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Like the Louvre, the church of Saint-Sulpice was a location that had no substitute. Architecturally, this Paris landmark is a hodgepodge of 1,000 years of history, which adds up to a unique look that no other church could mimic. But Saint-Sulpice had publicly denounced Brown’s book, which tells of a monk murdering a nun on the church’s sacred grounds, so the production did not even try to seek permission to shoot there. The filmmakers had to find another way. A typical solution would have been to build a virtual church from scratch. Instead, the new London branch of Rainmaker Animation and Visual Effects came up with another strategy, one that married CG technology with still photography. It was an approach Rainmaker had used on a smaller scale on Firewall in conjunction with visual-effects supervisor Angus Bickerton, who was the overall visual-effects supervisor on Da Vinci Code. “The simplest way of describing it is projection geometry,” says Mark Breakspear, Rainmaker’s visual-effects supervisor. “We basically do wallpapering in CG. We built the environment based on many layers of reference and also first-hand experience with the space.” He adds that Da Vinci Code was the first time this technique was used on such a grand scale. The first step was building a reference library that would be used to create the CG foundation. “We went to France several times and took quite a few photographs of the church, trying to capture the feeling of being there.” says Breakspear. “Our research enabled us to build an accurate model of Saint Sulpice. We even found floor plans on the Internet.” They used a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, which gets 16.7 megapixels of resolution from the full-frame CCD. Bickerton came with his EOS-D60 and measured the floor plan. “My feet are exactly 1 foot long, which is a blessing and a curse,” he says wryly. “They’re perfect measuring tools. Without getting a tape measure out, I could pace up and down, pretending to look at the scenery.” Using this reference data, Rainmaker sketched out the interior of Saint-Sulpice in a basic form, sculpting columns, arches and general architectural shapes. This model was needed on set during the greenscreen shoot at Shepperton. A partial set was built at 85-percent scale on Stage C; this featured the altar, some pews and a few columns for position, as well as that portion of the transept where the monk smashes through the floor to dig for the keystone. “We did a lot of previsualization on set,” says Breakspear. “It was a massive undertaking for the actors to be able to imagine where they were in the church, because the studio scene was basically some tiled floor, some chairs, a couple of columns and greenscreen all the way around, 40 feet high.” For Totino, the previz helped with framing, particularly when the camera had to start behind a CG column and then reveal the action. “We were able to combine the previz with our video feed so we could get a rough idea of how it would lay out,” says the cinematographer. “The only time it would get tricky is if an actor’s head went off the greenscreen. We tried to avoid that because hair tends to complicate rotoscoping.” The film shoot at Shepperton provided Rainmaker with about 40 camera angles. The team then returned to Saint-Sulpice and updated the reference library with more data based on the shoot angles. Most of the images Rainmaker took were bracketed exposures saved in the RAW (uncompressed) file format. With these, the final CG church could be built. However, the data was collected during the day when the church was open, and the scene in the movie is set at night. “Sal created a lot of areas where there would be moonbeams hitting on the practical set,” says Breakspear. “Matching the CG grade to the way he lit the practical set gives a fantastic overall feel. Our lead compositor, Mathew Krentz, had the onerous task of converting what is daylight into nighttime. It wasn’t just a case of making it go slightly blue and darkening it down; we actually had to go in and re-grade the textures, create moonbeams and reflections, and do different types of grading for different types of materials. The list went on and on. “Because the set was 15 percent smaller than the real church, there were a few problems,” continues Breakspear. “We ended up replacing much of the practical set. Pretty much everything from the floor up, apart from the nun and the monk, is CG.” To re-create the practical candlelight, Breakspear did a shoot in his London apartment, blowing on candles to create an hour’s worth of candle flicker. “We mapped them onto our own CG candles, put them into votive-candle racks, and put those all over the church. Then we re-lit our columns with flicker and balanced out the entire church with candles.” The visual-effects team placed no restrictions on camera movement. “I think we’re at a time and age where people should never be saying ‘lock-off,’” says Breakspear. “Budget and time constraints are obviously a factor, but the technology should allow you to do whatever you want.” For Totino, the experience was liberating. “It was fantastic to have so much freedom to move the camera around the set,” he says. “In the past, you’d have to worry because of rotoscoping. But Angus was always saying, ‘Don’t worry, we can track that,’ like when the nun and the monk are walking down the church aisle and looking up at the ceiling.” That shot was a happy moment for Breakspear as well. Because his team knew Saint-Sulpice so well, “there were a lot of instances where we were very proactive about trying to get the best shot possible,” he says. “We’d say, ‘If you tilt up slightly, you’ll get a beautiful part of the church coming into shot.’ In the case of the nun and monk going down the aisle, it was our second day on set. Ron hadn’t recently been to the church, so he asked, ‘When you walk into the church, what do you do?’ I said you start by looking up at the ceiling, which looks like the hull of an upturned boat. You walk down the aisle looking up at the amazing architecture, and then your eyes move down toward the altar. Ron said, ‘Well, that’s how we’re going to shoot it.’ That meant a whole bunch of shots needed tracking, but I can’t blame anyone but myself! But when you’re in Saint-Sulpice, you really do look up and say, ‘Wow,’ and I think we captured that.” Three other London companies shared the bulk of Da Vinci Code’s visual-effects work, most of which appears in flashback sequences. For example, The Moving Picture Co. handled the Crusades in Jerusalem, The Senate fleshed out historic Rome, and Double Negative handled much of Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb.
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