All three churches were off the shooting grid, so visual effects were the only way CIS Vancouver could appear in the film. Courtesy of CIS Vancouver.

For Santa Maria della Vittoria and Santa Maria del Popolo, the art department built one set that could work for both churches, with a little redress. For St. Peter's Basilica, the actors were shot on an entirely greenscreen set, with only the floor and a partial column to orient the vfx team. "We ended up replacing the column and the floor, but don't tell anyone," Breakspear chuckles.

"For Popolo, there were lots of issues with the practical set not lining up with the real location photography, due to creative license being heavily used in its construction. In the end, we were able to bring both locations together by duplicating areas where needed, and hiding other areas that no longer existed in the practical set. Santa Maria del Popolo was the only church we built using LightWave, everything else was built in Maya. When we worked on The Da Vinci Code, we did all our shots in LightWave, as at the time, our pipeline was more centered around this package for this type of work. Four years later, our pipeline has moved toward Maya, and although we still love what LightWave can do, it made sense to split the builds across both packages. All the churches created in Maya were rendered in mental ray. Each frame was generally broken out into 25-40 specific layers, giving the compositor great control on adjusting the look we wanted."

For Santa Maria della Vittoria, Bickerton shot a miniature of the ceiling and the resulting images were digitally projected onto a CG roof that could be placed in any of the shots. Fire, embers, heat haze and smoke enhancements were also added to the practical fire. All of the compositing was done in Shake.

For St Peter's Basilica, the task was far greater, for CIS had to create just about the entire environment, other than the actor. "Normally, you would try to avoid this, as that much CG real estate is typically very hard to pull off convincingly," Breakspears observes. "Our CG Supervisor, Karen Ansel felt that we could master all the nuances required to fool the eye, and together with 2D Supervisor, Martyn Culpitt, worked out all the required layers and approaches needed to pull it off. The end result is pretty amazing!"

CIS Vancouver recreated the churches digitally, projected them onto accurate computer models of the buildings and added in other elements. Courtesy of CIS Vancouver.

Simulating Hypoxia
Another landmark location in Rome, the Pantheon interior was built as a partial set that was extended digitally, both vertically and horizontally. VFX Supervisor Richard Higham and his team at The Senate built a hybrid of the rest of the location using photo reference of the set and the real church. They built the domed ceiling and oculus, and created a fully CG shot for Langdon's POV as he first walks into the building.

In a dramatic sequence, Langdon and a Swiss guard find themselves entombed in a vault and are slowly starved of oxygen. Referring to their personal experiences with NASA astronaut training when shooting Apollo 13, Howard and Todd Hallowell were keen to depict the visual degradation caused by hypoxia (oxygen starvation). "The Senate tested various looks based on Todd's vivid descriptions," Bickerton says. "At the same time as we tested the RED camera for potential plate usage, we shot material for the tests whereby the camera was hand-held tracked down corridors. The footage was stabilized in X and Y, but also in Z to give a digital contra-zoom effect. On top of this, vignetting mimicked the tunnel vision side effect of hypoxia, along with trailing highlights around the periphery of the image."