BACKGROUND

How did you get into visual effects?

Dan: Quite by luck really. I sought to get involved in the movie business, and was interested in what options were available, I ended up working for a company in Soho in London called the Computer Film Company and just began as a runner, washing dishes, answering phones and eventually that offered opportunities to try out new things. One thing led to another and eventually a job in the US, and now I travel quite a bit all over the place.

What were some of those early films you found yourself on?

Dan: Muppets Treasure Island was my first screen credit, then I worked on a bunch of things like Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible 2, Sleepy Hollow, The Beach, and Notting Hill, and then moved to the States and worked on a film called Thir13en Ghosts and then the Matrix sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions. Last year I worked on Batman Begins, back in London, and now we're on V for Vendetta.

What were some of the steps you took from being a runner to now being a visual effects supervisor?

Dan: The way I progressed or learnt within visual effects is akin to quite a few of the other departments in the film business. It's still more like an old apprenticeship system where you are almost required to start at some of the lower notches and earn your stripes, learn how to do every component as you move up, gaining gradual responsibility. When I began in visual effects, it was almost more important that you needed to do that because there were no rules, people hadn't really done a lot of the stuff before, so it was all adventure and exploration. In a way everyone was leaping in at the bottom and trying to figure it all out. It was a great time and opportunity there to work out how to explain things and to play with all these new options; there wasn't a formal hierarchy or system, certainly no formal training was available, so we just experimented.

I began in '93, and I guess I got onto the computers a year or so later, in '94-'95. The machines we were using at CFCÖ there weren't any purpose built computers, there wasn't any purpose written software for these types of things, so it was all designed in-house and it was very much an opportunity. If you saw a need for something, you commented, and you'd have someone who'd either write it for you or you learned to write it yourself. We used UNIX based computers that controlled these custom configured bit-processing boards that inherited parts from NASA and other projects and kind of brought them together. It was quite hard core.

Did you have any computer background at that point?

Dan: Not any specific training, I had played with computers and my mind had always worked in a logical way, so that it wasn't a difficult thing for me to pick up. That was all part of the fun and games of exploring and finding out new things.

Was that time the birth of even being able to do it?

Dan: More or less, yes. The late ë80s were really the first time we were seeing digital stuff significantly on screen, and the early ë90s was still very young, especially in England, although there were some big things going on in the States. The Computer Film Company was at the forefront, really, of discovering a lot of that, and the founders, Mike Boudry and Wolfgang Lempp, were building these machines. They were going to purchase a high-powered computer they'd heard about but that all fell through, it turned out to be a bit of a con, basically the guy didn't really have the savvy to make the machine, so they faced the idea of folding the company or doing it themselves, and they decided to build it themselves. They had to build everything including a film recorder and scanner, and from there on in it was a very small but very exciting outfit.

Processing power was a huge limitation back then and still is to a degree, as are compositing issues; were you a part of some of the problem solving at that point?

Dan: In a way everyone was. What was great about the way CFC was set up was they brought together all these different types of people, personalities really, more than particular background trainings, they went for a variety of people. So we had a nuclear physicist, we had a lot of fine artists, I came from an architecture background, then there were mathematics people. There was even one guy who was hired because he could juggle; it was a group of people who all had different views on life and therefore helped to provide different views about solving a problem.

How many people were there?

Dan: When I joined there were around 30 and the other thing that I remember noting was that it was more or less an even split of male and female, which was particularly unusual for such a technical field.

So it was an acknowledgment from the beginning that it had to be more than just technology?

Dan: Yes, and the founders were very much, not your straight down the line type businessmen, very much eccentric characters in themselves. Their company is still very strong today, they merged with Framestore and are now Framestore CFC, the largest visual effects company in London. They had very strong hardware and software units, the hardware side of it split off and became Northlight, which now sells the leading scanner around the world for digital film scanning, the software components are also licensed. For example, if you buy Shake compositing system, Keylight is a part of that, and that's part of the CFC legacy.

V FOR VENDETTA

How did you first get involved in V for Vendetta?

