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www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JULY 2016 Summer B L O C K B U S T E R S very, very large shots," Chen explains. "Especially in the space sequences. The filmmakers opted for longer shots, with rotating and traveling cameras. To say it is one shot is underplaying a little bit of the complexity of some of the shots." Beyond the space sequences, there's also a lot of "on the ground" action that relied heavily on VFX. "The crew is stranded on a planet," says Chen, "which is partially set extensions [and] some full CG environments. Also, a lot of stuff hap- pens within the bridge or the interiors of the different space ships. There's a quite high number of full-CG shots. The envi- ronments themselves are quite massive. We had to create the environment of a space station — the Yorktown — which is essentially like building an entire city out in space. Almost everything in there is a 'build item' — every building, every bench, every lake and waterway. It's a massive undertaking just to build." Dneg runs a Linux pipeline and uses Maya for most of its modeling and anima- tion. The studio relies on The Foundry's Nuke for compositing. For this film, they employed Isotropix Clarisse (www.isotro- pix.com) for lighting. "It's something that hasn't been used a lot in production," says Chen of Clarisse. "We've had to work closely with Isotropix, the publisher, to work out a lot of software issues. I don't think it has been used in such a large production before. It's an interest- ing lighting and rendering package, but we had a lot of technical issues to get it to perform for something like the Yorktown, for example. It's a massive environment — 1.3 trillion polygons! We've gotten to the point where we are hitting memory limits and we've kind of had to find a sweet spot with reducing the degree of detail on things like trees that are scattered over the entire space station to where we can render it and it still looks good." When asked which shots are their favorites, both Chiang and Chen had different replies. "It was a fantastic opportunity to give a new version of warp speed," says Chiang of the VFX effort. "Right from the outset I kind of presented the idea of folding space and gravitational lensing — all that sort of stuff — the science of it. They did a stretch idea in Into Darkness, and they always do that streak, slip/scan type idea throughout, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture all the way through to Into Darkness, there has always been this slip/ scan idea. I really want to sell it more as the science of folding space. We came up with that look to try and sell that idea a little more, and harken back to a bit of science. Luckily Justin was very amenable in accepting those ideas and the thought process. We end up with a pretty unique shot and look of the way in which the warp bubble works." Chen points to the film's environments: "Not to reveal too much, but there are a couple of worlds that we created that are unique. The Yorktown is supposed to be the pinnacle of Federation civilization, set out in space. It's a large city built out in space that has multiple planes of gravity and is built for docking spaceships and housing different species of the different civilizations of the Federation. We spent a considerable amount of time building it and are very proud of the final results." Dneg, Atomic Fiction and Kelvin Optical all contributed to Star Trek: Beyond's visual effects.