R!OT and Rhythm & Hues were the main vfx houses, with the holy trinity of Maya, Fusion and Inferno as the primary toolset.

BD: What's another notable effect?

DJ: The opening, which has a car crash, which happened at night during snow and since a lot of these are obviously greenscreen shots, we had to actually do one outside and they were generating a very dense look for snow hitting the windscreen and that bokeh of defocus you get when you have a light through water, the sort of big colored darts, which became the driving element of the title sequence. So one of the things we did was go and shoot fake snow on car windows and experimenting with different looks and then shooting that in HD and then using those elements along with the whole CG snow to get a natural look. Because any night photography is hard to shoot and it was especially tricky because the snow storm went up and then down and the violence of it. So it was hard orchestrating that since it was the first thing you see in the film.

BD: Talk about the studios you worked with on this?

DJ: The primary house was R!OT, which is where I worked. We sent the Visual Effects Supervisor, Jamie Hallett, to shoot the plates. And Rhythm & Hues were incredibly helpful as well. There's a scene where Henry is in the snow and has time traveled to the field behind Clare's family home, and comes across a deer. And we tried shooting a deer in Toronto but it wasn't impressive. So our very generous and good friends at Rhythm & Hues [Will Telford was the digital effects supervisor] actually did two animated deer for us for the two shots that we then comp'd in.

BD: What was the primary software that was used?

DJ: Primarily Maya, Fusion and Inferno: the holy trinity of visual effects. And Maya nCloth for additional clothing work for Henry during the various time travels.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.