Double Negative Creates ‘Real’ Gotham for Batman Begins
In its largest project, London-based Double Negative has created nearly 300 vfx shots for Warner Bros.’ BATMAN BEGINS, opening June 15. Production vfx supervisors Janek Sirrs and Dan Glass challenged Double Negative to tackle work that would require the team to completely revamp its design facility, creating a new working pipeline and installing new infrastructure to accommodate the huge workload.
Paul Franklin, Double Negative’s in-house vfx supervisor for the project, said, “Since the inception of Double Negative we have worked on some amazing sequences — and this film definitely captures some of the most spectacular shots we’ve ever completed. It was a huge logistical jigsaw, requiring meticulous planning at every stage to maintain maximum creativity throughout the process.”
Double Negative was tasked with “establishing” Gotham as a living, breathing, modern city. Fear as a weapon is a strong theme in the film, and to heighten this, director Christopher Nolan wanted the action to take place in a dark, gritty, but most of all a believably real environment. Franklin commented, “If for one second the vfx were visible the audience would be jolted out of the story and Gotham would become a fantasy. When we reached a point where Chris Nolan felt that our work was seamless with the live action then we knew we had achieved our goal.”
To establish the Monastery in its early mountainous setting, Double Negative shot a physical miniature and then virtually “grafted” the building into the landscape of Iceland where the background action was filmed. Double Negative vfx artists used in-house software to track the camera move and extract the terrain from the image, resculpting it digitally to fit the structure of the Monastery. The final layout and camera moves were then supplied to the camera unit for miniature photography.
Nolan was keen that Gotham should be rooted in an observed reality. “We initially thought of using a miniature and then switched to the idea of sourcing a real location that we could shoot from the air and then extend digitally, but neither approach would capture the enormity of Chris’s vision of a ‘city gone mad’,” added Franklin. “So we opted for a fully digital method, creating the huge cityscape from a library of CGI buildings sourced from Chicago originals. The lighting of the scene was key to selling the reality of the shot, so we went up onto the roof of the Sears Tower — at nearly 1,500 feet one of the tallest buildings in the world — and photographed the dawn breaking over Chicago as reference. The final city contains over half a million structures and is bigger than all of the major cities in the U.S. put together!”
Chicago served as the principal location for main unit photography. Double Negative developed a process referred to as “Gothamization,” adding extra buildings and traffic to extend the live-action plates and create Bruce Wayne’s home city. In addition, Double Negative created the monorail train system and the central structure of Wayne Tower, which are first revealed during a flashback sequence that shows Bruce as a child traveling into Gotham on the monorail with his family. The foreground interiors were shot on a purpose built carriage interior against a large greenscreen at Shepperton Studios in England. Specific backgrounds of Chicago were shot from a helicopter on large format film and then inserted into the train windows using Double Negative’s proprietary virtual environment too called “Plane-it.” Extensive Gothamization was required to turn Chicago into the endless cityscape of Gotham and the sequence culminates in the final approach to the Empire-State-like Wayne Tower, which was realized entirely through digital means.
Paul Franklin, Double Negative’s in-house vfx supervisor for the project, said, “Since the inception of Double Negative we have worked on some amazing sequences — and this film definitely captures some of the most spectacular shots we’ve ever completed. It was a huge logistical jigsaw, requiring meticulous planning at every stage to maintain maximum creativity throughout the process.”
Double Negative was tasked with “establishing” Gotham as a living, breathing, modern city. Fear as a weapon is a strong theme in the film, and to heighten this, director Christopher Nolan wanted the action to take place in a dark, gritty, but most of all a believably real environment. Franklin commented, “If for one second the vfx were visible the audience would be jolted out of the story and Gotham would become a fantasy. When we reached a point where Chris Nolan felt that our work was seamless with the live action then we knew we had achieved our goal.”
To establish the Monastery in its early mountainous setting, Double Negative shot a physical miniature and then virtually “grafted” the building into the landscape of Iceland where the background action was filmed. Double Negative vfx artists used in-house software to track the camera move and extract the terrain from the image, resculpting it digitally to fit the structure of the Monastery. The final layout and camera moves were then supplied to the camera unit for miniature photography.
Nolan was keen that Gotham should be rooted in an observed reality. “We initially thought of using a miniature and then switched to the idea of sourcing a real location that we could shoot from the air and then extend digitally, but neither approach would capture the enormity of Chris’s vision of a ‘city gone mad’,” added Franklin. “So we opted for a fully digital method, creating the huge cityscape from a library of CGI buildings sourced from Chicago originals. The lighting of the scene was key to selling the reality of the shot, so we went up onto the roof of the Sears Tower — at nearly 1,500 feet one of the tallest buildings in the world — and photographed the dawn breaking over Chicago as reference. The final city contains over half a million structures and is bigger than all of the major cities in the U.S. put together!”
Chicago served as the principal location for main unit photography. Double Negative developed a process referred to as “Gothamization,” adding extra buildings and traffic to extend the live-action plates and create Bruce Wayne’s home city. In addition, Double Negative created the monorail train system and the central structure of Wayne Tower, which are first revealed during a flashback sequence that shows Bruce as a child traveling into Gotham on the monorail with his family. The foreground interiors were shot on a purpose built carriage interior against a large greenscreen at Shepperton Studios in England. Specific backgrounds of Chicago were shot from a helicopter on large format film and then inserted into the train windows using Double Negative’s proprietary virtual environment too called “Plane-it.” Extensive Gothamization was required to turn Chicago into the endless cityscape of Gotham and the sequence culminates in the final approach to the Empire-State-like Wayne Tower, which was realized entirely through digital means.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment