BACKGROUND

How did you get into the world of film and visual effects?

Matt: I'm one of those geeks that wanted to work in digital effects when I was seven. I saw Star Wars for the first time when it came out when I was seven years old, and I walked out of the cinema saying to my dad I was either going to be an astronaut or I was going to work in the film industry. I got my first eight millimeter camera when I was seven and a half or eight, and started making little films in my garage, which I turned into my film studio with models and stop frame animation and blowing things up. So it was always an ambition of mine to work in the industry. I also read loads of books: when I wasn't reading action stories when I was a kid, I was reading the technique of visual effects and cinematography. I was a geek!

I went to film school and after that I started as a runner at Cinesite, the company that I work for now, and basically worked my way up from there. I would babysit renders, which means making sure that machines don't fall over and the renders crap out in the middle of the night, so you're here all night. Then I started as a trainee compositor, then a compositor, then a sequence supervisor, then an on set supervisor, until I ended up as a Visual Effects Supervisor, which is the job that I do now. So that's basically being in charge of anything you can't do for real in the movie for Cinesite.

Considering that you were so looking forward to actually getting into working in films, have there been any particularly exciting moments for you?

Matt: I was overall Visual Effects Supervisor for King Arthur, the Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and that was cool. When you're a kid and have watched Jerry Bruckheimer action movies, and then to actually be sitting in a room and having a conversation with Jerry about the scene that he wants, I felt that was pretty good going. The first time I did any on set work I ended up supervising the second unit on a James Bond movie. You're on set and the action director is asking you what to do, and there's Pierce Brosnan over there as James Bond. It is hard work, but there are occasional moments of realizing I am doing what I always dreamed. I remember one time driving along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with the Beach Boys playing, and thinking… this is what I wanted to do when I was a kid!

With my job you tend to get involved in many things from early on in the production, so you tend to follow things through. It's interesting when you get your original script, and when you look at what needs to be done and you wonder how on earth are you ever going to do half of what is written down in the script, and then you follow it through. You're on set when the movie is being shot, and you're responsible for the day-to-day how do we shoot this, how do we do that, and any problems that may come up. You have to work very closely with the director and the cinematographer and the production designer to make sure that everything done in post is in keeping with the overall vision of the movie. Then in the post facility you're supervising a team ­ it could be several hundred people - directly responsible for every shot, and in many cases the methodology used for those shots. You work with the editor as well, so you get to follow the movie through pretty much up to the premiere.

V FOR VENDETTA

What was the first you heard of the project V For Vendetta?

Matt: I have to say, I'm one of the people who remembers the comic book. I was a big Alan Moore fan when I was in college. I went through the Watchmen thing, I had the little smiley badge with the bloodstain on it, and everyone was doing ‘Who watches the Watchmen' graffiti all over the walls at college. From enjoying Watchmen so much I got V For Vendetta - the original graphic novel - and read that, and thought it was cool and interesting. I first heard about the project when it was being discussed months before I was even involved - in the film industry you hear about these things going on and who's working on them. My role on V For Vendetta is slightly different from what I've done recently, I am the VFX Supervisor for Cinesite - the main Visual Effects Supervisor is Dan Glass.

Before we got involved in the project we were asked to do a test for some crowd Vs in Trafalgar Square in London. I was very excited about doing the project, so I managed to get on the roof of the National Gallery [on Trafalgar Square] by making a few phone calls, and I took some pictures of Trafalgar Square. Then we got some Saxon warriors from King Arthur, because we had all these CG crowd guys from that, and we changed the costumes a little bit and put them in hats based on what we'd seen in the comic book. I think the production liked that, and also Cinesite - the company I work for ­ has probably the biggest miniatures division in the UK as well. That's the part of the company that builds miniatures and does pyro, and on this there are obviously a lot of miniature explosions (although the miniatures are actually quite big). So it was a plus that we could do the miniatures work as well as the digital work.

We had meetings with Dan and we got on, and I guess money was involved somewhere along the line as well, and we were hired. So I went out to Germany a few times to help Dan out and to become more familiar with the project. Basically the team working in the UK is my responsibility: to make sure that shots are going through the facility, to make sure what is needed is being acted upon, and from a creative point of view to help steer the show to the way that James [McTeigue, Director] wants to see it on screen.

