How the Oscar Nominees for Visual Effects Created Movie Magic at the Highest Magnitude

The aim of Matt Reeves’ The Batman was to make it feel as if the action could really happen. “There’s no science fiction element or fantastic element that removes it from our reality,” production VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon says, explaining that required doing as much in camera as possible. Special FX supervisor Dominic Tuohy and his team even built four versions of the Batmobile for different uses. Lemmon says that in the ramp jump (pictured right), which occurs as Batman chases the Penguin, his team used a stripped-down vehicle with additional features. “Eventually they were able to dial it in so the car could get up to about 12 feet high,” he claims, adding: “It soared for nearly a hundred feet before it would hit the ground again. And they were able to drive it through a wall of fire at the same time.”

The live action was photographed from a camera mounted on Penguin’s car. In post, Weta FX added further explosions and adjustments to the vehicle. And since the chase occurred in a rainstorm, the team replaced the road surface, as well, to make it slick. Sums up Lemmon, “We wanted to deliver all the excitement and spectacle that you have come to expect from a Batman movie, but we wanted [to make] every moment is plausible.”

“We had to not only merge what we shot with visual effects perfectly, but we also had to make sure that we did everything historically right,” says production VFX supervisor Frank Petzold of Netflix’s German-language anti-war epic, based on the classic novel written by Erich Maria Remarque. “Our approach was to make it not flashy; it couldn’t overpower the story or the acting,” he adds.

Petzold says his team’s major role was to focus on the details — and, of course, to make it seem like he did no work at all. “Our effort was really in detail, making the visual effects invisible to the viewers so that it doesn’t even cross their minds that they’re looking at something that was done a hundred years later,” he says. This included researching and creating what were at that time new weapons and tanks.

The battlefield was created by the production design team at an abandoned airport outside of Prague, but for these shots — and wide shots in particular — the VFX team was tasked with digital extensions, including terrain to support the story, smoke and other atmospheric elements. Also key was sky replacement for weather consistency.

Petzold notes that they created different “characters” of smoke — “large-scale, small-scale,” he elaborates. “And we use that smoke to not only give the viewer a sense of direction but also to connect sequences.”

This shot in the sequel to Marvel’s Black Panther features Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor, king of the underwater Talokan people. To make it happen, the actor’s performance was lensed by DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw while submerged underwater in a 20-foot tank, with a throne built by the production design department led by Hannah Beachler. The scene was repeated without the water, in a dry-for-wet environment, which was filmed on another stage and was the basis of the shot that appears in the movie.

VFX supervisor Geoffrey Baumann explains that the underwater reference was used by Weta FX to complete the shot. “They had to add the water back,” Baumann says, “and the little particulates in the water and the set piece behind him.”

He adds that in some scenes, the filmmakers also incorporated some of the underwater footage. “We had to be able to match the two,” notes Baumann. “[We had to support] Ryan [Coogler] and the rest of the filmmakers’ desire on the aesthetic and look and then try to keep it true to water.”

This shot contains several sizable challenges to realistically allow the human Spider (Jack Champion) to drag Quaritch (Stephen Lang), in Na’vi form, from the sea. The work started with performance capture — in a full-size tank that could simulate waves crashing — at Lightstorm’s Los Angeles stages. Next, Champion’s performance was shot on another stage in New Zealand. “Jack is dragging a guy in blue, the tallest guy we could find — he was somewhere in the realm of 7 feet tall, which is still 2 feet too short. [for a Na’vi],” explains VFX supervisor Eric Saindon of Weta FX. “We put a strap on his back for Jack to grab onto to simulate the strap on Quaritch’s back where he is actually pulling him from the water.”

Weta FX’s real-time depth compositing software helped director James Cameron to visualize the shot before all the elements were sent to Weta, where the artists went to work, combining live-action elements with digital effects to create the finished shot. “This allowed us to extend that live-action water into CG water fairly seamlessly and extend the rocks and things like that,” Saindon says. He adds that from the waist up, they used live-action footage of Champion. “At the very beginning of the shot, where he’s deep in the water and he is splashing around, we actually replaced his legs. [with CG legs] so we got the CG water splashing onto CG legs,” he explains. “There’s one wave that comes through that we wipe into Jack’s real legs because we really wanted that draining water off his loincloth and off his legs. [in order] to feel that interaction with the water.”

The filmmakers behind Paramount’s box office behemoth wanted the shot design of the flying sequences in Top Gun: Maverick to be based on real aerial photography with an aim of giving it a visceral feel. But there were aircraft that they couldn’t use in filming — for instance, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, which Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Miles Teller’s Rooster take from an enemy air base during the movie’s climatic mission. That plane was a model retired by the Navy in 2006.

In these instances, the planes used during filming were replaced or augmented with CG models. In the example above, the VFX team started with a live-action shot of a pair of F-18s. Then the VFX team digitally replaced them with a CG F-14 and fifth-generation enemy fighter. “We would remove the jet digitally, but we would use it as motion capture, so to speak, and also lighting reference for what the real aircraft was doing,” explains production VFX supervisor Ryan Tudhope. “[We] then put our digital aircraft in that place and animated it to do the same thing.” Tudhope reports that in its entirety, the movie involved 2,400 VFX shots, led by VFX studio Method (now part of Framestore).

This story first appeared in a Feb. stand-alone issue of The News84Media magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.