One of the most difficult characters was the hive guardian, the bruiser of the vampire world. The original design had him thinner and longer, but Tippett convinced them to give them a chance to design a more powerful creature."The way we thought of it was a rhino or bear with a hard skull structure to be used as a battering ram," Rothbart continues. "For vulnerability, we gave him a soft underbelly as well. We started with some motion tests and it didn't take long for them to get a great sense of what the drone and hive guardian motion should be. Animation supervisor Jim Brown gave him a snarl."

For the main city, Svengali (under the supervision of Robert Nederhorst) helped create a combination of Blade Runner and Orwell. "We came to the conclusion that they needed to build a city kit," Rothbart adds. "So we worked on a building level first and then expanded that out to the whole city. It's walled and confined, so there's always an upward expansion. We had newer buildings on top of older ones and it went up and up and up. And intertwined with that were these smoke stacks. At the center is the cathedral, which is the hub of the city and the shining light above everything. It was a really good process and solved a lot of the scope problems for us on a micro level."

By contrast, the wasteland by The Senate (under the supervision of Richard Higham) is an infinite horizon of ground and sky. "We did a lot of horizon replacements," Rothbart suggests. "We shot at the salt flats in the Mohave Desert but even that wasn't barren enough. In the DI, they just blasted it to create a great contrast to the city."

Plus there was a thrilling train sequence that was a combination of live action and CG split up between Gradient, Iloura and Spy Post with a 12-scale miniature by Kerner Optical. They built exterior facades of two trains that were pulled by trucks in the desert and then extended out. Then the fight on top of the train was filmed outdoors in front of a bluescreen.

The toolset consisted of mostly of Maya, Nuke, RenderMan and mental ray.

A virtual production flow was created with Rothbart in San Francisco and Fulle and her group in LA. They also sent out a color pipeline package to every vendor with LUTs, which took a lot of the guess work out in viewing the movie and mixing live action with digital sequences.

As for the stereo conversion, both Rothbart and Fulle were impressed with the results. "We shot the movie Scope and there's not a straight line with those [rare C-series] lenses, so we wanted to take advantage of that," Rothbart says. "Conversion enhances the experience of looking deep into the channels of the city or into the vastness of the desert."

"When the release date was pushed back several months, we were able to finish the shots, which was a luxury in looking back at it," Fulle adds. "Then we re-engaged some of our vendors where we wanted to re-render in stereo. It was kind of like doing two projects, one after the other. We did the visual effects, we regrouped and then we came back to do the conversion."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.