By Oliver Peters
DC Comics’ Caped Crusader has been gracing our big and small screens for decades. While some have been campy, the newest Batman movie skews dark. Director Matt Reeves’ latest take on Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) in The Batman takes us to a very gritty version of Gotham.
No superhero film is possible without extensive visual effects work, and The Batman is no exception, with numerous top-flight effects houses contributing to the film, including New Zealand-based WetaFX. I recently spoke with Weta visual effects supervisor Anders Langlands about the visual effects studio’s work bringing The Batman to life.
Anders Langlands
What are some of the scenes that ended up on Weta’s to-do list?
The biggest and most exciting scene was the highway chase. We also did all the work on the Batcave and the City Hall environment for the mayor’s memorial sequence. We worked on a few fight scenes in a couple of different locations, like the Iceberg Lounge. These required fight augmentation — speeding up and adjusting punches and kicks to make people look like they’re actually hitting each other — as well as some face replacements between Rob Pattinson and his stunt double. There are also CG bats in the Batcave and in a cage in the Riddler’s apartment.
Can you dig into the Penguin and Batman chase scene a bit more?
The chase scene was very complex, with a lot of moving parts. The first part is practical, with tons of added effects, and the back end is completely 3D CG. We did previz for everything in advance, so we knew what the intention of the shots was going to be. They shot pretty much everything in some form, even for shots that had elements we’d be replacing digitally. There was a plate for everything, even if it was only a rough representation of what the final shot was. This was good for reference of what items ought to look like.
The highway was shot at Dunsfold Aerodrome in the UK. It was dressed to look like a highway, with street lamps and a partition down the middle. The first part is the lead-up to them getting on the highway. It ran from Coryton in the UK, down some back streets around Longcross, over some country back roads, and then up onto a highway for the first section. That’s mostly in-camera. However, throughout the scene — both for the in-camera and CG parts — we’re adding digital rain to everything.
It’s difficult to stick rain bars up over long lengths of road, and from a safety point of view, it’s not a good idea to have a very wet surface when you’re trying to do stunt driving at speed. Because of this, they shot everything dry, and we were required to make it look like it was pouring rain — a key element of the scene for Matt Reeves.
It’s constantly raining in Gotham (laughs), but he also wanted that extra level of danger for the chase. Batman, because he’s Batman, is able to control the car when the surface of the road is completely covered in water. We added falling rain, mist and spray coming off of the wheels of the vehicles and then the little crown splashes of all the raindrops hitting the road surface.
How did you go about creating the digital rain and other effects for this sequence?
The rain effects were quite an involved process. You have to know the positions for all the vehicles so you can have the rain colliding with them properly. Representations of headlights and taillights illuminate the CG rain. It was a lot of work to reconstruct in 3D what’s there in the plate. We started off simulating the rain explicitly, but that turned out to be extremely expensive. Instead, we came up with a cheaper, custom solution that kept most of the look but could be rendered in a reasonable amount of time to actually get the movie done.
Once editorial assembled what they got from the shoot, it was clear that things weren’t moving fast enough or getting quite close enough to each other. There were no big, wide helicopter shots or masters to describe the location of everything in an easy-to-understand way for the audience. Matt wanted you to feel like you are in it the whole time. That meant we had to do a bunch of work to revise what was shot, in terms of A) the speed of everything, and then B) making sure that we could clearly identify the location of vehicles throughout.
The audience had to understand the geography and the sequence of cause and effect. Penguin slams on his brakes, so this truck hydroplanes and jackknifes, which causes Batman to swerve and nearly collide with another truck that also jackknifes. That starts a chain reaction and a rolling pileup. We had to hit all those story beats.
It all starts with Penguin trying to escape and ends with this huge explosion. Our animation team, led by Dennis Yoo, did a lot of revisions to get all these things across — in particular, the animation of the Batmobile. Batman is right on the edge of losing control the whole time, but it’s his skill and the power of the Batmobile that allow him to remain in control enough to avoid absolute disaster, considering all that’s unfolding.
Once the whole crash starts, most of the shots are full-CG. There’s some great asset and effects work in there to make those look as good as they do. I was really pleased with the way that turned out. Sophie Cherry and James Worley, our WetaFX production managers, did a great job of lining all that up so that we were able to give the proper amount of attention to those big shots.
What typically happens on a big production is you end up doing the really big shots at the last minute because it takes so long to get those up and running. However, we aggressively planned to start all the full-CG simulation work super-early. Therefore, we had time to iterate rather than just having to take the first version and stick that in the movie. Beginning to end, from when we got turnover for the chase to when we delivered, was about 16 weeks… just for that one scene.
