Eye Candy – The visual effects of SPECTRE

The James Bond series has always maintained an incredibly high standard in film production and employs some of the most experienced and skilled crew behind the scenes to make every adventure of agent 007 look impeccable on screen. One of the wizards of post-production is Visual Effects Supervisor Steve Begg who has been in the business for over 30 years.

While you might think that the exceptional locations featured in the latest Bond adventure “Spectre” are no less then stunning and flawless, you’ll be surprised to learn that quite some alterations and visual tweaks were done to enhance the film footage shot on location. With 1500 visual effects shots in the film, Begg had his hands full to make the final result worthy of the glossy 007 style.

In a recent interview on awn.com, Begg spoke in great detail about the creative process and what was changed in post-production. “Particularly the interior of the Crater was a big ILM number. There were shapes and small set pieces for the actors to relate to on location in the Moroccan desert but otherwise it was an ILM CG construct, crater walls and buildings,” so Begg.

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The location shoot in Austria held several challenges in store for the production crew of “Spectre”. Unpredictable weather conditions, icy roads and a village that had a bit of a snow problem. However, one of the visually striking elements in the film is the “IceQ” restaurant which was extended to a four-sided building in the final film to make it look bigger.

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The scenes shot in Altaussee were tricky due to high risk of avalanches in the area and because there was a lot of fog on the first day of shooting Daniel Craig on the lake. To match the mood for the establishing shot, Begg and his team added layers of fog. Feels a lot colder now, doesn’t it?

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In the scene where Bond chases Madeleine and her kidnappers through the forest, several adjustments needed to be made. The plane steered by Bond had been attached to wires and pulled through a swathe – the wires and cranes naturally needed to disappear.

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“The touch and go bounce of Bond’s plane in front of the bad guys’ Range Rovers, causing one of them to crash and the other to veer off, used MPC’s full CG plane model,” Begg continues. “It had to intercut back to back with the real plane and a practical effects full scale model plane on wires used for the shots where the plane loses its wing tips as it tries to fly between a narrowing roadway of trees. Subsequent shots with the grounded wingless plane continuing to pursue the Range Rovers used a prop with a skidoo snowmobile inside propelling it along. CG propellers, snow wakes and plumes of black smoke coming from the thrashed engines were also added to heighten the action. Continuity issues with the snow on trees and rooftops due to differing snow fall during the six week shoot was also addressed with a series of 2.5D matte paintings throughout this sequence.”

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The Spectre meeting in the Roman palazzo was filmed in England, Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire to be precise. By the help of visual effects, the entire complex was placed into an aerial shot of the Eternal City.

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Moving on to Morocco, it is actually not Morocco at all that you see in the establishing shot. This was filmed on location in Rome and later made to look like Morocco.

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The Hotel “L’Americain”, in which Bond and Madeleine search for clues, doesn’t exist at a prominent location overlooking the city of Tangiers – at least not until Steve Begg and his team put it there.

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“In pre-production, we worked a lot with Dennis [Gassner] on the look and design of the various artefacts and extensions we would have to add to sets and locations. Then on the shoot, I would literally shadow Hoyte [van Hoytema] and request that certain things be switched off or minimised during principal photography, like smoke on big VFX shots, and big lights shining down the lens causing lens flares, which he kindly did. Then the opposite happened when I told him not to worry about stuff that I thought would be easy to fix in post.”

No film today is complete without a visual effects overhaul. But it is a tricky job and often overlooked art. Steve Begg, who received a Lifetime Contribution BAFTA award in 2013, has once again proven, that visual effects can greatly improve a film and its mood when done by experts. Even if that means to animate a mouse from time to time.