"And we developed a stylized de-focus treatment for different scenes where we used arbitrary shapes to make it look more graphic. We'd have a square de-focus or a sharp circle, overlapping shapes. We had various iterations of that to look at here. They wanted the cars to reflect their environments but asked to take it up a notch. For example, to have streaks of light, we built HDRI light tunnels that the cars would drive through, to enhance the sense of speed and give it some graphic line treatments. We looked at a lot of commercials and music videos for inspiration. We built a pipeline using our image-based rendering here at DD that would allow us in the composites to independently change the color of the environment, the base color of the car and all of the CG lighting and reflections. For example, a blue car would only reflect a more saturated blue light and it would still have the correct light modeling response -- it was not just a global color. In other words, the lighting of the car would be treated as just blue but the reflections would be the natural environments. This would allow the colors to pop.

"For me, it was interesting because it's not something you would normally do on a project. As a compositor, typically here at DD, we mostly focus on photorealistic work. But on Speed Racer, we had to unlearn what you've learned over the years of what makes a good composite in terms of the integration of elements. You are forced to think about the individual shots as if they were drawn as cel animation, except, in this case, you were using photorealistic imagery on the different layers instead of illustrations."

A palette was chosen for each sequence. The Grand Prix has extreme saturated blues and hot whites, while the Thunderhead Pass features a more golden hour with stronger yellows and reds.

In constructing the Exhaust compositing team on the fly in Chicago, where the Wachowskis hail, Morrison and his team were responsible for building the tools and the infrastructure. Wife Amanda Morrison was the lead compositor. "We started as a supra vfx editorial department doing the directors' cut of the film and then came back to L.A. to do post.

"Funnily enough, this is exactly what I did on 300 for Warner Bros. But visually it was at the opposite extreme. You can categorize it in terms of focus. This never fell where you would go with a true camera. We either went way overboard to bring the audience in or we kept everything tack sharp to let everyone see the vistas. There's a sequence called the Driver's Club, which contains huge wood panels and is very opulent browns and reds. It's very Versailles with massive windows on the side and a gigantic swimming pool with synchronized swimmers, with the blues punching through the browns and reds. So you start with everything tack sharp where the focal point is allowed to be infinite so you can take in everything. And then as we move through the sequence, there's a gathering of people in the center of the room, where [legendary driver] Cannonball Taylor, [Speed's adversary] Royalton and the family all come together, and we pull the focus in tighter and tighter where everything behind these guys is totally out of focus. As part of that, we had another choice, which was the 'circle of confusion.' We chose diamonds as an impossible diaphragm for the camera to add a slightly subconscious feeling of more wealth to the room."

Morrison adds that there were other shots, much like the Hitchcock dolly zoom, where you make a particular character feel unsteady. They took different layers and scaled and shifting them around in "impossible" ways. They might bring the background in and push the foreground away and take a mid-level and do something more extreme than either of the first two. But the language is already well described in anime, so, he says, you're not creating anything brand new stylistically. The trick was bringing it into live action without totally overwhelming the viewer and making it look too synthetic.

"It's very vibrant and super saturated, but there's always a theme running. It's very clear that there's a palette chosen for each sequence. In terms of the races, the Grand Prix has extreme saturated blues and hot whites, but there are amazing sequences that are bold and different. Thunderhead Pass tends to go for a more golden hour with stronger yellows and reds, then very clean blues punching through that. The school section at the beginning, when Rex picks up young Speed from school, contains the largest cacophony of all. That's basically taking the outside of the hue wheel, all of the saturated colors that live on the side of that, and sprinkling different advertisements and flowers. In fact, in an odd way, the less saturated stuff in that makes it a more unified palette."

Morrison admits that the bubbles were very useful in manipulating the live action, splitting them into layers as though you were working on a rostrum table. "It was very much an anime thing to do but it goes back much further than that with matte painting. One good example was in a hotel room during the Casa Cristo rally sequence. Taejo and Horuko are having a conversation and the camera is wheeling around from right to left on Taejo and left to right on Horuko. But what we've done is taken the bubble and overridden the camera move and let the whole thing just spin at a consistent rate while still swapping backwards and forwards to frame up on the nicest bit of the room. The bubbles gave us that kind of functionality. Depth of field was big in terms of making sure people got enough stuff to feel the right way and then using the circle of confusion to enhance the feel of that. If you're in a rainy scene, the circle of confusion would be a vertically stretched lozenge, which is in sympathy with the rain falling down, and very much controlling the background to help the audience feel slightly uncertain."

Like Poe, Morrison maintains that the trickiest part for artist and supervisor alike was to be counter-intuitive to their previous photoreal experiences in compositing. "To some degree, for a certain look that we developed in Berlin and Chicago, we then had to tell people when to go off the rails and when it was not the case to do that. That was the hardest thing for an artist working on this show. It's not empirical, there's no yardstick to measure everything against. It's a series of aesthetic decisions that, only by doing it for a reasonable amount of time, and working with the brothers, do you get a feel for it."

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.