Dan: I was slightly tricked, actually but very pleasantly. I had worked with James McTeigue, Larry and Andy Wachowski, Grant Hill and Joel Silver on The Matrix projects. Grant had arranged to meet me at a bar in London ostensibly to talk about a different project and he didn't showÖ instead James was sitting there at the bar when I arrived. It was James who asked for me to be involved on this. It's his first film - he was first assistant director for Larry and Andy on all three Matrix films - but this was his first feature as a director and he wanted a good consortium around him of people he trusted and knew well how to work with. It was an honor to be asked and to be involved. That was back in October [2004], and I was still finishing Batman at that time, but knew that it was coming to a close and this was starting up in January [2005], it all happened pretty quickly.

At that point, were you familiar with V for Vendetta as a graphic novel?

Dan: I'd heard of it because I knew that James and Larry and Andy were planning to put it together. So I knew it was a venture and I knew there was a novel out there, but originally I'd not felt I was going to be involved in it.

Which did you read first, the script or the comic?

Dan: After meeting James I went straight out and got a copy of the graphic novel and read it. I really liked it, although I didn't doubt that something Larry and Andy would pick to make a feature wouldn't be exciting material. I was intrigued at how they were going to get that much onto screen in a feature length movie, and when I read the script I was really impressed. It's very well written with excellent dialogue, and a very clever translation from comic to screen.

MINIATURES

On your first read through of the script, what jumped out at you from a VFX point of view?

Dan: The clear two events are the explosions. In fact, initially we thought three, but Larkhill ended up being more of an in-camera special effects thing, though we will be adding flames and enhancing aspects of it. In terms of the visual effects focus, we're building miniatures for both Westminster and for the Old Bailey, which are going to be very large, and form a sizeable part of our budget and energies on this project.

Is the miniature work all taking place in London?

Dan: Yes, the miniatures are under construction right now. They take 3 months to build, some of these things, so that has to run in parallel with the photography here [in Berlin], and the miniature shoot will take place just after principal photography has finished. We have a few days of breathing space and then we launch into two weeks of intense miniature shooting. It is a separate shoot with an entirely separate crew. Miniatures require specialists; the lighting cameramen and the operators very often specialize in miniatures.

The film speeds used are usually different, you're either having to shoot at higher frame rates to compensate for the scaling of gravity and mass, or, you have to get into motion control because once you scale your light fixtures they don't put out the power that they should so you have to do a pass or a version of it where you expose much longer in order to retain a reasonable depth of field. You end up using a combination of undercranked camera footage, which involves a very slow day waiting for a motion control camera to run by the model, or alternatively, if you're shooting pyrotechnics or events as we will be, you shoot at very fast speeds to make up for scale.

How many models are you making for each explosion?

Dan: For a film that is probably going to come over as having a higher profile than its relatively modest budget, we're going to build two versions of each thing, and have four cameras photographing each time. So in a sense we come up with, if we're lucky, eight good takes of everything, which should be plenty to choose from. It's quite laborious for the craftsmen, especially for structures that are built to collapse. With a miniature that is just standing up and looking beautiful and is designed to fit into a plate or something else, you can build it as casts that can be made up and painted and decorated like a regular set, but for stuff that blows up or gets destroyed, you often have to either pre-build the way that it breaks, or it's built out of a very special plaster material so it behaves the right way for the frame rate we're shooting at. That is labor intensive and building a second one is not a fraction of the cost, but essentially the same as building it again.

What are the scales of the buildings being created?

Dan: We're using a variety of scales. The Old Bailey is seventh scale, which sounds a little strange, but choosing scales is a combination of what you can physically fit into your stages and shoot for the size explosions we need, and also trying to keep it large enough that things don't look miniature. The Old Bailey built to seventh scale will stand at 20 feet tall, it's fairly sizeable when you walk up to it. Big Ben will be about 25 feet in height, but the scale is actually smaller - tenth scale - the full building (we're not building the entire tower) is over 90 meters tall [295 feet], so it's quite a beast. Then we're building a faÁade of Westminster, which is also tenth scale, but it's 42 feet long and almost 6 feet tall [12.8m x 1.8m]. They're not miniatures you might think of, like matchbox cars, these are small sets basically.

