In February 2008 I took the opportunity to move to Vancouver and work at MPC’s new facility. The project we’d be working on was Watchmen, a highly acclaimed and classic graphic novel that was being adapted to a movie by “300″ director Zack Snyder. The first thing I did was read the script and the original comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons to get a clear feel for the kinds of things we’d be expected to reproduce.

As we were also setting up a new studio, the first few weeks were very  interesting. Our office space was being built, desks were being put in and the tech guys from London were busy getting our new workstations in place. The crew started fairly small too, and many of the people that joined the crew were still being interviewed at the time. Still, once we settled in things went pretty smoothly in terms of the technical setup, apart from a few teething problems we were running as if we’d never hopped over the pond.

The main focus of my work on Watchmen was the owl ship that the Night Owl character used in his vigilante hero heyday, along with what seemed like mostly bespoke standalone shots involving people being thrown through glass windows, clouds, cityscapes, traffic, boats, grappling hooks etc…

First of all I started to think about  the Owl-ship as I knew it would be an iconic part of the movie. It appears throughout, and in various states of wear and tear, and the look was somewhat goverened by a full size model used on set. At this time the model was being built and I had a rough version to start my look development with. Hundreds of stills were shot of the real ship that were used not only for textures but also reference of how the various materials reacted to light.

I started by setting out a plan for the shaders, which materials i’d need and how to approach some technical aspects such as how much raytracing i’d need to do, how to have the practical lights on the ship work, how the thrusters would light around the engines, how to deal with brushed metal parts etc. This was quite a challenge as I wanted the setup to be fairly robust and not need a lot of tweaking per-shot. I also invested some time in tweaking a few bits of shader code to improve a few aspects visually, and also to aid the simplification of putting the owlship into shots.

Whilst the owlship was a major part of the project I also got involved in a whole lot more including lookdev for most of the character doubles, and a whole lot of shots.

One of the classic all time stress inducing shots was known by it’s shot number - CA110 (a number I will never forget!) which is the shot of the owlShip emerging from the east river in New York City. As it involved a lot of water we all knew it would be a big challenge as fluids are notoriously hard to do in cg. After many iterations and lots of discussion I think we managed to get a great result. The particle counts and mesh sizes were so large that at one point we could not keep more than one version on disk, the caches were so massive.

Another classic shot, which was nowhere near as stressful for me, but a challenge none the less is the shot of blake being thrown out of his apartment window. It’s such an iconic part of the graphic novel it was really rewarding to see it come together over the course of the project. Almost all of the shot is cg, and once we do our digi-double takover of blake the entire shot becomes cg. I dealt with the apartment and the window that smashes,  digital blake and the iconic smiley face pin that flies into camera view. I think it turned out really fantastic.

Overall, working on Watchmen was the hardest,  most stressful and tiring project I’ve ever known, but it was also one of the most rewarding and best learning experiences of my career.