“The 355″ is an American action spy film of director Simon Kinberg. It tells the story of a CIA agent who teams up with other international agents to recover a top-secret weapon.
Based on a screenplay of writer Theresa Rebeck and Kinberg, the film was shot in London, Paris, Morocco, and Taiwan. Goodbye Kansas Studios were the primary visual effect vendor on the project. They contributed over 400 VFX shots and assets throughout the film. VFX Supervisor, Keith Devlin, and producer Danny Evans led the team, alongside James Prosser, MD of Goodbye Kansas Studios London.
Recreating an entire city as a CG environment
One of the most complex aspects of Goodbye Kansas’ work on The 355 was centred around Shanghai . Unfortunately, there were many reasons hindering access to the city, including political factors and the ongoing pandemic. Therefore, the team had to rethink how they could make it work.
One of the action sequences centred around a skyscraper hotel and our initial workload included creating this in CG and extending the two-story live action set piece. The original plan was to have just a couple of establishing shots of the hotel, compositing the CG hotel against live action stock footage background.
However, it soon became clear that this wasn’t going to be enough to bring the vision of the director to life for the movie.
There was a desire to create more angles and more interesting camera moves. So the team offered up a CG Shanghai solution to give the director the creative choices he wanted for the climax of the film.
Delivering VFX using 3D software
When it came to creating that authentic Shanghai environment, the team designed the camera angles to mimic real-world drone footage in order to keep with the stylistic intent established in the film.
CG Supervisor James Sutton said, “Modeling was done in Maya, alongside Substance for texturing. We combined Maya with V-Ray to create the lighting for the cityscape and Nuke for compositing.”
“There were some really exciting sequences that we used a variety of other software tools for. For example, we use ZBrush for sculpting and Substance for texturing two bronze dragon statues”, she adds.
To truly give the CG Shanghai a sense of realism, the team used Houdini’s procedural approach to scatter street-level props and roof dressing over the whole environment in one go, rather than having to hand-place individually in Maya.
The team also built a custom AI system that would allow them to give cars in these shots a life of their own.
“It allowed us to incorporate detailed animation, such as driving around street blocks, in a very efficient way. It really adds a sense of realism to these environments,” said Sutton.
High speed chases: Designing CG trains and shooting underground in Paris
Another key scene in the film follows a high-speed action sequence that takes place through the underground tunnels of the Paris Metro. To make the shots feel truly authentic – a key requirement of Kinberg for an action movie – the team themselves went below ground to shoot in the real Metro tunnels.
However, the team quickly realised that it wasn’t going to be as straightforward as they’d hoped. “Even with all the safety measures in place for our teams, there are certain things you just cannot do with real people in a real tunnel with real moving trains,” admits Devlin.
The live action footage again proved to be limiting in creating the dynamic action shots needed for the edit. Using CG trains allowed production the creative freedom to devise more elaborate shots to make those scenes feel more exciting and action packed.
“Simon could see that we could give him more interesting shots with the trains. After that, they started becoming more dominant criteria in the edit,” said Devlin. “Because we gave them more scope to play with the trains, it allowed them to do things in ways they couldn’t given the limitations of the physical trains.”
Another question: How to look as realistic as possible?
Part of the challenge involved making the CG train look as realistic as possible. So that it would merge flawlessly with the surrounding environment.
Sutton adds, “We took plenty of reference images and once we built the CG model, we were able to find orthographic drawings of train carriages and engines to achieve the correct proportions. We even went as far as gauging the width of, and the distance between, the wheels. We even ended up writing a script for the finer train movement animations. Therefore, it appeared as an organic movement to the viewer.”
Universal Pictures released The 355 on 7th January 2022 in cinemas.
The 355 (feature film)
UNIVERSAL PICTURES INTERNATIONAL presents in association with FILMNATION ENTERTAINMENT
A FRECKLE FILMS Production
A KINBERG GENRE FILMS Production
VFX Supervisor: Keith Devlin (in-house and production side)
VFX Producer: Danny Evans
Release Date: January 2022
Cre: cgsociety
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