How many people are working on the project at Cinesite?

Matt: At Cinesite there are two sides to the project. On the miniatures I think there were a good 60 or 70 miniature builders making the models and filming them, and you may have spoken to the miniature people who have got better information on that. [See interviews with Jose Granell, Nigel Stone and Nigel Trevessey.] On the digital side it started the way it always seems to work on projects: you start with a core team, and then you bring on more and more people as the sequences go through, I think we had around 40 or 50 artists working on it at its highest point.

On a movie like V For Vendetta, there are so many different types of effects: there's the CG crowd, there's the knife trail sequence, there are explosions, and there are all these other shots. So a good way of achieving everything is to have key people responsible for each sequence, so you're basically set up like a pyramid structure so the information always filters down. Then we have artists assigned to different sequences, whether they are 3D artists ­ the people doing the computer graphics ­ or whether they are 2D artists ­ the compositors. We have to take all the green screens, the CG, and the matte paintings, and compile everything together, so we've found that structure works for us.

VICTORIA STATION

What is one of the key sequences your team has been working on?

Matt: We have a team of 3D artists who've just been doing knife trails, for example. That's actually been quite a challenging sequence in terms of getting the look, because it's one of those very disparate things that has a fantastical look. Obviously it has to be what James wants, so we went through a process of iteration ­ artwork, if you like - it was one of those looks that's been refined many times over. We've probably done 60 or 70 different ideas of what a knife trail could look like, finally getting it to the way where James is happy and how it will be seen in the movie.

Will the knife trail just feature in Victoria Station?

Matt: It's just in Victoria Station, towards the finale of the movie, when V confronts about 14 Fingermen, all with automatic pistols firing at him, they shoot him and think that he' should be dead, but he just keeps on going. He pulls out his knife, and the movie goes into a kind of slow motion - it was shot at a very high frame rate, so everything becomes like there's a slightly different time. Maybe V is so quick with his knife that as it's cutting through the air it's creating some kind of shock trail. The trails basically emphasize the fact that V is doing this incredibly cool kind of fighting, and the speed has been played with so it's not a real world time thing. I think the concept of the trails on the knives was inspired by manga and comic books and cartoons, where you have those nice shwingy trails. I remember sitting outside a café in Berlin that they were filming at and looking at pictures in manga comic books that looked like what we were trying to create.

V's knife is just a regular kind of knife; he has a whole bunch of them. When they were filming the scene, the stunt guys would actually be fighting with those knives, but there was obviously no kind of trail on there, because they were just shooting with regular film cameras on set: hand held and dollies and steady cams. Our first job is to take those frames into the computer and then basically work out what the 3D camera is doing by tracking. Essentially that means that the computer looks at different points in the background, and if they're in frame one, they're there, and frame two, they're there, that must mean the camera has done something. So basically it goes through a complex algorithm that says, OK, that's a 35 mil lens and it's on a dolly and it's moving at X speed. From that, the tracking and animating department had to go in and roto-animate. We had a mannequin that was the shape and size of V, and CG models of the knives that were the shape and size of the real knives, so it was a case of going in and actually matching your CG knife to the real knife and the real action. Then from that you can generate paths ­ basically, the path of what the knife is doing. From that a variety of different renders are used in order to create the effect of the knife trail, combined in the composite with various tricks to integrate them into the scene.

MULTIPLE Vs

You did an initial test on multiple Vs, how did the process continue?

Matt: There are CG Vs in a scene at the end of the movie - there are thousands and thousands of identically dressed people marching down on the Houses of Parliament in London. We did some filming, which was quite a cool thing - it doesn't happen very often in London, they were able to shut down Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, which is near Downing Street where the Prime Minister lives, and down to the Houses of Parliament. We had three nights where we closed off the streets around there, which is a really big thing to do in London, it's kind of like they were filming outside the White House or something. I think we had 400 extras dressed up in V masks and costumes, which looked cool, but when you want to put the camera really wide we would have to have 5,000 or 10,000 people in costume. Twenty years ago they probably would have had to do it if they had the shots, but now what's more common is to do digital characters. So we made some digital V models.

