If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view clips of the vfx work from Zodiac by simply clicking the images.

To create the most complex sequence showing the murder of taxicab driver Paul Stine in Zodiac, Digital Domain used camera projections for the 3D matte painting environments. All images © 2007 Warner Bros. Ent. and Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

"Zodiac" was an infamous real life serial killer who committed a series of random and brutal murders in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late '60s and early '70s. Like Jack the Ripper, the killer built his own legend by sending cryptic letters to the newspapers and taunting the police. Although the case remains unsolved, Robert Graysmith, an editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle when the murders occurred, investigated the case in a heavily documented book, which has been turned into a chilling thriller by director David Fincher (Se7en). Opening March 2, 2007, from Paramount, Zodiac features extensive, albeit invisible, visual effects work.

Matte World Digital and visual effects supervisor Craig Barron were called in to create more than 40 establishing shots of San Francisco as it looked during that tumultuous era. Several of these shots, including flyovers, required building complete 3D environments. Parallel to this effort, Digital Domain was asked to focus on the exact recreation of the actual murders. The team was led by visual effects supervisor Eric Barba, vfx producer Lisa Beroud, CG supervisor Karl Denham, compositing supervisor Janelle Croshaw and matte painting supervisor Wei Zheng.

"We had to reproduce very precisely the way the killings occurred, and the environments in which they took place," Barba says. "We did more than 100 shots, but most of them will go unnoticed by the viewers. The bulk of our work, in terms of man-hours, involved set extensions. We recreated specific areas in San Francisco as they looked [at that time]. David was very adamant that everything looked exactly as it was at the time the murders occurred. He wanted to shoot his movie as if a camera had really been there. To start with, he decided that, whenever possible, we would shoot the plates at the actual location of each murder. Obviously, the environments had changed quite a bit in the last 35 years, so that's where we came in, to digitally bring them back to their original state."

Camera Projections
One of the most complex sequences was the murder of taxicab driver Paul Stine in the affluent Presidio Heights neighborhood. The plates were shot on a minimally built set of a couple of doors and steps leading to the doors surrounded by bluescreens. The art department drew up architectural drawings of the neighborhood to give the matte painting department a starting point.

"The murder took place at intersection areas of Washington and Cherry streets," Wei Zheng explains. "The sequence involved a couple of dozens shots, which covered 360° of the neighborhood. To achieve realism, we chose an approach of camera projections to create 3D matte painting environments. It involved modeling 3D geometries, painting camera maps using actual photographs of the neighborhood and then projecting maps back to corresponding models. Today's Washington and Cherry neighborhood provided us good references in terms of architectural styles, look, size relationships, etc. Using 3ds Max, we modeled 19 houses matching the real ones, and also built streets, sidewalk of the late '60s and early '70s, cars and a fire truck, power lines, stop signs, trees, etc. The camera projections technique allowed matte painters to utilize his or her painting skills and take advantage of real photo references at the same time. We then used 3ds Max to project the maps onto the geometries."

The maps were created from hundreds of day and nighttime reference photographs, all shot at 4K resolution. "I found out that daytime pictures were more useful," Zheng continues. "With the camera projections technique, you would like to have as many pictures as possible. Typically, you will need front and side views of a house to have a sense of its overall look. A matte painter should be able to paint something with little or nothing to go. Yet, I was hoping we never had such bad luck that we didn't have any pictures to start with. It was the case with one of the hero houses that had two big trees in front of it. We didn't have any ideal photo available. So, a lot of painting work went into that house. Since it was a nighttime scene, there were many streetlights, house lights, doorway lights that we needed to reproduce with their true luminosity. Typical digital images carry a value of 0 to 1, which can't represent the wider luminous value of lights. Unlike most software on the market, Digital Domain's proprietary compositing software, Nuke, truly supports high dynamic 32-bit images that carry a luminous value beyond 0 to 1. Knowing this ability of Nuke, we generated two 16-bit passes: the hero pass, and the core of lights pass. We brought those two passes and other elements into Nuke to re-build our high dynamic pictures. As a result, the images have a much wider range of luminous value. The lights in the scene are brighter and more vivid on the big screen."

The recreation of the environment turned out to be a much more demanding task than what had originally been thought. "A tremendous amount of work went into that sequence," Barba recalls. "For instance, we had police cars in the foreground and bluescreens in the mid ground. It meant that there was no reflection of the background houses on the vehicles. We had to build CG cars specifically to create those reflections, and then put these back in on the real vehicles. Some of the effects that we created were afterthoughts from David. They included adding a CG policeman on a motorcycle and a period fire truck, all in motion. For this type of work, we used either Maya or 3ds Max, depending on which renderer we thought was the most appropriate for any particular element. The vehicles were created in Maya and rendered in V-Ray, our main render engine on this project."