When seminal London buildings are destroyed in the fascist England depicted in V for Vendetta, Cinesite produced the sequences. Above, Big Ben was created in a 30’ miniature. All film images courtesy of Warner Bros.

Hollywood takes yet another stab at adapting an Alan Moore graphic novel, V For Vendetta (released by Warner Bros. on March 17 and playing simultaneously in IMAX), this time by producers Andy and Larry Wachowski, who actually wrote the first draft of the script before directing The Matrix trilogy. Not surprisingly, Moore has not only distanced himself from the project, but has also removed his name from the credits, while illustrator David Lloyd has endorsed the political thriller for its complex and cunningly topical depiction of terrorism.

The Wachowskis awarded the directorial duties to James McTeigue, their first assistant director on The Matrix movies, and selected Dan Glass, also a veteran of the Matrix adventure, as production visual effects supervisor. The filmmakers initially designed the film with remarkably few visual effects shots. “We set out with a plan to tackle 120 shots, but ended up with just shy of 500,” Glass recalls. “Although a large increase, it was a naturally evolving process working with the director, and not a case of things spinning out of control. James was great to work with. At my first meeting with him, he produced a list of all the vfx moments he envisaged in the script, but, from there on, he left it all very much in my hands. The underlying stylistic approach was always to keep things very grounded in reality and to that end, achieve what we could in camera as a first resort.”

The film’s production visual effects supervisor Dan Glass (left) worked with Cinesite’s vfx supervisor Matt Johnson (center) and CG supervisor Thrain Shadbolt on more than 150 shots involving 2D and 3D technology.

Four vendors, all based in London, were contracted to produce the visual effects: Cinesite (Europe) was the lead house with more than 150 shots involving 2D and 3D technology; Double Negative looked after the majority of the monitor/TV inserts; Framestore CFC assisted the digital intermediate with atmosphere addition and mask shadow work; and Baseblack executed miscellaneous but often tricky wire removal and fix-it shots. “Technically, the challenges on V For Vendetta were mostly our timeframe and budget: we had nine months to complete the film from start to finish, and only seven weeks to complete the vfx once the edit was handed over,” Glass notes. “From an artistic point of view, our biggest challenge was the end explosion sequence, which needed to be [dramatic, convincing and leading to almost magical].”

At Cinesite, part of visual effects supervisor Matt Johnson’s assignment was to oversee the creation of a slightly retouched London. “Even though the story is set in the near future, James didn’t want a futuristic cityscape,” Johnson comments. “Instead, we moved buildings around, erased advertisements, removed any recognizable sign or corporate logo, and slightly altered the skyline. It was done within Photoshop on a shot-per-shot basis. The main addition to the skyline was a forest of antennas that was composited over the actual British Telecom Tower. Also, we added a major feature to Piccadilly Circus, a landmark location in London where some facades are covered with large billboards. We first removed these and replaced them with one giant screen on which we digitally projected images related to the story. The whole location was heavily retouched with numerous matte-painted elements projected onto cards and tracked into the plates to get the perspective right. The screen itself was modeled in Maya and tracked to the facade. In order to simulate the look of billboard images, we created a node within Shake — our main compositing package with Inferno — that took our images and generated a pixilated look. We also incorporated some broken pixels to make the image look more realistic, and added highlights to suggest the curvature of the screen. The goal was to create a view of Piccadilly Circus that only Londoners would be able to pick out as unreal. For any other viewer, the screen had to look like it was an authentic feature of the location, which required seamless compositing.”