In the movie they're all supposed to be different people, so we couldn't just make one digital guy. We had to make four or five different shaped and sized guys, and some ladies as well, with different body styles, so you get a random feeling in the crowd. To initially animate them we did a thing called motion capture, which is essentially capturing the movement of real performers ­ in this case it was me and a few colleagues from Cinesite. We went to a motion capture studio and got to look a bit stupid dressed in skin tight black lycra, which shows what you'd been eating the day before. Then you stick these little balls over your body in a room full of infrared cameras, and the cameras can plot what your body movements are doing by reading the balls, and that information is fed into a computer. It's a fairly complex process, but that's essentially how walking into this little room can be translated into a 3D model, and then that can be translated into one of our CG Vs.

We also have crowd simulation software which basically means that rather than have to individually animate each person, you can set up behaviors for them so that they never get too close to each other, or if there's an object in the road they'll walk around it. It's essentially an artificial intelligence system based upon the topography and on what's going on. So in motion capture we captured a load of clips of us walking in different ways and climbing over things, which was all fed into the computer. In the movie there are aerial shots of Trafalgar Square and Whitehall and Parliament Square, where I think the Vs are going to look pretty much like little ants walking around, but if you went in closer and closer and closer you would actually see they're very detailed, textured people with their capes are billowing, and their hats as they should be. You have to go in and put in too much detail because if it's not there you would probably spot it.

BIG BEN & PARLIAMENT

What was the digital process of working with the miniatures?

Matt: One of the cool things about V For Vendetta, and about working at Cinesite is that you're not limited to just having to do computer techniques on shots. We're able to make very large models - it's always cool, whenever you're doing explosions or anything like that, to have things happen for real. So if you can really blow something up, it's probably going to look a little better than a computer simulation. The randomness of something like that done for real sometimes gives you really cool and interesting shots. There are two scenes - the finale of the movie, and also towards the beginning of the movie - where two famous London landmarks get destroyed.

At the beginning of the movie there's the Old Bailey, which is like the Supreme Court House structure in London with the statue of Madame Justice, who is a figure holding the scales of justice. Obviously they wouldn't be too keen for us to blow up that for real in London, so we built a several models of Madame Justice and the Old Bailey, and rigged them with pyro charges and shot them against a green screen, which allowed us to put in real backgrounds. In the case of the Old Bailey, Dan Glass and I went up on a roof one night and took lots of photographs of the real Old Bailey and the surrounding environment. We're able to take those images and then make very large, detailed matte paintings of London, but then change it to make it the London of V rather than the London of today. Then we're able to composite the miniature elements within the matte paintings, so it looks as though it's a real building and a real place, but of course we're adding in explosions, and we're adding in firework elements that were shot separately against a night sky. If you like part of the explosion from take one, but the debris shower from take two, we are able to go in and combine all of those different elements to get the coolest explosion you can possibly imagine.

On the clock face of Big Ben James wanted explosions to be racing up the top of the tower, and then have the clock face explode and the whole tower collapse. To achieve that, we built a series of miniatures that we blew up in various different ways. We were able to take our miniature elements, and actually nest them into the plates of the real Houses of Parliament in London.

We built the House of Parliament in sections with the right architecture and the right shapes, and we were able to take those explosions and composite them into plates of the real buildings. So you basically get a sense of London along with the buildings, and you get the water and everything else, rather than just sticking explosions over the top of the real surface that isn't really reacting to the shape of the explosion. If you did that there would be no windows and things blowing out. However by building a miniature and blowing that up then sitting pieces of those shots in, you're able to get the explosions all conforming to the right shapes of the buildings and cool interaction on the surfaces.

Parliament and Big Ben exploding is a very large scene that was very specific about which bit of the explosion goes first, so we were able to get the desired look by integrating the very latest in the digital realm in terms of CG with what was done back in the day with models. You're taking elements ­ whether it be a live action Natalie Portman [Evey] in front of a green screen, or a digital photograph of London, or a miniature ­ and combining all of those things together in one shot. It's like a jigsaw puzzle… putting all the pieces together to get the shot you want, and it allows you to control so much more. Natural elements like fire are still tricky to do in CG - getting all the dynamics and the debris to look real. By building the miniatures we could put a camera at the foot of the model looking up and have all kinds of debris and rubble falling straight at the camera, and it looks really cool, but that would take ages to do in CG. It also gives something for them to cut with.

