Men-From-Mars' work on Mutant Chronicles is the most vfx work done by a single studio in British film history. All images courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Nowadays, it is not rare to see a movie featuring more than 1,500 vfx shots. The work is usually spread among many different vendors in order to ease up the pressure on any particular team. These mammoth projects typically require hundreds of vfx artists and a substantial budget. So, one can only wonder how London-based Men-From-Mars managed to single-handedly produce 1,454 multilayered shots for Mutant Chronicles with only six 3D artists, 2 to 3 matte painters and 20 compositors... Moreover, this team of 30 was able to deliver the bulk of the work -- 900 shots -- in less than six months, and on a very tight budget.

Opening in limited release today from Magnolia Pictures, Mutant Chronicles tells the grim story of our near future. It is the year 2027. Planet Earth is on the verge of complete ruin, as four giant corporations battle over the world's last resources. During the conflict, an ancient buried seal is broken, which releases a horrific mutant army. Soon, the mutants threaten to wipe out the whole human race.

When he embarked on this ambitious project, director Simon Hunter knew that he didn't have the budget to shoot a movie with such a grand scale using traditional means. He thus adopted the cost-effective strategy that had been so successful on such movies as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and 300: shoot live action on minimal sets and create the environments digitally. That meant that almost every shot would eventually be a visual effects shot. Indeed, Mutant Chronicles features some 1,645 VFX shots, a new record for the British visual effects industry.

Similar to Sky Captain and 300, the filmmakers used greenscreen for the live-action elements and composited digital environments behind the actors.

A Runaway Train
Serving as Overall Visual Effects Supervisor, Simon Carr mainly worked with lead vendor Men-From-Mars, while additional shots were assigned to Dinamo Prods. (VFX Supervisor Llyr Williams), Baseblack (VFX Producer Stephen Elson) and Lipsync Post (VFX Supervisor Glen Pratt).

Carr faced the challenge of achieving the scale and scope of the Mutant Chronicles world while working within the constraints of a very modest budget. "On a practical level, it meant there were no armies of vfx people on set -- in fact, for much of the project it was just me!" he laughs. "So, we had to find ways of streamlining approaches, such as ensuring that the camera data for each set-up was then available to vfx via a database. Since the film was shot on the Thompson Viper camera, we had access to every frame that was shot and, in many cases, it was also possible to put the camera data info into the headers."

Preproduction took place over an intense eight-week period, which didn't give Carr much opportunity to plan shots. He compares the shoot to a runaway train. "Our record for set ups in a day was, I believe, 62, and our average was about 40... Although we did do some previsualization and temp composites during the shoot, I generally did much of that myself on my laptop using C4D and some basic models and animations. In most cases, it was simply a case of trying to picture how the environment we'd imagined related to the minimal environment in which we were shooting."

In postproduction, the budget determined how much time the team was able to spend per shot. Knowing this, the director kept iterations down to a minimum on as many shots as possible. The lengthy postproduction process allowed the team to develop looks and environments in a less pressured way. The really heavy period of vfx post only started six months after the end of principal photography.