BACKGROUND

How did you get into film initially?

Mark: I have always liked films, like most of us, and I drifted into the effects side of it just trying to find a way to do something. I'd never been that interested in effects, to be honest, but I became a runner at an effects company, then sort of worked my way up from there. The hours are crap, but it's interesting, and that's the important thing.

What are some of the films you've worked on recently?

Mark: I just finished on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and before that I worked on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Brothers Grimm and King Arthur.

Do you remember first hearing of the V project?

Mark: The first thing I heard about this was the graphic novel, really, and people talking about it. So I read that, and I thought it was really good ­ very interesting - I used to read 2000 AD and all that sort of thing. The Vendetta comic was very interesting, and that made me go and read Watchmen as well… I liked the fact that V wasn't patronizing.

I didn't see it as a particularly effects-heavy film from reading the comic book. There is the violence in it, but it's always off-screen… however a cinema audience might not find that acceptable, so there has to be something in there.

VICTORIA STATION

How did your job begin?

Mark: I got shown the raw knife sequence and I saw some artwork that had been done ­ some concepts - which I think the Director [James McTeigue] had seen and liked. So we started to experiment, just started to play around: we got our CG guys doing some work. Some knives are CG, some knives are live action, so we started experimenting with trying to build something that would look cool. Then we would do it again and again and change it, because it has grown. The knife sequence has been quite organic as it's gone along, like the way the trails have progressed: they've been longer, they've been shorter, they've been shinier. So we always try to keep what we do adaptable, so it will work on more than just one shot. You can put all your effort into one thing, but it has to be something you can turn around, it can't be too unwieldy to work en masse.

The idea is that whenever it's in over-cranked slow motion, V is moving very fast. Because of the experiments that have been done on him, he can go faster than a normal human being, so whenever you see him over-cranked, and he's got the knives out, they start to leave a trail, which at first starts as a hard glint from the tip of the knife, and then there's a tip trail, and you also get the actual knife blade itself forming a visual echo going back behind it, which fades over time and then starts to turn into a slightly smoky atmospheric effect. Also behind the knife distortion is a slight warping effect, so the background is as if it's cutting though the air ­ like the air is being sliced, there's turbulence going on. That knife trail then goes through shafts of light, so it goes into shade and darkness, it always has to be interactive, and it has to go in front of and behind people, and it has to react with people as well. That is the harder bit, because if you put it on top it's quite easy, but it's when someone's arm goes through it or over it, or blood goes through it, then you have to work on the burst of blood going through it and making the trail disappear like vapor.

How did the rules grow for the knife trails?

Mark: Organic is probably the right word - we tried to do things and then we looked at them - it was learning as we went. You saw that having the blood go through the trail, and the trail not react, looked wrong. It's obvious now! So then you have to decide what you're going to do about that. We figured a way to make the trail react to the blood, or to someone going through it, or to whatever was going on. It was, essentially, trying to match the artwork, and then it was going on from matching the artwork to making it practical, and then when you actually put it in, working out what problems that led to.

That shot was actually one of the first shots we did that set the look for everyone else to follow, and then it got parked in the background and we've recently opened it up again and started adding extra bits to it. We're now adding the final touches, so that whole process has been two months of work of various intensities.

What sorts of technicians were involved in creating the 2D portion of the knife sequence?

Mark: Because there's a CG knife there's a modeler who creates the knife, then there's someone who lights and animates the knife, then there's a compositor who'll actually put it into the scene as well. You could potentially have someone doing the roto-scoping as well, which would be to integrate the knife in behind things, so you'd have a minimum of four or five people. The compositor would be the one who really - in this case - churns it at the end, and really does the work of putting it in together; that's where the grunt work goes in.

On a day to day basis, what have you been doing on the knife sequence for the last two months?

