London-based VFX studio Union was called on to create visual effects shots for the Kevin Macdonald-directed film The Mauritanian, which is based on the memoir “Guantánamo Diary” by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The Mauritanian is the true story of Slahi’s fight for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the US government for years. The film stars Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch, Shailene Woodley and Tahar Rahim.

Simon Hughes

Union’s main job was turning the South African set builds into Guantánamo’s base. The production built two sections of the base. The first was on the coast just outside of Cape Town for exterior and contextual shots. The other, larger set was in a car park, where they had more control over the environment. That was where the majority of principal photography took place.

The base needed to be seen from multiple angles at numerous times of the day and night, so the team decided early on to do a full-CG build of the base to provide as much flexibility as possible.

Jan Guilfoyle

The Union team conducted extensive online research to enable them to build the base as accurately as possible. Drones were also used at the parking lot to capture the set from multiple angles and assist with the build. Union then added matte paintings and digi doubles of both inmates and guards, along with CG military vehicles, to the live action.

Union had worked with Kevin Macdonald before on How I Live Now, Black Sea and Oasis and had been talking to him about The Mauritanian on and off for about a year before starting on the project. We reached out to Union VFX producer Jan Guilfoyle and VFX supervisor Simon Hughes to find out more.

How many shots did you provide in total? How would you describe the majority of them?
Jan Guilfoyle: We provided 115 shots, 14 assets and two environments. The effects were mainly invisible.

Any specific challenges for this one?
Hughes: The beach location was particularly windy, which meant matching the movement in the live action was sometimes tricky. The team had to stabilize and rebuild some of the real set to remove the movement as well as animate the matte paintings of waves and flags, etc. to marry up with the shot footage.

Slahi is physically tortured during his imprisonment, and Union altered some of the prosthetic makeup to simplify the scarring and make it more true to Slahi’s experience. This process was complex due to the shadow cast by the cell-door grill, combined with his facial contortions and expressions.

Lewis Wright and Iain Read were the comp leads and helped establish the looks and methodologies on several key shots.

When Slahi is finally released, he is blindfolded and loaded onto a C-17 jet. There was a minimal set build — a ramp and platform and two lights — and the rest was down to us. We added in a fully CG C-17 exterior with its hold exposed. We had planned to shoot some stills inside a C-17 in the US, but COVID put a stop to that. Instead we conducted lots of online research to turn up good photographic reference that helped produce a great replica that could be lit and positioned to match the live action. It was one of our biggest builds and appears during the climax of the film. The team, led by CG lead Jonathan Wannyn, did a great job in getting the build to a photoreal state that didn’t compromise the narrative.

It was a challenge to find a suitable location in Cape Town for the Pentagon parking garage with a view onto the Pentagon, so we ended up with a minimal car park, which we had to clean up and extend, along with the Pentagon, into the background.

The shoot was pre-COVID, but the post was during 2020. Can you talk about those workflows?
Guilfoyle: Our actual workflows were very similar, but with everyone remote and dialing securely into our company technology.

Team meetings and internal reviews were all online using a variety of technology — Google Hangouts, RV and CineSync. The rapid change in workflow meant that communication was key. This was marshalled successfully by line producer Elliot Mander.

We were approaching finals in the summer when COVID restrictions had been relaxed to a degree, so we held some on-site client reviews that adhered to health and safety protocols.

Simon’s established relationship with Kevin, having worked together three times previously, meant there was a good level of trust that enabled us to do remote reviews until we were very close to completion.

Can you talk about the tools used?
Hughes: We mainly used Foundry Nuke for compositing and Autodesk Maya for CG with the addition of Adobe Photoshop for some of the digital matte painting work.