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Invisible Effects ■ ■ ■ ■ w fi lm in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, artists at Double Negative fi t CG assets into daylight sequences For the last ©2012 DC Comics. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. June/July 2012 21 appeared on screen in 2005, audiences saw director Christopher Nolan's vision of superhero movies for the fi rst time, a dark vision in which gritty digital eff ects melted into realistic backgrounds. Famous for wanting to capture everything in camera, Nolan challenged the VFX teams to produce invisible ef- fects. Th e fi lm earned visual eff ects BAFTA nomi- nations in 2006 for special eff ects supervisor Chris Corbould and visual eff ects supervisors Paul Frank- lin, Janek Sirrs, and Dan Glass. But that movie's success paled next to his sequel, Th e Dark Knight. Th is time, to heighten the visual impact, Nolan fi lmed several sequences with high- resolution, 65mm IMAX cameras, which sent huge amounts of data through the digital eff ects studios' pipelines. For that feature, writer/director Nolan again placed the deeply troubled caped crusader in dark chaos and a bleak, unsentimental location, and again, the eff ects, while spectacular, never upstaged the characters. Th e Dark Knight smashed opening weekend records, achieved a 94 percent approval from critics according to reviews aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes, and eventually earned more than $1 billion worldwide. Corbould and Franklin received Oscar nomina- tions for the fi lm, and followed Nolan onto his next movie, Inception, for which they won Oscars for best visual eff ects. And for his part, Nolan received two Oscar nominations, for best picture and best origi- nal screenplay. hen Warner Bros.' Batman Begins bould, Franklin, and cinematographer Walley Pfi ster (who won an Oscar for Inception) to help him realize the last fi lm in the trilogy, Warner Bros.' Th e Dark Knight Rises. Th is time, Nolan and his brother Jona- than, who helped write Th e Dark Knight and other fi lms, sent Batman to war in the streets of New York City. Th ere are epic battles, extraordinary eff ects, and, once again, rough-hewn reality. So, it's no wonder that Nolan brought back Cor- High-Res Heroics "Chris [Nolan] always challenges everyone on his shows to bring their best to the movie," says visual eff ects supervisor Paul Franklin. "Whatever we did last time, he's looking to go one better this time." Go- ing one better for this fi lm was not a trivial task. After the previous two features, Nolan was more convinced than ever to fi lm in high resolution, and after the last three fi lms, he had become more comfortable with visual eff ects. "I think we had about 24 minutes of fi lm shot on 65mm IMAX, the same format we had used for Dark Knight," Franklin says, "5.6k x 4k resolution. But we had 25 minutes of IMAX then. Th is fi lm has close to an hour. We shot the rest of the fi lm in cinemascope at 4k." Double Negative was one of four vendors on Dark Knight, but on Dark Knight Rises, all visual eff ects shots ran through that studio. "I think that of about 450 visual eff ects shots, ap- proximately 350 were IMAX," Franklin says. "We set aside 250tb of online storage for the fi lm, a quarter of a petabyte. We ended up with close to half a petabyte. It required an industrial-strength operation, but disk space is cheaper now and computers are faster. And, By Barbara Robertson