Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/759864
n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 6 c g w 1 9 den Studios on a nine-acre backlot set. "We had Fih Avenue type of streets, Tribeca, a brownstone area, a tenement area, and each of those was re-dressed to become different areas of different streets within the film," Manz says. "We had a map of where each scene would be in the story." Visual effects artists topped the on-set buildings, created new buildings, extended the sets, and added traffic, pedestrians, and atmospheric effects. During filming, the production crew would cover some of the buildings on set with greenscreen so they could repeatedly re-use the sets. "It was a cunning collaboration between the art department and visual effects switching greenscreens up and down the street," Burke says. "We must have done 20 variations of the streets to give them a wide scope. We re-created Times Square for a third-act sequence, using the build- ings covered with greenscreen in one of the existing T-junctions. And, we had doz- ens of other sets to replace greenscreens outside windows." During preproduction, the Soho crew built a digital version of the stage set from the drawings. "As the set was being built, we could look at the orientation of the sun and the layout of the streets with the director of photogra- phy," Manz says. "We could work out which areas would be shadowed and where we'd need to have a building that wouldn't be in the set. It was very collaborative. That became the plan we handed to people who created the set extensions." To build and texture those set extensions later, a crew spent nearly three months surveying and photographing areas of New York selected by Craig. In addition to the main neighborhoods, visual effects artists in various studios also created Central Park, extended a small Central Park Zoo set, and constructed a Macusa building to house the Magical Congress of the USA. "There was a massive set on the sound- stage, with two stories of the 54-story building," Manz says. "Rodeo VFX did the full CG shots, including a transition walk-in from the street outside." MPC artists created digital set exten- sions, water, boats, cars, and pedestrians for an "arrival in New York" sequence, adding blinds to the windows, clothes hanging on the digital rooops, and plumes of CG smoke from the coal heating everywhere. "We wanted to have unexpected shots, so Demiguise Artists at MPC created this little magical creature with the long, white hair. "He's like a little fluffy ape," says MPC Visual Effects Supervisor Ferran Domenech. "But, he can camouflage himself like a chame- leon and become invisible." MPC artists used the studio's Furtility soware for his hair, with dynamic curves and, in some cas- es, cloth simulation on particular strands for more control. "We wanted a beautiful flow of hair when he was running," Dome- nech says. When he's camouflaged, we see the creature by how he affects the environment around him. "We'd project textures from the point of view of the camera into the fur and embed it into the color of the fur," Domenech says. "So, if the animal doesn't move, it's invisible, but when it starts to move, the color in the fur breaks up in a natural way, and you understand that the creature wasn't invisible, it was perfectly camouflaged."