Soho VFX extended a simple helipad set surrounded by greenscreen and connected it the CG Aesir building. It also added an entirely CG/matte painted New York City environment around it. Courtesy of Soho VFX. 

A major sequence takes place on a helicopter pad situated atop the Aesir building. Since no suitable location was found, the actors were filmed on a simple helipad set surrounded by a greenscreen. Soho VFX then extended the set, connected it to the CG Aesir building, and added an entirely CG/matte painted New York City environment around it. In the final composites, the action seems to be taking place hundreds of feet above street level.

In many exterior shots, the team ended up having to add a significant amount of digital snow, as it was not always feasible to cover large set with practical snow only. One such location was the harbor. The script called for Max Payne to jump out of a ship into icy water. "We were planning to have wax ice pieces and hopefully real ice, as we were shooting in the dead of winter, for Max to jump into," Burrell continues. "As luck would have it, all the ice around the dock was gone when we came to shoot. So, the special effects crew put as much ice in the water as they could, but in the end, it just did not work. So, we added in all the CG ice in the water when Max jumps in. When we came back the next night, Mother Nature came through and the dock was surrounded by real ice. Throughout the entire sequence, the lower part of the horizon is real, and above that is the 'Ghost City' extension matte painting with CG ice all around."

In many exterior shots, the team added a significant amount of digital snow, as it was not always feasible to cover large set with practical snow only. Courtesy of Spin.

Signature Shot
The videogame being extremely cinematic, Moore always wanted to have some signature shots that would feature unique, memorable camera movements. Working with his team, he played with the concept of a different type of bullet time shots. What he wanted was to slow the action down to an impossibly slow speed, without having to use the complex bullet time still cameras set-up. He eventually came up with a technique that was named "Boom vision" -- as it was ultimately used twice when Max Payne was firing a weapon. In the first one, we see Max killing a guard on a catwalk while jumping backward, and in the second one, the camera spins around Max's hand firing a gun.

The shots were achieved using a digital camera called the Phantom-HD at the amazing speed of 1,000 fps. "We had to build a special rig for the hand close-up," Burrell recalls. "It was a big motion control arm that was modified to spin around at two revolutions per second. Almost like a propeller of an airplane with the Phantom HD mounted on it. We called it the D.G.N.I. rig (Don't Go Near It) or it would do some damage to whatever it hit!" The tens of thousands of frames then needed a lot of processing and colour correction in order to blend into the regular footage. Soho FX handled the Boom Vision shots, adding slow motion CG bullets and CG bullet trails.

Later on, both shots were heavily featured in the film's trailers along with many of the other creative vfx shots -- a testimony to their visual distinctiveness. "I am very happy with the work we have done on Max Payne. It was a tough show and a lot of complicated work went into the making of the film. We stuck to the plan and the results are beautiful."

Alain Bielik is the founder and editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications, both print and online, and occasionally to Cinefex. In 2004, he organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.