Were you a part of deciding what scale to make the models?

Matt: The scale was primarily decided by the Model Unit Supervisor, José Granell; it's one of those things that takes years of experience. The miniatures guys on this film have been working in miniatures for 20 to 30 years in some cases, and there are rules about camera speeds and model sizes for things like flame and water. We always want to try and have models that are as big as possible in size, because natural elements scale in different ways. Scale also comes down to physical limitations of the space where we're shooting ­ the Big Ben model couldn't have been any bigger because we would have had to take the roof of the stage off… and that was a pretty big stage. The scale also has to do with frame rate and with lighting, because you need to keep your f-stop wide open to keep depth of field. This is all the model unit's thing - they know that stuff, and they're able to come up with the best solutions.

VFX DAY TO DAY

Right now you are five weeks from final shot delivery, what does that mean for you on a daily basis?

Matt: We probably would have shot out sequences on film the night before, so the first thing we would have is film dailies, where we go and sit in the screening theater and watch what went to film the night before. We check that it's OK, and check that it looks like what James wants. Some sequences are finishing, so people are being moved onto different sequences, so I'm working with the production team, allocating people to sequences and new shots. I also go around the different teams and artists, looking in and answering technical or creative questions about what something is supposed to look like, or what has happened during a particular shot. We also have what we call digital dailies, where we sit in a 2K playback room watching shots in real time on a high def system. More usually we look at shots on a high resolution computer monitor, and from that we get a sense of what we'll put to film. We also present shots to Dan Glass to check that he's happy with what we're doing and to give him the opportunity to make any comments.

How much creative freedom do the matte painters have?

Matt: Different productions do things in different ways. For V Owen [Paterson, Production Designer] had some beautiful concept artwork done, which essentially gave the mood and the look. One of the things about visual effects is to make sure that everything you do in post is still harmonious with the rest of the world of the movie. In many cases the Production Designer and the art department team have left the picture long before many of the digital artists start working on it, so part of the job of a supervisor is to make sure you keep that look throughout. The matte painters are artists to a certain extent - these guys are really brilliant at what they do - so they instinctively know how to take different photographic elements and to combine them in certain ways. Matte paintings used to be done on sheets of glass, where they would literally go in and paint with a brush and acrylic paints. Now it's done primarily in computer with Photoshop software, but these guys are able to take the basic playing around with Photoshop to the next level, and make something that is completely photographically real, and obeys all the laws of photography and depth of field and focus.

A lot of the movie takes place at night time, so when we were doing plate photography we would do digital stills, but in order to get the full dynamic range on the very high resolution digitals you would under- and overexpose three stops. So you'd have your basic stop, then you would overexpose three stops and underexpose three stops, to get these very weird looking pictures. You'd get one image that you would expect, and one image that's just all the really bright highlights of street lamps, and another image which has all the dark shadows. The matte painters combine all of those shots together so that the matte paintings they're working on have the full dynamic range of film. That means you're able to grade something bright or grade something dark, and not get clipping in the highlights that you normally get when you're dealing with computer generated elements like that. In terms of creative ­ it's a two-way thing ­ they are able to go in and put their artistry and their experience into the matte paintings, and we're able to go in, make comments, and present it to the clients making sure that everyone gets precisely what they want. If James wants to move a building we're able to do that now; it's very much a collaborative process.

OTHER VFX SHOTS

What are some visual effects your team is working on that may not be recognized as a visual effect in the film?

Matt: Straight off the bat would be a shot in Piccadilly Circus, which is this very lively area in the West End of London. It has a big sort of neon sign with lots of advertising for different companies on it. What we're doing is actually changing that sign to become a screen that V is able to talk to London on. We're working very hard to make it look exactly like the jumbotron that they now have in Piccadilly Circus, so if you're not intimately familiar with Piccadilly Circus you might think that it was there. We're not doing a lot of advertising in the picture, so we've had to remove all the advertising holdings. Also, the real screen is only about half the size of the one that will actually end up in the movie, so we've had to make a huge screen and add in a little ticker tape ­ similar to what you see in Times Square in New York. I think that's one of the things that Londoners will look at that and wonder how we did it.

