Another exo-suit? Watch out District 9. Digital Domain said the acceleration was all about grounding and tried to make it real world and not look too unbelievable. All Images: © 2009 Paramount Pictures.

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According to Boyd Shermis (Poseidon), G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is more than your typical summer tentpole: it takes advanced technology to a higher level of spectacle and mayhem.

"There are a handful of things about the film, at least for me, that are unique and provided personal challenge," the overall visual effects supervisor suggests. "One was the Typhoon aircraft, which is the bladeless helicopter that uses vertical takeoff and landing technology. One of the things we wanted to do, in addition to giving it that advanced technology aspect, was to give it some flight characteristics that would make you feel like it's an advanced tactical fighter. Not like a spaceship, but something that would obey the laws of physics. So, one of my fun challenges was defining the animation style for this craft to make it do some really tricky stuff with gravity."

A more crucial challenge for Shermis, however, was designing and executing an elaborate chase through Paris, in which the Joes use special accelerator suits to help thwart the metal-eating Nanomites from disintegrating The Eiffel Tower and all of Paris along with it. In fact, the previs for the sequence not only helped greenlight the Stephen Sommers-directed movie, but also offered the explosive centerpiece.

"Stephen Sommers said, 'I've got this idea where these guys wear exo-skeletal suits and they have a chase here in the streets of Paris trying to knock down The Eiffel Tower.' And that was literally about all the direction I got and I had the opportunity to create something from scratch and design an entire sequence and then execute the whole thing almost entirely the way it was done.

"So we took a lot of this advanced technology and applied it in a cinematic way that gave us a very elaborate and choreographed chase through Paris. There was the challenge of animating human characters and making them feel and act human while also accelerating them. So you had to walk that fine line by having them run 40 miles an hour and not looking stupid. That 10-minute roller coaster ride is just out there."

Shermis turned to Digital Domain, which handled the accelerator suit, the recreation of The Eiffel Tower and the CG cars and the destruction that occurs during the heart-pounding sequence.

"So we were given the task of recreating, I would say, the centerpiece of the movie," explains Bryan Grill, Digital Domain's visual effects supervisor. "It was definitely a mish mash of very big practical effects and a lot of CG augmentation and then full CG shots. It ran the gamut from removing pipe bombs, which would lift cars up, to completely having CG cars get blown up and thrown across the sky. We shot mostly at the Downey soundstage and then went to Prague [at the Czech Republic's Barrandov Studios] for two-and-a-half months. It was pretty intense. We call it raining cars, while the Joes are in their accelerator suits trying to jump through all of these obstacles in their way. It's kind of like a mine field in Paris."

As for the accelerator suit, Shane Mahan was in charge of building the actual suit. He made four to six and they all had different types of damage or no damage at all, depending on the requirements. They were form fitted for both Marlan Wayans and Channing Tatum and their stunt guys. "And, basically, anything from the belly button up was the practical suit, and everything else was our CG recreation of the suit," Grill adds. "We knew we had to match it exactly but also used motion capture early on to get Marlan and Channing jumping, running and walking. We wanted to make sure during the chase scene that you could get a sense of who was who at all times.

"The animation team (supervised by Bernd Angerer) worked really hard to preserve who the characters were and used the parkour running style as a basis for the acceleration effect. It's all about grounding. For our sequences, we tried to make it real world and not look too unbelievable. They had to have balance, they had to land correctly."