Wong Kar-Wai’s dreamlike world is a colorful mix of reality and the bizarre.

A City Unlike Any Other
This look took form almost by accident, when Wong once saw a wireframe model of the city. Intrigued by the look of the CG buildings in their most basic form, he asked if the wireframe could somehow be used in the final city imagery. Buf started making tests in which the wireframe element was composited over the final render. The results looked extremely promising. The studio realized that this unprecedented approach could produce a futuristic city unlike any other that had ever been designed for a movie. At the same time, the more Buf explored this option, the more Wong aimed toward a very stylized city.

After months of experimentation, the studio came up with the final look. In each shot of the city, wireframe models of the buildings were colorized and composited over their rendered counterpart, but in order to make it even more intriguing, Buf didn’t line them up exactly. Being off mark, the wireframe element gave the cityscape a three-dimensional and surreal look. The wireframe animation was also slightly desynchronized from the main animation, which created the eerie illusion of a vibrating city. The final touch was to lightly bend and twist some wireframe models in ways that made the shots more interesting. Many tests were required for each wireframe effect in order to nail down the spatial and temporal displacements that produced the best results. Again, this process involved generating numerous versions of each shot and just as many revisions before the effects were finally approved.

Even after animation and rendering had been finalized, Wong still had the possibility to tweak the imagery. Buf decided to render most of the layers as individual elements: streetlights, neon lights, cars, pedestrians, but also CG passes. The first advantage was a very short render time; the second was a complete freedom for the director to modify the look of each shot at the compositing stage. Up to the last minute, Wong could create a wide range of ambiances by adjusting the compositing. The final look of the futuristic city is very graphic, highly complex and detailed. It is also surprisingly colored, as the director wanted the digital environments to match the graphic ambiances of the live-action scenes. Many shots feature the characters in stark red settings. Buf matched these ambiances by applying various shades of the same color to the wireframe models. Many different color combinations were submitted to Wong before the right hues and the appropriate balance were nailed down.

All the city shots were entirely computer-generated, sometimes running as long as 40 seconds. Several shots required compositing the environment with actors shot on stage. One sequence features the writer traveling across the city on a futuristic high-speed train. Buf completely designed the bullet-shaped train with only two tips from Wong: the vehicle had to reflect its environment and its architecture should be based on the train system of our time. Therefore, no flying trains in 2046. For shots inside the train in motion, the art department built a train car set in front of a bluescreen. In order to avoid the need of generating blocks of CG buildings, Buf opted for a very stylized environmental look. Since the train was supposed to be traveling at high-speed, this approach worked remarkably well and saved a lot of modeling and rendering time.