Where do you get the detail and the reference from for the details on those buildings?

Dan: We're quite lucky in basing our reference because they're both real buildings, so we have the real buildings to evaluate exactly how the thing should look. Over several weeks the art department drew up beautiful drawings of the buildings based on historical surveys and highly detailed photographs of the buildings themselves. For the lighting, the real Old Bailey is never lit very significantly at night, so we have to design that ourselves. Part of the director of photography's job will be to actually create a lighting environment that looks natural for that, like architecturally uplighting it all.

For the Houses of Parliament we are actually sitting the miniature pieces into plates of the real buildings, so we have to be much more careful about matching the lighting that is used on the real buildings. Main unit, when they're photographing there, will also be providing some of their own lights on it, so we'll be mixing the actual lighting with what they use when shooting.

Will the miniatures unit have what is shot by the main unit as reference?

Dan: Yes, which is partly why we shoot the miniatures later. Not just from a reference point of view for lighting, but also angles and lenses that we'll need to match up to, based on what they shoot.

LARKHILL

What was your involvement with the Larkhill explosion?

Dan: Generally the way we've been trying to do this picture is to get as much real footage as we can, and unfortunately for Chad [Stahelski, stunt coordinator] that meant walking through fire with nothing on, but I think it'll look fantastic as a result. You'll believe he's there because he was, and what we add will be there to enhance it, not to create something that didn't exist.

What are some of the things you're going to be doing in post with that shot?

Dan: The one thing Chad wasn't going to do as the character at that point in the story was actually walk through a wall of flame. So as much to your eyes that it looked like there was plenty of fire around him, we're going to be putting more in, and have him actually step out of this inferno to then be silhouetted by it. The flame retardant gel he was covered in, and he was made up as well with scarring on his head, the idea with that is that it will actually also look like charred flesh - nice and appealing - but it does have that glisten like flesh that's gone bad.

Was that a consideration in going heavy with the gel?

Dan: The gel was required for safety. We looked at body suits that he could have worn, and in all of those instances they just looked like a body suit so, unfortunately for Chad, the decision was to really bare it all.

THE OLD BAILEY

What was the first step in the preparation of the Old Bailey explosion?

Dan: The first step was actually location scouting. We found a rooftop that represented the view that James wanted to see - the characters V and Evey are up on a rooftop watching the explosion - so we found a physical rooftop near the real Old Bailey that represented the take. From that the plans were made and storyboards drawn of how this event should happen. There were a couple of creative decisions made at that time about the Old Bailey, which probably stemmed from the fact that the real building is never lit, so they knew we couldn't ever use that as a true basis at night. As a result every time we see it in the movie, it is actually the miniature, even before it explodes.

That gave us a lot more freedom to light it the way we wanted. It also gave us the freedom to actually modify the design slightly. The real dome is actually quite a vertical dome - the idea is that when you look from the ground it actually looks like a true hemisphere, but when you're up level with it, it isn't. So we flattened that to make it look like a true hemisphere, and then because part of the sequence is really about the Madame Justice statue, Owen [Paterson, production designer] decided to increase the size of the statue by 20% so she's just a bit more dominant.

How do you match the miniatures to the real London backgrounds?

Dan: The Old Bailey sequences are a bit easier for that. We shot all the foreground action on a set piece here [in Berlin] with the characters against a green screen. Based on the location photos we'd taken, we understood the angles and roughly had a sense of where the Old Bailey was going to sit and where V and Evey are going to look to see it. When that was shot we put together little test comps [compositions] where we put the backgrounds in the green screens, then it goes to the editor and he plays with that. That footage is now going to go to the digital company [Cinesite] where they're putting in explosions and test versions of that, so we can actually start building timings. Because the whole event happens to music, we're also trying to integrate that into the design of the sequence.

