Framestore Provides VFX for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Press Release from Framestore
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens on 16th December 2011 in the USA and the UK. The sequel to 2009’s box office smash, Sherlock Holmes, the film sees Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law reprising their roles as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, with Guy Ritchie once more at the helm. Produced, like the first film, by Joel Silver, Lionel Wigram, Susan Downey and Dan Lin, Shadows also sees the return of cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and Visual Effects Supervisor Chas Jarrett. Framestore, too, were delighted to rejoin the crew for a second foray into Victorian mystery and mayhem.
Shadows sees our latest incarnation of Holmes matching lethal wits with his most famous literary nemesis, Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris). When an eminent surgeon is found dead in an auction room, Holmes deduces that he has been the victim of a murder that is only one piece of a larger and much more ominous puzzle. Holmes then encounters Sim (Noomi Rapace), a Gypsy fortune teller, whose life he saves and who reluctantly agrees to help him. The investigation becomes ever more dangerous as it leads Holmes, Watson and Sim across the continent, from England to France to Germany and finally to Switzerland. But Moriarty always seems to be one step ahead as he spins a web of death and destruction - all part of a greater plan that, if he succeeds, will change the course of history…
Framestore created nearly 550 shots for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, including the film’s climactic encounter at the Reichenbach Falls and a thrilling battle on a speeding train, as well as numerous elaborate environmental shots and set extension work, a scene taking place inside a gun, and some ingenious, near-subliminal puffs of breath.
Shooting took place from September 2010 to January 2011, with the majority of first unit material captured on location around the UK and at Elstree and Leavesden Studios. Supervising the shoots for Framestore were Visual Effects Supervisor Sirio Quintavalle, Compositing Supervisor Kyle McCulloch and CG Supervisor Ben White.
* * * Spoilers Follow * * *
Rain of Terabytes
At Shadows’s gripping climax, Holmes and Moriarty meet in a fortress high in the Swiss Alps, built above the source of the colossal Reichenbach Falls. They play chess and then – as so often happens – turn to fisticuffs. Holmes realizes that the only way to definitively best his nemesis is to seize and pull him over the balcony into the waterfall below, even at the price of near-certain death. In a classic piece of Ritchie theatre, the camera is placed midway down the falls, descending and pointing upwards, as the two figures locked together plummet towards it. They are moving faster than the camera, though, and it pans as they pass it. We switch to ultra-slow motion as we watch Holmes and Moriarty’s heads in close-up, inches apart and with very different expressions, before the film speed picks up again and we watch them plunging and separating as they continue their fatal descent. It is 29 seconds of virtuoso film-making, the sort that Guy Ritchie has made his own. But such visual audacity places the highest demands on a Visual Effects team, and Framestore are honoured that Ritchie and Jarrett trusted them to bring it all together.
VFX Supervisor Chas Jarrett’s initial hope was that the sequence could be constructed purely through the use of real waterfall elements. Both Quintavalle and McCulloch travelled far and wide as part of the quest for the perfect falls. They both dangled perilously out of helicopters (Quintavalle in Switzerland, McCulloch in Norway), clutching their trusty Canon EOS 5D cameras as they captured plates and footage. In the end, no real waterfall proved up to the sequence’s demands: for a start, it would have had to be over a kilometer tall, a waterfall so high it was finally only possible to encounter it inside the Soho offices of Framestore.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens on 16th December 2011 in the USA and the UK. The sequel to 2009’s box office smash, Sherlock Holmes, the film sees Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law reprising their roles as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, with Guy Ritchie once more at the helm. Produced, like the first film, by Joel Silver, Lionel Wigram, Susan Downey and Dan Lin, Shadows also sees the return of cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and Visual Effects Supervisor Chas Jarrett. Framestore, too, were delighted to rejoin the crew for a second foray into Victorian mystery and mayhem.
Shadows sees our latest incarnation of Holmes matching lethal wits with his most famous literary nemesis, Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris). When an eminent surgeon is found dead in an auction room, Holmes deduces that he has been the victim of a murder that is only one piece of a larger and much more ominous puzzle. Holmes then encounters Sim (Noomi Rapace), a Gypsy fortune teller, whose life he saves and who reluctantly agrees to help him. The investigation becomes ever more dangerous as it leads Holmes, Watson and Sim across the continent, from England to France to Germany and finally to Switzerland. But Moriarty always seems to be one step ahead as he spins a web of death and destruction - all part of a greater plan that, if he succeeds, will change the course of history…
Framestore created nearly 550 shots for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, including the film’s climactic encounter at the Reichenbach Falls and a thrilling battle on a speeding train, as well as numerous elaborate environmental shots and set extension work, a scene taking place inside a gun, and some ingenious, near-subliminal puffs of breath.
Shooting took place from September 2010 to January 2011, with the majority of first unit material captured on location around the UK and at Elstree and Leavesden Studios. Supervising the shoots for Framestore were Visual Effects Supervisor Sirio Quintavalle, Compositing Supervisor Kyle McCulloch and CG Supervisor Ben White.
* * * Spoilers Follow * * *
Rain of Terabytes
At Shadows’s gripping climax, Holmes and Moriarty meet in a fortress high in the Swiss Alps, built above the source of the colossal Reichenbach Falls. They play chess and then – as so often happens – turn to fisticuffs. Holmes realizes that the only way to definitively best his nemesis is to seize and pull him over the balcony into the waterfall below, even at the price of near-certain death. In a classic piece of Ritchie theatre, the camera is placed midway down the falls, descending and pointing upwards, as the two figures locked together plummet towards it. They are moving faster than the camera, though, and it pans as they pass it. We switch to ultra-slow motion as we watch Holmes and Moriarty’s heads in close-up, inches apart and with very different expressions, before the film speed picks up again and we watch them plunging and separating as they continue their fatal descent. It is 29 seconds of virtuoso film-making, the sort that Guy Ritchie has made his own. But such visual audacity places the highest demands on a Visual Effects team, and Framestore are honoured that Ritchie and Jarrett trusted them to bring it all together.
VFX Supervisor Chas Jarrett’s initial hope was that the sequence could be constructed purely through the use of real waterfall elements. Both Quintavalle and McCulloch travelled far and wide as part of the quest for the perfect falls. They both dangled perilously out of helicopters (Quintavalle in Switzerland, McCulloch in Norway), clutching their trusty Canon EOS 5D cameras as they captured plates and footage. In the end, no real waterfall proved up to the sequence’s demands: for a start, it would have had to be over a kilometer tall, a waterfall so high it was finally only possible to encounter it inside the Soho offices of Framestore.
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