What about the large environment scenes, such as the Batcave and City Hall?
The environments were based on concept designs by production designer James Chinlund and his art department. The Batcave ended up becoming fully digital. We resculpted the shape of the space of the Batcave to make the shots that Matt wanted work. For example, there’s a long, panning shot when Bruce first comes in on the motorcycle. We rebuilt the cave around how long Mike wanted that shot to be and the speeds he wanted the bike to be going.
They built the ends of the platform and the little workshop area where Bruce is working on the Batmobile. That portion is on the stage at Leavesden in the UK. Due to the relative size of the stage and the set, they couldn’t get the camera exactly where they wanted it on the crane. That meant we had to replace everything completely to get the angle that Matt wanted and to extend the move. It started off as a set extension but ended up as a full-CG shot. Both that and the preceding point-of-view shot were all digital. Once we’re down into the dialogue section between Alfred and Bruce, it’s more of a traditional set extension for the background of the cave behind them.
What about City Hall?
City Hall was shot in an old blimp hanger. Key features of that environment are the huge windows at either end that create a lot of the light that falls onto the set built on the ground floor. We had to extend the pillars above the mezzanine level, where you have the balconies with people. At either end of City Hall, they had a creamscreen as opposed to a greenscreen. It was roughly the same color as the stonework, and they cut holes to hang a silk behind it to get light coming in from outside. Even the hanger wasn’t big enough for the size of the intended wall of the building. The set was built to 80% scale using forced perspective. If you were shooting from the middle of the hall, the windows would appear to be at the correct size and position.
Maybe only two shots came from that position. We knew that we were going to do some fiddling with it ahead of time, so we built a wild wall at either end to allow us to shift things around afterward based on the needs of the shot. The cookie cutter approach for those walls meant that people are properly backlit when walking in front of those windows. When we were dealing with shots where the windows didn’t appear to be in the right place (because the camera wasn’t in the intended position), we had to shift everything around to line up our CG windows with the holes in the creamscreen.
There are also a bunch of complex, multi-plate composites in there. COVID was the main restriction for the number of people that could be on the stage at the same time. Crowds had to be shot in multiple passes. Small crowd sections then had to be comped together while keeping them out of the path of the vehicle — the stunt car that’s careening through the crowd. Fortunately, Dan Lamkin [second unit, second AD] managed to have these shot with the camera locked off.
The most complex one is when the Riddler commandeers the DA’s SUV and crashes right into the foreground. That was a gnarly comp because there are multiple layers of stuff going on in the background, all while dust is coming off of the vehicle where it’s just smashed through a column. Plus there were multiple layers of crowds and building and cream-sheet windows behind them. These were very complex comps, but they weren’t as bad as they could have been if there had been a moving camera.
Did any of your visual effects work include LED “volume-style” production techniques?
That was mainly done by ILM. Some of our driving shots were captured in a volume-type setup for the interior POV shots through the windows while Penguin is driving. They shot numerous 360-degree plates with a camera car driving the same route. The intention of that was to map that view onto the LED volume so you would see it from inside the car. You’d see what was outside with all the correct lighting — particularly water drops on the windshield with the correct reflections and refractions.
Unfortunately, that got ditched early on. Since that driving footage had to be prerecorded, I think Matt felt restricted. You couldn’t change the path or get a particular move from Colin Farrell, who’s playing Penguin, because he has to sync up to what the video’s doing outside. For much of the scene, those shots ended up just being bluescreens. We created the backgrounds from the 360-degree footage for some. But in a lot of cases, we just did them digitally since we were adding CG vehicles anyway.
Was The Batman shot all digitally?
Yes, but DP Greig Fraser (ACS, ASC) used the same film-out approach that he did on Dune. The locked and graded digital cut was recorded back out to film. However, on The Batman they added a bleach bypass step to the film-out process. That gives you this desaturated, contrasty look.
For us, it mostly meant that we had to keep in mind that it was going to go through this bleach bypass process. The LUT that we had from the DI sort of emulated that, but the actual process boosted levels even more. It was shot very dark to start with. They ended up pushing levels even further because they were aiming for IMAX and Dolby Vision standards.
[Editors Note: Other VFX and previs houses that worked on The Batman include, Scanline, Atomic Arts, Barnstorm VFX, Crafty Apes, Territory, Halon and The Third Floor.]
Oliver Peters is an award-winning editor/colorist working in commercials, corporate communications, television shows and films. More information at oliverpeters.com.
