Hasta La Motion!

Following their exceptional work on The Da Vinci Code, Visual Effects Supervisor Angus Bickerton returned to The Senate Visual Effects to create a number of sequences for the follow up thriller Angels and Demons. The Senate worked on 196 shots and contributed outstanding environments and digital FX in several major scenes, most notably a photo real recreation of one of the largest and oldest churches in Rome, The Pantheon.

When Tom Hanks, as Robert Langdon visits Rome searching for clues to the Illuminati’s next victim, his path leads him to the two thousand year old building in the heart of the city. Unable to film on Vatican property the production built a partial set of the Pantheon interior that consisted of just two chapels and one altar surrounded by green screen. The Senate were then tasked with recreating the remainder of this iconic structure which stretches 140 feet in diameter and 140 feet in height and comprises a further five chapels, seven altars, intricate marble flooring and the great domed ceiling with its nine metre hole at the apex, the oculus.

Work began in June 2008 with The Senate designing previs for the entire sequence and building a CG scale model of the Pantheon. Senate VFX Supervisor, Richard Higham notes "After reading the script, it was clear that at this point in the film the Vatican authorities did not yet trust Langdon, so we wanted to create a scene that visually reflected this. Langdon and Vittoria enter the Pantheon uncertain of whether they were in the presence of the murderer, so we devised angles that felt nervous and dramatic and offered this to Angus as a complete animating 3D storyboard." By creating a CG model at this early stage they were not only able to establish the size of the ancient church and the prominence of the oculus but could also orientate the director and actors to where in the building the action was taking place when they were filming on the minimal set against green. The production responded well to the previs and some key shots in the final edit match it very well.

Richard then travelled to Rome to study the Pantheon interior. Because of the restrictions imposed on the production by the Vatican Richard had to masquerade as a ‘keen’ tourist and took hundreds of photographs to provide the team back in London with all the reference and high quality texturing photography necessary. Before the final model was complete, Richard and CG Supervisor Dan Canfora also attended the shoot on set in LA to ensure any technical problems were solved and that new ideas could be incorporated. Using the supplied rushes, the team then created temps of the entire sequence within a couple of weeks of the shoot. This enabled the production’s editors to explore the space and eventually led to a couple of extra full CG shots being added to the sequence, making maximum use of the meticulously built CG Pantheon.
Armed with the high resolution photography and a library of reference books, The Senate’s team spent over six months crafting the interior in Maya. One challenging aspect of the CG build was the lighting, which needed to be true to both how the set was lit and the intense natural daylight that beams through the oculus in situ. As Dan Canfora explains “The mood of the lighting was taken from a mixture of the on set lighting and the overall feel of the real Pantheon at that time of day. We used HDR images taken on the set to form the basis of the lighting, which made sure that all our set extension immediately sat together with the real set. Using Mental Rays image based lighting tools the HDRIs were used to bake the lighting into a point cloud allowing every shot to have its basic lighting colours, intensities, bounce and bleed. From this point each shot was honed to convey the correct lighting mood, be it deep shadows or the blaring sunlight coming through the oculus or the giant bronze doors.”

In addition to the intensely detailed structural architecture of the church, the team also had to build the many intricate objects that adorn the Pantheon. Using 3D modelling software Modo and Mudbox, they faithfully recreated items such as elaborate ten foot tall statues and ornate grand altars which then sit seamlessly in the environment. To complete the work, two further elements shoots were held, one at Sony Studios, LA and the other a motion control shoot at Twickenham Film studios, London, to capture extras to fill out the Pantheon with tourists. Look closely and you may be able to spot one or two of The Senate’s team amongst the crowd. In order to give the compositors control over every aspect of the shot, each one was rendered with up to 25 separate passes in Mental Ray. This allowed the compositors, using Shake to adjust the look as required, for example enhancing parts of the scene by boosting specular kicks and highlights, deepening shadows to create a greater sense of depth and adding extra reflectivity to the marble flooring.

Another ancient church The Senate worked extensively on was Di Santa Maria Del Popolo, situated in Piazza Del Popolo, which is the focus of Langdon’s search in a later scene. Here, once again permissions to film were restricted so The Senate were charged with modifying the exterior of the opposite building, a police station, to look like the church from the outside. Initially, this sequence began as 2D and 3D projection based matte paintings of the tower and Dome that adorned the real church and assembling them to the police station. Once the sequence reached editorial, new requests for complete sky replacements and POV shots of a distant St Peters were introduced to manage continuity and sequence consistency. Digital stills were once again used for these shots, taken at particular times of day to ensure the sun was in the correct location of the frame and casting shadows to match the film plates.

The Senate also created a unique look for when Langdon and Chartrand find themselves locked in the Vatican archives with the air supply cut off and they are slowly starved of oxygen. The brief for this sequence was to design an effect that depicted the visual degradation caused by hypoxia (oxygen starvation) for which Second Unit Director Todd Hallowell was able to provide a vivid description based on his and Ron Howard’s experiences of working with Nasa on Apollo 13. Working closely with Angus and Todd, The Senate tested various looks based on these descriptions and Senior Artist Anton Yuri came up with the final solution, a contra-zoom type effect. Richard explains. "This is where the camera physically moves towards or away from its area of focus. This is then stabilized within the comp on a central location leaving the peripheral edges of frame to warp and stretch giving an unnatural and unnerving perspective." Richard worked closely with Todd and the crew on the shoot, “for these particular shots, Todd was great and allowed me some freedom to instruct the cameraman to move in a way that would facilitate this effect to the max. The set space itself was a little bit limited so I requested wider angle lenses to help. After this, Angus asked for further embellishments so we added extra radial blurs that were isolated to the most luminous areas of the action." Vignetting was also added to enhance the tunnel vision and The Senate completed the rest of this scene tracking in bullet hits and cracks and enhancing the smashing glass with a dynamic particles system.

Other shots contributed by The Senate throughout the film include CG and matte painting set extensions, green screen composites, muzzle flashes and sky replacements.

The Senate Visual Effects is one of London’s leading boutique visual effects facilities, specializing in digital environments and invisible effects. They have previously worked with Ron Howard on both The Da Vinci Code and Frost/Nixon and other recently completed projects include Richard Loncraine’s My One and Only, Shanghai and latest Julian Fellows film, From Time to Time.