses there was how to take the non-greenscreen footage and treat that so it could co-exist with the 2-1/2D bubbles. I would take things that they shot and then go in and roto and re-paint sections of it and split it out into multiple layers and give things slight drifts against each other and post multi-planar camera moves to give it that anime vibe."

Poe did some imaging scrubbing experiments too. The goal of that, of course, was to have a completely grain-free movie inspired by fashion photography as well as anime. "We looked at super airbrushed makeup ads and tried to find ways procedurally to get that look without labor intensive work for compositors later on. For that effect, we used a combination of Furnace tools for de-graining and found ways to isolate contrasty areas of skin tones and minimized contrast using color corrections and added detail back in. There was no film grain but a certain noise level needed to be addressed, so we experimented with getting rid of high frequency noise and homogenizing color within individual objects to give it a more idealized version of the image.

One of the big challenges facing the vfx team was starting racing scene sequences as 3D previs which would then became full 3D animations and 3D environments. 

"One of the big challenges at DD was our sequences where racing scenes started out as 3D previs and then became full 3D animations and 3D environments. And so what we came up with were ways to step back from 3D to 2-1/2D. We were then re-projecting the 3D environments onto layers of bubbles and then going back and compositing new camera moves and drifts between the plates. Our big challenge was to make the inherently 3D stuff have the same consistency of the work being done at other facilities in the anime-like vein. Maintaining consistency was the evolving stylistic direction of the show across multiple continents.