Co-writer Farhad Safinia talks about Apocalypto. Mel Gibson's action/adventure chase film set against the backdrop of the waning Mayan civilization. All images © Icon Distribution Inc. All rights reserved.

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip Apocalypto by simply clicking the image.

After his phenomenally successful The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson decided to switch gears and make “a high-velocity action/adventure chase film.” But wanting to shoot something vital as well as visceral, Gibson went for another challenge: the backdrop of the waning Mayan civilization. Collaborating with first-time screenwriter Farhad Safinia, Gibson came up with Apocalypto (Buena Vista, Dec. 8), which explores the coming-of-age of Jaguar Paw, whose idyllic world is torn apart when fierce hunters capture him and he’s nearly sacrificed to the gods. Miraculously spared, Paw makes a heart-racing dash to save his life, his family and his dying civilization.

Using a cast of indigenous performers, Gibson and his crew shot for several intense months on location in Mexico, including the lush rainforest of Catemaco. Visual effects supervisor Ted Rae was recruited once again to provide seamless effects in support of Gibson’s naturalistic vision. Meaning: lots of wire removal, creative compositing and minimal CG.

Bill Desowitz: How many vfx shots do you have in Apocalypto?

Ted Rae: I had originally estimated we were only going to have 75 shots because Mel didn’t want to do an “effects picture.” He wanted to shoot as much as he could for real and he’s darn good at that. However, my crew and me in the visual effects department were part of production. It’s not like subbing it out from the outset to a company where you have to niggle over every dime spent against what was bid, etc. We were an integral part of the live-action crew hired by Mel to make his film.

BD: How many shots did you end up doing?

TR: We turned over 398 shots, 372 of which are still in the picture. Seventy of those were “fix-its,” which leaves a total of 302 vfx shots, including some heinously difficult wire removals. The film is about indigenous people and there’s a lot of action so, of course, there’s going to be wirework. Indigenous people from Mesoamerica wouldn’t wear much, so where do you put a stunt harness? How do you hide the wires? Removing them involves visual effects. Since we’ve got to get the shot, we’ve gotta get the stunt, it doesn’t matter that I can see a buckle that’s right on top of a bum cheek. We’re going to have to paint it out. We’re going to have to track in a new section of butt cheek. It doesn’t matter that the guy is running through the jungle, is supposed to be bare foot and is really wearing running shoes. The actor has to wear shoes. He doesn’t have feet like leather the way the character really would. We knew we were going to have to remove the shoes.

On his second outing with Gibson, vfx supervisor Ted Rae (above) was recruited to provide seamless effects to support Gibson’s naturalistic vision. Meaning: lots of wire removal, creative compositing and minimal CG.

Now in post, I still subbed things out to seven different companies, which is my inkling anyway… to go to companies that I know: Asylum, Svengali VFX, Luma Pictures, Zen Haven Studio, Look Effects, Filmworks FX and Radium. I think that Asylum did over 150 shots for us. Quite a variety of kinds of shots as well. They did a lot of really tricky wire removals. There’s a sequence with a live jaguar in it. What Asylum had done in the teaser, helped me to rethink how we approached the jaguar sequence. They are really tough shots. It’s a real jaguar chasing the actual actor and it isn’t that far behind him. It was laborious but it really shows the audience something that they’ve never seen before. You’ve got a 180-pound jaguar running eight feet behind our actor guy running full out. No motion control, no repeat passes. It’s all live. Svengali also did a couple of really tricky shots where we have the jaguar up a tree. They painted out the platform and its collar and warped the fur back up to fill the space, painted back in branches: tracking it all back in to the camera move. They put in the jungle floor, which wasn’t visible. And they animated leaves and vines, and I made sure the tail looked like it was bumping a vine the way it did in the real piece. All throughout the project, we put a lot of effort into putting things back into the effects that were there in the original photography. There were bugs everywhere. If a fly went through the matte line, it got painted right back in. So much so that in some of the matte shots we added flies. There was always something flying through the shot. There was always water dripping off things in the jungle

BD: Who were some of your matte artists?

TR: Rocco Gioffre, Mark Sullivan and Michele Moen of Svengali and Ken Nakada of Zen Haven Studio. They were my dream team and I’ve wanted to get them all together on the same project for years. And then Marc Andre Samsom of Svengali and Shannan Burkley of Asylum also were aboard to add some really nice work. Most of it was painting over existing elements, including photography of a miniature city. Something that production designer Tom Sanders and I discussed in pre-production was the idea of never making a point of revealing the Mayan city in the background. I’d rather do three times as many shots and have all of them shorter so that the city doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s just there, just thrown away. We also discussed that we didn’t want to leave the design of the city to artists in post who hadn’t been part of the production’s art department or the live-action shoot. It needed to feel like it was real. Tom designs his sets by building models anyway, so once he had all his main sets finalized, the model makers in the art department rolled over into building a 60' x 80' model of the Mayan city. For everything that we shot from the top of pyramid number one, which is where most of the action takes place, we recorded all of the camera data. And then toward the end of principal, after they built the city model, I shot BGD plates of the miniature city, finessing the lighting and sense of distance as much as possible. During post, Rocco, Mark, Michele, Ken and Shannon touched up the elements and blended them into the foreground plates