When VFX Supervisor Richard Kidd first came on the show, there were about 350 vfx shots planned. It expanded to 500, then went down to about 95 shots and wound up at 250. 

Hancock adds, "We had a fun time with the helicopter shot around Edward and Bella perched in the top of the tree. It started off as a wire removal shot, and we used Digital Fusion to remove the wires. Then we needed to add some foreground trees and bushes to make it feel like the actors were out in the wilderness instead of on location in a 'groomed' field. It turned into a great example of the new 3D compositing features in Digital Fusion. We were able to do a 3D track of the swooping camera move and then -- just using images on moving cards -- creating the movement of tree branches, and layering many trees and having them stick into the ground. We could quickly make changes without having to go through the traditional 3D lighting and rendering and comping."

The shots where the vampires move through the trees serve to underscore author Meyers' idea that vampires are hunters, observes Kidd. "We did augment the traditional levels of motion blur with a bit of streaking to give the sense that they're moving impossibly fast. But it's not heavy-handed."

For a complex sequence in which the vampires play a baseball game, CIS helped Kidd prepare for the shoot by doing a Maya previs. The scene had to show the vampires' extraordinary abilities to throw and hit baseballs with lightning speed. These shots also required CIS to replace the skies with storm clouds and CG lightning -- major plot points for the storyline. As Kidd explains, "It's one of the scenes where the vampires could be themselves, because there's a storm rolling in, and with the thunder and lightning, the noise that they make when they hit the ball would be masked. They make a thunderclap sound because they hit the ball so strongly."

"The weather underwent a long evolution for this scene," notes Hancock. "In pre-production we wanted to get some thought put towards weather factors in case that would impact how the filming would be done. Initially they had an almost fantastical sky in mind with crazy formations of storm clouds, and then there was the push to get it in-camera and limit the horizon. That required that we see the sky through branches. We wanted to limit the sky replacements to more of the up-angle shots.

"The weather on the day of shooting was pretty cooperative," Hancock explains. "We extended our color correction as deep to the horizon as we could, but we had some rotoing of characters. In most cases were able to get far with color corrections to modify the existing sky in the plate behind the trees. This would leave the new stormier cloud elements above the treetops. Some of the shots did have animated rolling clouds but they were all approached from a 2D point of view -- there were some 3D tracks but mostly they were 2D cloud elements shot up here in cloudy Vancouver. We used Boujou for some of the complex 3D tracking -- for zooms or whip pans or really fast dollies. But a lot of it was just 2D tracking in Shake. It ended up being a moody scene with lightning and thunder, which provided a nice chance for visual effects to be part of the story."

Another aspect of preparation for the sequence was the gathering of environmental background images in case CIS would need to extend the background during post. As Kidd explains, "We shot gigapixel images for panning and tiling. We shot with a long lens and created enormous panoramas so that later if we needed a background we could zoom in on it at whatever level and have sufficient resolution. In the baseball sequence we actually did a full 360-degree view from the ground to the sky at extremely high resolution." This kind of home-made 2D 'Lidar', Kidd notes, "Allowed us to create lots of virtual set elements in 2D."

While it's become standard practice to add completely digital balls in sports sequences, Hancock had the idea of using clear plastic balls that the actors could actually hold, and then replace those later with CG. "When you ask actors to imagine having a CG ball in their hands you end up with hands that are too closed or too open, which means we have a lot of additional work to do manipulating fingers. We didn't have to contend with that because these actors had good solid objects that they could squeeze, rather than miming an imaginary ball." And having the balls be clear, adds Kidd, "Didn't affect the light nearly as much as if we had shot with a solid green ball. Also, if there were several cameras picking up close-up shots, we didn't want to have six baseballs out on the field that we'd have to paint out. In our wide shots we didn't have to paint out all those clear balls -- they'd kind of disappeared."