All of this information, from the angles and lenses we used on the set, to the timing of the explosions that we're pre-visualizing with Cinesite, will all be fed into the planning of the miniature construction and the shoot. We can make decisions like, because we're always seeing the Old Bailey from one particular side, we won't be building the other side of it. It'll be dressed for one vantage point mainly, which is Evey and V's view point. The timing of the explosions we'll get based on the pre-viz and the edit. We also did a couple days of pyrotechnics testing of materials and explosions, getting a feel for the types and colors of things.

How big are you planning to go with the explosion?

Dan: Because we have two takes, we'll probably go a medium size with one and then if that works we'll go whole hog on the second. Essentially we'll obliterate it. The only thing is that in terms of context, the Old Bailey explosion (differently than in the comic) happens first in the movie, and because it's the first explosion of his that we see (chronologically it's the second because Larkhill is technically the first), I see it as a bit more of a training thing. It's not his perfected work of art yet, it's an event that is spectacular, but it mustn't upstage our final crescendo that happens at the end. It needs to be designed in a way that's great and looks fantastic, yet still leaves us room to go bigger in the end.

For the Parliament explosion was there any thought to matching the amount of gunpowder Guy Fawkes had stored there?

Dan: If you look at the conceptual for V's train, if anything, that's based on that. It'll be one of those great images from the movie: the underground train laden with explosives of all kinds. The final set up of the Houses of Parliament will be pretty spectacular. The event is designed to grow from a gasoline explosive phase into little streamers that start breaking off, and then it becomes a fireworks event; it becomes something we know and are fascinated by every year.

OTHER VFX

You expect visual effects to be a part of explosions; what is something that's smaller and more subtle than an explosion, where VFX becomes involved?

Dan: Things that come up are muzzle flash, it's a simple thing to fix. Gunfire, when it goes off, is for such a brief period of time, and a camera shutter is only open for half the time that it's filming, so it is quite common that you miss muzzle flash. In fact, there's more or less a 50/50 chance you'll miss it, so quite often what we'll pick up is that the shot they like needs to have it painted back in. It's not completely unanticipated, because in a movie with guns we do usually build in allowance for it, but you never know exactly where it's going to show up. We will be getting rid of a few wires here and there, and also because V fights with knives, there are times when he's stabbing someone where he's either got a retractable blade or the blade has been removed so he's just fighting with a stub, so we'll be adding the blade on top of that as he stabs someone.

One of the types of shots that can come up unexpectedly would be reflections or booms appearing in shots, and occasionally someone walking in the background. Whereas at one time they might have been left in or just used a different take, frequently that'll be something that visual effects is now asked to help out with.

Another shot on this film that is very much a visual effects shot, although the idea is that in passing it'll hopefully look like, how did they do that? It's actually relatively simple: it's the first reveal of the mask and we see it from V's POV. He picks up the mask and brings it to his face, you see the mask come upÖ and as it's brought to his/our face, you end up looking through to see V in the mirror as he's putting on his mask. Technically you have to break it up into bits to shoot because, if you're shooting from his POV, you see yourself in the mirror, so you actually have to take the mirror out and go back on the other side of the wall and shoot back in to get the reflection piece. This has to be done at a different point in the day or even the next day. Old style, but it's nice. It combines all photographic elements, so it's a composited shot and it just needs a bit of thinking about how to piece it together, and how to shoot the pieces in order to piece it together.

Do you enjoy that aspect, the puzzling?

Dan: Very much, yes. It's what keeps the job interesting, and every job is different because no project comes up with truly the same problems to pose, everything has it's own different twist on it, the solution you used last time suddenly doesn't work because now there's water involvedÖ there's always something.

Is it much more common for filmmakers to do things in post as VFX have become cheaper and easier?

Dan: To some degree, yes, there are definitely a lot of things we can much more comfortably say, ìYes, fineî about than ten years ago. Back then it was ìOh well, we'll give it a go!î That said, one of the challenges about this project is actually it's timeline, which is phenomenally short, both from the way the project started up, to the very short prep period, to the extremely short shoot, to the very short post-production period. It is that that makes me more cautious on this project when a lot of new things come up; you really want to try to get as much achieved while we're here shooting, rather than leave it as something that can be done later.

