This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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‘The Batman’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Warner Bros.
The Batmobile chase sequence is grounded in photography and physical special effects, which were combined with digital effects in post. Work began with special effects supervisor Dom Tuohy’s team, which built four bespoke vehicles for the sequence. Says Weta FX’s VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon: “They featured push-button-switchable two-wheel to four-wheel drivetrains and Formula One-style brakes that could be adjusted and activated at each wheel. Two of the vehicles could be driven from a pod attached to the outside of the vehicle, which allowed Robert Pattinson to be in the driver’s seat while an unseen stunt driver drove the car. For this shot, we stripped one Batmobile down to its lightest possible weight and set it up with long-throw suspension and doubled shock absorbers, allowing the Batmobile to jump 12 feet high and soar for 80 feet before it touched down on the pavement again.” He adds that the Batmobile and the wall of fire “were completely practical until the point where the car hit the ground and stood back up on its raised suspension.” From that point, it was created digitally in post.
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‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios Disney/Marvel
Roughly 2,000 VFX shots across 11 vendors were used to make the latest Doctor Strange movie, including a 40-second, fully CG tumble through the multiverse. According to Framestore VFX supervisor Alexis Wajsbrot, the shot contains 20 distinct worlds that morph into one another — “the same New York street scene variously changing from alternate universes composed of pipes, paint, honeycomb, cubes and classic 2D animation. This wholly CG shot was painstakingly iterated, with the creative team flexing their wildest ideas while integrating blink-and-you’ll-miss-them MCU Easter eggs and nods to the likes of Escher, Dalí and Picasso.”
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‘Black Adam’
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Warner Bros.
In Black Adam‘s final battle, members of the Justice Society take on supervillain Sabbac in Shiruta’s palace throne room. According to Weta FX’s VFX supervisor Sheldon Stopsack, the team started sequence work at an early stage of production by creating a real-time environment. “[It] was intended to be used on LED wall stages during photography,” he says. “We ended up using less of this particular set in the virtual environment, [but] it gave us a great head start by establishing a basic mood for this location.” Character work involved motion-capture data and keyframe animation. “Sabbac was probably the most challenging character,” Stopsack says, explaining that this included use of Weta’s facial technology “to build a complex facial system that allowed us to take [actor Marwan Kenzari’s] captured performance and interpret it for the 7-foot-tall devil-like villain.” Digital work in the sequence also included fire, explosions and other elements. “A large number of the shots were entirely digital.”
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‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios Disney/Marvel
For the underwater world of Talokan, the filmmakers aimed to shoot as much as possible practically, though digital visual effects would of course be required. VFX supervisor Geoffrey Baumann reports that while this presented its challenges, it gave director Ryan Coogler the ability to direct the actors. “Heavier performance scenes were replicated on a stage after they had already been shot in our underwater tank,” he explains. This allowed the actors to “reference the experience while performing the same scene later, dry, onstage.” Of the film’s 2,548 shots, 2,233 required visual effects, which were created with the contributions of more than a dozen VFX houses.
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‘Nope’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Universal Studios Universal
This shot from Jordan Peele’s sci-fi thriller, set on a Southern California horse ranch, is the point in the movie where “we are asking our audience to look at the sky for the first time in the film,” VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron says, explaining that the skies were digital throughout the film to allow the VFX team to control the cloud movement and composition, as well as present the alien creature Jean Jacket. “The night scenes were created using a new day-for-night technique with an infrared and a film camera aligned on a rig so we could create a realistic night look in VFX,” he adds, noting that this delicate work “had to be completely invisible to the audience and not be an obvious visual effect in order to successfully immerse our viewers in the story.”
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‘Jurassic World: Dominion’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Ilm/Universal And Amblin Entertainment Universal
The final movie in the Jurassic franchise includes 35 species of dinosaurs, six of them fresh designs presenting a new challenge: They have feathers. Industrial Light & Magic rewrote its feather software system to address this task. Explains VFX supervisor David Vickery: “The new Houdini-based toolset was designed to build accurate digital models of feathers from thousands and thousands of individual curves and gave artists the ability to simulate water, snow and dust alongside the feathers themselves.”
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