Mark: Trying to set up a strategic look, trying to find a hero shot to go with and then pulling all the others up to there. Because it's a sequence, they work en masse or fail en masse. You can show anyone one shot looping, but all the knives have to work together and you have to show them together, so you have to drag all the knives up to a particular level and then show them to your next person up, and they've got to give their judgment on it. They might want some changes, so then you've got to realign them all, and make them all work again, and then you show them to the next person up again. You're always juggling a little bit, working on the hero, pulling the others up to the hero, that sort of thing. So hopefully what you're doing is every time you're doing a new version, you're pulling everything up a little bit more.

Are you just working on the knife and trails on this sequence, or everything to do with this sequence?

Mark: We're working on everything to do with this particular sequence. There are blood bags as well ­ the Fingermen are often wearing big blood bags, and we remove them in a variety of ways… there's plenty of blood squirting around at various points, which is a bit weird when you're looking at it all day on the loop. The blood bags were painted black to match the costume, but we have to remove the little packages. None are particularly obvious, but there are some real close up shots, so I think a lot of people these days would wonder what those bin liner bag-type things are on the Fingermen's chests. The original idea was just to take the highlights down and make them look less glisteny so they lost their shape, but it just wasn't enough. So in some cases it really was a matter of painting an empty flack jacket and then warping it on and tracking it on which, if no one ever notices, then that's good. Basically that's the idea… it's a fairly complex process for no one to even know you've done it!

Have you augmented or changed the blood in any way in these shots?

Mark: There are a couple of shots where the blood is doubled up, we've given extra blood spurts… never less blood, always more blood. I think in the final grade as well, they're actually going to be doing some selective color corrections, to really boost the blood even more. I did one shot where the guy gets hit by a knife in the head and I had to do all sorts of different grades of chocolaty blood… you learn a lot about these things as you're going on, you research everything. When I was looking at that wound I went to the Internet and wrote ‘wound' in images… and so many came up, it was just horrible. So I do research to get ideas. On something like the knife trails we were talking about vapor trails and that sort of thing, so you've really got to look around for ideas and inspiration.

What was the process the knife trails went through to get their look?

Mark: Originally the trail was a bit more glisteny, it had more of a sheen, and it was stronger, almost to the extent that each trail looked so strong that the whole screen would be a big mass of trails by the end of it. You just try to experiment, it was really a matter of doing different versions and showing each. There was never a point where someone said… all right, we're going to do smoke. I remember there were a few of us here one weekend, and we all brainstormed and that came out ­ the smoke. We showed it to Dan [Glass, VFX Supervisor], and he liked it. So conceptually that became the new norm to move everything else to. We're trying to play down the smoke a little bit more now because it did become a bit dominant at one point; it's now a bit more subtle, it had become a bit too much of a feature. We want it to be strong enough to notice, but you don't want it to be distracting from the rest of the action. During the process we bent our laws of how these trails work, so now, whenever someone hits a trail it suddenly becomes smoke, and it's allowed to disappear.

What programs do you use?

Mark: We use Shake for compositing ­ that's our main compositing system, and that's my world, really, we put everything together in Shake.

You work on large computer screens, however they're much smaller than a cinema screen; at that scale how can you tell you're moving in the right direction?

Mark: We can't film everything out that we work on, but we have a 2K projector, which is a really handy thing to stop in at as many times as possible. So we can always stop and look at things on the 2K projector, which is a different concept to a computer monitor - the idea of someone's eyes on a big screen - so we try and check that as often as possible. From the monitor to the screen you never get the same look entirely, to be honest. You can try and mimic it in various ways with the display of the monitor, but it's not the same, it's not the same medium.

When you show shots to Dan, how do you present them?

Mark: Both on a computer monitor and projected. But before you would even consider moving on to James, you would check it on film. On the knife trail shots we've got a fair bunch of finals, we're just doing the last little tweaks now. We're getting really accurate feedback, which makes it easier. We are literally asked to take that trail down by ten percent, that trail by five percent, and that's very easy to do because you just change a few numbers and you're away.

Thanks Mark.