Whenever you can get something in camera, there's a look that it has that's very hard to recreate in a digital realm. It's usually more work, even if it's equally comparable in terms of expense, to put it in later. It requires time and thought and design processes later that is harder when everybody is fragmented: production designers and DOPs, they don't usually stay on through post, it's very unusual. So you really want to get a lot of the design issues resolved while your shooting is going on.

How long do you have in post?

Dan: We have seven weeks after the delivery for director's cut. Which is probably the single biggest challenge. It's also partly the choice to go with miniatures as the backbone because it's all part of that aim of trying to get the bulk of it photographed in camera. So the digital stuff is stitching things together, dropping monitor replacements here and there. The other big digital aspect we're doing is for the end sequence when the crowds of V arrive. Although they anticipate getting somewhere in the region of 500 or 600 extras, it's not as many as they want for the story, so we're also going to extend those crowds digitally. With the time restrictions when we shoot on Whitehall in London, we can't rely on some of the traditional methods of moving people around in blocks to bulk up the numbers, so we may be actually using digital doubles for a lot of that.

Have you planned that out in advance, or do you need the shots to be able to see how tricky it is?

Dan: Pretty much. We need to work on specific shots, and there are some storyboards that we know will be very close, so we can begin planning in terms of volumes of numbers. We're also setting up a motion capture session so that we can get walk cycles and standing cycles and people chatting to each other that we'll need for the multiple V shots. All of that is going ahead, plus we take photographic still sessions of the character dressed as V and we build the digital model. Luckily we don't need a completely specific representation of the character because we're creating the general populous wearing his outfit, so we can actually rely on libraries of digital figures. We just need to create the clothes that he has, so Cinesite has examples of the mask and his hat and his cape for all of that modeling and building and texturing, so as we arrive in the final stages of post production it's basically lining up cameras, dropping in walk cycles and lighting it and rendering it.

Would that just be for wide shots?

Dan: The idea is we will have 500 extras that will always be in the foreground to midground of the shot, so we're talking distant extras, not intending them to be hero. Our shot count will be somewhere around 130 plus shots, by most normal shows these days that is hardly vast. The pressure is to get it done in the time period.

Will there be any visual effects on V's cape?

Dan: We have a shot we're still trying to resolve at the moment, where he leaps from one roof to another, which may end up being a digital version. In which case we'll have a cape flowing and the digital doubles will have capes, but that's another thing where digital software has advanced so much that, depending on what you're specifically trying to do, there are basic systems built into the 3-D packages these days, that if ever you need to set up basic or even medium to complex examples of things, it is fairly straightforward for someone who knows how to use the tools.

THE FUTURE OF VFX

What is your feeling about the current state of animation and CG?

Dan: I think amazing things can be done. I think the realms are nearly infinite, in that given enough time and enough money you can solve most of the problems. But I think wherever it is feasible, even if it's challenging or complex to achieve it for real it should be attempted for real. The relative effort and cost to achieve it in post-production, unless you have to, doesn't always seem sensible to me. Unless you're after a specific look: there may be a super hero aspect to the way a character behaves that reality isn't going to produce. Reality has its own limitations, like gravity obviously, and sometimes you need to get around that for a particular effect, and the digital realm may be a way you need to achieve it.

Do you see it becoming easier to do more and more with CG?

Dan: Certainly, but I think one of the key things that needs to change now is not so much what the computers can do - processing speed will still be an aspect as that inevitably increases as well - but actually to change the interfaces. I think the big future on a lot of technology fronts is the way that people interface with computers, and within visual effects and film technology it's about designing systems that people relate to more than typing expressions in a keyboard, or dragging a mouse around, it's about building systems that work more like a traditional camera. Whether it's VR goggles and gloves that you can put on and you can actually drive animations in a way that is more relevant and tangible and understandable to people who are not computer literate.

Thanks Dan.