One of the goals of this sequel was to create superior eye-popping visual effects. Above, Magneto moves the Golden Gate Bridge for his own convenience. 

With their chunk of the finale taking about 20 minutes of screen time, Saindon says there were plenty of other elements they had to create also. “We atomized soldiers, which is similar to the effect in War of the Worlds, when the little pods blow up the people. But we were trying to do it in a way that is different and the people almost turn into confetti as this power goes through them and it just washed them away. We also did a lot of water simulation. As Jean gets stronger and stronger, she is supposed to lift the San Francisco Bay up and pull the water up around the island and shoot it up into a dome up above — which you never actually see in the final cut. They changed things around from what we did to the final cut. We are primarily a Maya, Shake and RenderMan house. Everything we do is through that process, but the R&D for the water was difficult mainly because of the time frame we had to finish. We didn’t have a lot of time to do the water and it was a pretty complex scene to do. The good thing is that we created a lot of the pipeline on Kong for the Venture sequences, so we were able to piggyback on that a little bit to create the simulation and get it to look like water in the scale that we needed.”

As to the Weta team, he offers, “I think we had somewhere around 300 people on the film, so we did put a lot of bodies on it. By the time we got the plates at the end of January, we were delivering at the end of March. It was 190 shots, so it was a fair amount of complex shots for the amount of time we had to do it. We also had to consult with other companies, including MPC in London on the Dark Phoenix look. When she becomes Dark Phoenix, her eyes go black and she gets veined and her skin loses some of the saturation. They were having similar shots so we had to make sure our look and their look matched very well. They also did a lot atomizing shots, so we had to send them a lot of information, plates or final comps, so they could get theirs to look like ours.”

Even with the short turnaround and scale of the shots, Saindon says the film was very manageable for the Weta group. “To be honest, I think it went really well. It didn’t feel like a lot of pressure was on us and we were able to turnaround everything in a very timely manner and we got lots of iterations to the client, but we didn’t feel that stressed. John ‘D.J.’ Desjardin was our connection to Fox and he was really easy to work with. We did all our talks over iChat and used cineSync and we were all on the same page. We ran it in a way that didn’t kill everybody with long hours. It really was a fun project to work on.”

Tara DiLullo is an east coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI-FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.