Before and After CGI: 6 Film and TV Locations That Were Mostly Built
- Film & Television, Visual Effects & VFX Breakdowns
- body tracking, cg animation, CG assets, CG doubles, CG environments, Cinematography, cleanup, Compositing, Digital Doubles, Digital Environments, features, filmmaking, green screen, Look Development, lookdev, Marvel, match moving, movies, Post production, rigging, rotomation, Rotoscopy, visual effects, Weta Digital
- June 7, 2020
Before and after CGI, many of the places you see on screen turn out to be built. A real set covers only the area around the actors. The rest is built later. We looked at six film and TV productions and wrote down what was real and what was CG.
Our other post, movie scenes before and after special effects, covers ten different films. This one is only about places.
1. Gladiator (2000): the Colosseum
The crew built about one third of the Colosseum in Malta. It stood 52 ft high. Mill Film extended it digitally to full height and size.
The real set had a cloth awning of about 17 shapes on cables, designed to cast real shadows. It was removed digitally. The CG version has a movable awning. The film won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
2. Boardwalk Empire (2010): 1920s Atlantic City
Brainstorm Digital built the world around a real set. The crew built a stretch of boardwalk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on a steel frame. Shipping containers were stacked and painted blue to act as bluescreen.
Everything beyond that was matte painting and 3D period buildings. Every shot got a new sky. A 1920s Times Square was a fully CG shot, Brainstorm’s first. The team worked from black-and-white archive photos, because no colour images of the period existed.
3. 300 (2006): almost no real sets
The film has more than 1,200 VFX shots. It was shot in Montreal over about 60 days in summer 2005, against blue screen. Nearly every set was digitally augmented.
The production hired about 30 stand-ins and copied them to make armies of 100,000. The team chose blue over green because much of the story is outdoors, and the red Spartan capes clash with green.
4. Oz the Great and Powerful (2013): old Hollywood, rebuilt
Sony Pictures Imageworks made over 1,100 shots under Scott Stokdyk. The production built as many sets as it could in Detroit, over a 100-day shoot. It used bluescreen instead of greenscreen for the crew’s comfort. It shot in native stereo 3D on RED Epic cameras.
Imageworks built the Emerald City, China Town, the Haunted Forest, Glinda’s castle and village, the poppy fields and the river gorge.
5. Chernobyl (2019): a reactor that doesn’t exist
The series has 846 VFX shots. DNEG made about 550 of them under Max Dennison. The production filmed at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, which has a similar reactor type. A LIDAR survey captured the plant. The team built a rubble set in Vilnius.
Reactor 4 itself is CG, inside and outside. DNEG built it from Soviet archive photos. They also built a model of the surrounding site covering about 12 square kilometres. A real Mi-8 helicopter was filmed and then replaced with CG, keeping the real rotor blades.
6. Game of Thrones, season 8 (2019): King’s Landing burning
Scanline made 615 shots across episodes 4 to 6, in about a year. The burning city is fully CG. It was built from photogrammetry scans of Dubrovnik, put together from parts such as shingles, windows and chimneys.
A real set was built in Belfast, so the real Dubrovnik wouldn’t be damaged. One shot needed a single large simulation of the whole city burning.
What these six have in common
- A real piece sits where the actors touch. It’s often a few hundred feet at most.
- The CG copies real places. Scans, photos and surveys come first.
- The production plans the join between real and digital before the shoot.
If you’re planning a location that will be part real, part digital, see our work or get in touch. Happy to talk it through.
Which build surprised you most? Let us know.
Sources and references
- Wikipedia: Gladiator (2000 film).
- ASC: “Gladiator: death or glory” (theasc.com).
- fxguide: “Building a Boardwalk Empire”. Art of VFX: Boardwalk Empire, Brainstorm Digital interview.
- fxguide: “300: from 405 to 300”. AWN: “300: it’s Miller time, CG”.
- fxguide: “The wonderful world of Oz”.
- Art of VFX: Chernobyl, Max Dennison interview. fxguide: “Emmys 2019: Chernobyl”.
- AWN: Scanline reveals the Throne melt and King’s Landing destruction. Chaos blog: “How Scanline VFX delivered Game of Thrones’ epic conclusion”.
