CafeFX's biggest challenge on The Kite Runner was building about 40 square miles of digital set for aerial shots of numerous kites flying over Kabul. All images © Paramount Vantage. 

Visual Effects Supervisor David Ebner had been eager to work with acclaimed director Marc Forster ever since he saw Finding Neverland, which he considers "movie magic." That day arrived when he signed on for The Kite Runner (which opened Dec. 14 from Paramount Vantage).

It also helped that Ebner found the 2003 bestselling novel upon which it was adapted to be "a gripping story" that begins with an innocent kite-flying contest in Afghanistan before years of brutal occupation by the Russians and Taliban dictatorship.

Universal themes of family ties, childhood friendship and forgiveness resonated so deeply with readers from around the world that the novel sold more than eight million copies in more than 34 countries. Author Khaled Hosseini, a physician born in Afghanistan who, like the lead character, managed to escape his war-torn country for America as a boy and didn't return for decades.

Building a Digital Set
Ebner, co-founder of CafeFX, oversaw 125 shots that blended footage from Western China and the San Francisco Bay Area with deft CG touches. "Where we shot [in China] there were no surrounding mountains and the architecture was very flat, while in Afghanistan everything is on hills," he says. "So we did a lot of digital matte painting work and set extensions. Anytime there was anything modern in a shot, we replaced it with things that were 30 or 40 years old."

His team's biggest challenge was building about 40 square miles of digital set for aerial shots of numerous kites flying over Kabul. That meant paying close attention to detail on the geometry and texturing of the mountainous terrain, buildings, cars and street scenes.

A variety of 3D applications were deployed, as opposed to just using Maya, which came in handy for close ups but couldn't handle enormous resolutions, or LightWave, whose focus was on background elements. Special software from German-based db&w called infiniMap Pro that could hold large resolution texture maps was used to generate a hybrid of highly detailed 3D models featuring matte painting projections and instancing.