Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/724677
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST SEPTEMBER 2016 which the day began. It was a case of how to work out exactly how we were going to achieve this — all the kids in this back garden at night, time running backwards, — it was a complex thing to design. "We worked with The Third Floor on previs — they designed a whole bunch of interesting shots in conjunction with us. Quite a lot came out of the previs and we shot the sequence exactly as per the pre- vis. One of the hard things was working out how to get the light moving across the characters, because you have to have a whole cycle of night and day running. We had to have Bruno, our photography designer, working with the sun moving around the children very quickly. The dif- ficulty was, the sequences were at night and we had all these children, and the children aren't allowed to work after 5pm. So, we shot this on a bluescreen stage at Longcross Film Studios. We ended up putting a large bank of 20K lights around the stage to show the progression of the sun and the light moving across the chil- dren and the shadows shifting. "Double Negative designed the whole CG environment. It was all based on the real location of the house, which was in Belgium, which we digitally scanned and created a CG model for the garden and the grounds and the house, and obviously, the German bombers. We had the char- acters standing on the stage with light flashes going off, to simulate the German bombs, and then when time went back- wards, we had this kind of light sequence to simulate that 24 hours of light was passing. "To achieve that, we actually went and shot real timelapse of the location be- cause we needed to see the various view- points of time changing in this garden. We had various members of the visual effects team go out with Canon [EOS 5D MKIII] cameras and positioned the cameras around the grounds of the house." Can you talk about the underwater sequence? "Yes, that was particularly complex. It was one of those things where, you really want to try and get the characters under the water because of the way they move and look, the way people swim and the way their hair moves, it's almost impossible to simulate. So it was important for me to get the characters under the water. We did that. We shot the sequence in an underwa- ter tank in Pinewood Studios and we had lots of backlit greenscreens in the pool. The sequence was designed by Scanline, after The Third Floor had done the previs. "In fact, this was the first scene I had approached in terms of the film's design and the previs. I was brought on in February 2014 and we just finished the film, so it was a long process and the underwater sequence was the first thing I wanted to tackle. And Tim agreed that we should get to that. We did the previs and designed an underwater environ- ment. The characters dive down to an underwater wreck, an ocean liner, where Emma keeps her secrets and photo- graphs, and she shows Jacob the various bits and pieces he needs to know about their world and the Hollows, and it's all hidden in this underwater shipwreck. This was going to be a completely-CG envi- ronment and we built one of the rooms in the ship where there's a big dialogue sequence. So, they swim down into the ocean, into the ship, they go through a skylight and swim through a cocktail lounge and a dining room that's full of skeletons. They end up in the cocktail lounge and when they're there, because [Emma] has powers over the air, she blows all of the water out of the cock- tail lounge, and they're left in a damp, but also dry environment. So really, the design process was, 'How do we do that? How do we get them down into the ship? What do we build for real? And how do we do the gag where she clears the cocktail lounge of water?' So, the envi- ronment was pretty much CG with some props built and placed under the water as kind of reference of elements for Scanline to make their CG environment. Once we were in the cocktail lounge, we had to design a rig that would enable them to go from being under the water to above the water, but the trouble with that scene is, all the gravity works the wrong way and all the water is dripping down and the hair is hanging the wrong way, and it doesn't feel as if they're standing up. It would solve the problem of getting them out of the water, from being wet to dry, but it wouldn't solve the problem of gravity acting incorrectly. So we had to design a rig that rotat- ed them out of the water and with the camera fixed to that rig so you didn't see them being taken out of the water, all you would see was them going from being under water to being above water and them standing there, dripping wet and everything going the right way. "Scanline did a great job of doing everything from designing the bubbles to the props on the table to fish swimming around and crabs and water dripping from the ceiling. So much work went into it." Thoughts about how the film is coming out? "I saw the final shots a few weeks ago — I think it's great. It's a fantastic film and I can't wait for people to see it. It's really something unique and special, and Tim has made a great movie — and Ransom's book and Tim's twist on that — he does deviate from the book quite a bit, but there's a lot of interesting stuff people could look forward to seeing." The house is based on a real location in Belgium. Double Negative created the CG environment. PHOTO CREDIT: JAY MAIDMENT