There's another shot where Natalie Portman [Evey] gets a raindrop splashed on her face, which is quite a complex shot. It's one of those shots where you think someone might have stood there with a little dropper and drop the raindrop on her face, however we're actually modeled her face in CG, and we've programmed full fluid dynamics of water splashing on her face. That's incredibly complicated effects for something that I hope people will think she's just standing under a hose or something like that. James wanted to do this very complex shot, following a single raindrop moving down her face, amidst other raindrops. We were able to play with the speed of the shot infinitely in the computer, and real rain wouldn't have reacted in the way that James wanted.

We have also done some wire and safety harness removals, and things like that. Audiences now want cooler and more exciting sequences, and there are only so many things you can do for real without killing people, so we're able to go in and remove things these incredible stunt guys use for safety. We have also augmented things as well ­ flames for example. There's a scene where Larkhill burns and there were an awful lot of flames on the set, but we were able to go in and add a little bit more flame and some heat haze, just to make the shots look more visually dynamic.

What makes fire tricky: the fire itself, or the randomness of something like the explosion that goes with it?

Matt: It's difficult because of the randomness of the explosion and the randomness of fire as well. You are now able to simulate crashes and things like that in a way looks cool and interesting, but if you can go out and film it in the real world, fire is not one of the hardest things to make, so why not just use something that's real?

On set it was challenging to capture the mask well - with it being white the light bounced - did you have to put any effects on the mask?

Matt: We didn't do anything on the live action mask, however for our digital V mask we had to pay a lot of attention to the way that the mask itself reflected and how it was affected by light. We were given a real mask to look at, and we would wave it under different lights to see how it would react. It is an interesting facet of the production because a lot of the drama from the film is all about the lighting of the mask. You can light the mask in different ways and it'll make V look like he has completely different expressions. One of the things that you could do with the mask digitally is perhaps shadow half of the mask, or if there's a particular mood that they want to get in you could potentially go in and matte and shadow the eyes a little bit more. So you are able to go in and tweak things like that, and I think that's being done for some shots in the digital intermediary [DI] process. You have very black backgrounds and a very white mask, and being able to do things digitally you can tweak selective areas of the frame, which helps get James's vision completely perfect on screen.

How involved in the DI process are you?

Matt: All of our shots are going through the DI. I was at the DI session the other day, seeing how it was being graded, and Dan is very involved in that. On movies it's always good for the Visual Effects Supervisor to look at grading because sometimes you've been working for months, or years maybe, on one shot, and then you give it to the colorist who hasn't had the experience that you've had on the shot, and they instantly destroy a lot of the work that you've been doing. On this show that has been quite a collaborative thing, making sure that everything is shown off in its best light. So for example, on the Victoria Station sequence, because the knife trails are so tenuous, you'd put a heavy grade on, then you would make the knife trail - you could make it go blue or pink or whatever you wanted. For that we had to pre-grade a lot of the backgrounds so we would have a very clear indication of how the knife trail would fit in there, because it's almost like grading smoke or something.

Why don't you always pre-grade shots that you work on?

Matt: We are given match clips, so when a sequence comes in we have a guy who is responsible for universally balancing a whole scene of film. Then there would be a grade given to the artist that they could employ, which would bring everything into the right kind of color area, but in many cases the creative decisions about grading are made at one of the last stages. Decisions can be made purely subjectively when everyone is sitting in one room and looking at something, so grading things often come up 0n the day.

DI is becoming another offshoot of the digital world: having the computer power to keep that movie at high resolution on servers and on disks, and being able to conform it all in a digital way, and then having the machines to record it out onto film negative and be proper cinema-sized reels, is becoming more and more prevalent. A lot of directors who've come from commercials backgrounds are used to being able to go in and do things like that, it's just bringing that kind of freedom to film work now.

As a fan of the graphic novel do you like what you have seen of the film?

Matt: I'm pretty pleased. It's a dark and very interesting movie. It's not your normal popcorn affair. The graphic novel was about interesting and challenging issues that were right for the time, and the Wachowski Brothers [Writers & Producers] have taken that and updated it, so it's right for our time now, but it's still very much keeping the spirit and the atmosphere that the novel had back in the ‘80s.

Thanks Matt.