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n n n n Invisible Effects ing out of control. For Dark Knight, Chicago stood in. "Chicago provided a fantastic back- drop," Franklin says. "But for this film, Chris [Nolan] wanted a bigger scale." The crews filmed a motorcycle chase in (Above) Double Negative created many of the buildings in Gotham City using 3D models. (Next page) The artists also replaced the physical Bat with a precisely rendered digital replica. we're using Nuke from The Foundry, which is great at handling large resolution compared to [Apple's] Shake. We have a lot of custom software built around it: plug-ins, shot man- agement tools." The bulk of Double Negative's work cen- tered on a football stadium sequence and a fi- nal chase sequence through Gotham City, but among the 450 shots, the studio also helped create an aerial heist, built a flying vehicle, blew up bridges, extended a prison, and generated a colony of bats. tion, Chris learned he could rely on visual effects to carry story points," Franklin says. "So on this film, sometimes I didn't want to go down a VFX route, and he' "I think that after Dark Knight and Incep- visual effects.' In New York City, for example, there were limitations about what we could do in the streets, so to create some of the bigger moments, we had to turn to visual effects, par- ticularly on the bridges." Early in the film, the villain Bane blows up the bridges to isolate Gotham City. Double Negative created those scenes digitally, as well as a replica of the one remaining bridge that Bane keeps open. "We had to make a very ac- curate digital model of the 59th d say, 'We'll use the Queensborough Bridge," Franklin says. "It's a complicated latticework structure, so we had the guys do a Lidar scan and survey it extensively. They had let us shut down the upper deck of the bridge for filming, but the lower deck had traffic. Sometimes it's easier to use a CG bridge, and our bridge fit in nicely." The audience meets Bane during an aerial Street Bridge, 22 June/July 2012 heist, which the film crew shot over the High- lands in Scotland. Stunt coordinator Tom Struthers dropped four skydivers on wires from a C-130 Hercules transport plane. In the final shot, they land on a smaller, turboprop plane and attach cables from the small plane to the large plane. "We see the small plane dan- gling from the wire like a fish," Franklin says. "We created the shot with a digital small plane and a miniature. As the digital plane is being hoisted up, the wings start vibrating." Then, at New Deal Studios, the wings break away from a one-fifth scale miniature shot on greenscreen that Double Negative artists enhanced with digital effects. Inside the plane, the actors tumble around thanks to a set built by Corbould's team that could tilt 90 degrees, yaw, and roll. Double Negative artists helped make the shot seem believable by creating a digital environment visible through the windows. "The skydivers attach chargers, blow off the tail, and crack the plane open like an egg to get to Bane and his henchman inside," Franklin says. "In Scotland, they had the fuselage of a plane attached to a helicopter. We tracked in a CG piece to put the 'cap' back on. The cap blows off with a miniature explosion at New Deal. So, we have a real plane's fuselage, a CG cap, and a tumbling miniature plane piece at New Deal." Gotham City The visual effects teams working on the previ- ous films had established the idea of Gotham City as a huge, modern East Coast city sprawl- downtown Los Angeles. And, with IMAX cameras mounted on a low-riding pickup truck, the visual effects plate unit shot foot- age of street environments in New York City that the crew would use for background plates and CG textures. But, Pittsburgh provided the majority of material. "We digitized and modeled a whole four-city-block area of Pitts- burgh," Franklin says. "That gave us a library of buildings we could use to dress other loca- tions, to fill in the gaps. This common library of Pittsburgh buildings provided a thematic connection between the locations." To collect HDRI images of these locations and the sets, the crew used a proprietary cam- era system. "We have four digital SLRs mount- ed in a case on a tripod that point to the four points of the compass," Franklin says. "Each has a fish-eye view so we can capture overlap- ping fields of view. We connect the cameras to a laptop. Software brackets the photographs and assembles them into panoramas that de- scribe the lighting and the environment." As soon as they had captured the HDRI panoramas and other reference photography on set, the crew sent the images to the look development artists at Double Negative, so the team could begin building assets and envi- ronments. "By the time shooting wrapped in November, they had all the assets ready to go," Franklin says. "That was important because we never have much time to do these things and Chris's postproduction is always tight. But, I was prepared for that." The modelers designed most of the build- ings in the Gotham library based on Pitts- burgh structures and used those to extend streets in a chase sequence and to replace buildings as needed. During the Pittsburgh chase, Batman pursues the villains, who are riding in a huge, 12-wheeled truck, with his new vehicle. "People called it a 'Batwing,' or sometimes just the 'Bat,' " Franklin says. "It is an incredible flying vehicle and perhaps our biggest challenge." Flying into Reality Corbould's team built a full-size version of the Bat and mounted it on a hydraulic crane on a four-wheeled motion base. "There was a car underneath it," Franklin says. "They had three operators: one to drive, one to operate the pitch, and one to control the hydraulic arm. It was an impressive thing to see. It thun-