When VFX is invisible

I was fortunately enough to be Build supervisor at DNEG on christpher Nolans Oscar award winning film Tenet. In my entire career I dont think I've ever worked on such a high profile file, where i struggle to really showcase our VFX work. Nolan sets a high bar of achieving invisble vfx, he wants to capture as much as possible in camera, and so his on set photography is pretty extensive. As a vfx supervisor working on one of his shows your main priority is to blend seemlessly with the footage so for hte audience there isnt any doubt that what they are watching really happened. 

We were the sole vfx vendor for this film and we had several sequences to augment: 

• The highway chase
• The Airport plane crash
• the opera house 
• The catamaran sailing seq
• The final battle

Below are some shots of the Highway seq, our main responsibility here was to model matching cars for for the seq so they could be shown closer together, whilst driving both backwards and forwards, and also modelling the underpass you see below, which had to blend seemlessly. Most of this work was completed in Mumbai with Myself supervising from London. 

Opera House

This sequence was completed in london, I modelled a matching replica of the Opera house balcony level to house the explotion effects, we also had to build a leg replacement for one of the actors who was wearing crash padding that needed to be removed. 

Battle scene

For the finale we had to replicate much of the physcial site. Many of the explotion were filmed on a minature set, which we then replicated inserting damaged variants into shots so the edit could cut together seamlessly without noticing different levels of damage to the buildings. 

we also had to produce effects of the buildings both colapsing and constructing at the same time, as time went both ways, its was complex, but visually stunning. 

In addition to this we also produced many variants of digital double for the red and blue armies, but also the main cast members. 

Vehicles

Photo real vehicles was definately the largest challenge of Tenet, with high res helicopters, yaghts and commerial airliners in the list. 

A replicate of a chinook for the final sequence was our tallest order, with modelling completed in mumbai and texture/lookdev done in London, as Build supervisor i had to oversee both teams handing the transition from one site to another, and ensuring all our needs were met, 

With the bowing 747 we had to replicate one of the jet engines, the crash into the airport was in fact shot in real life, but a fully running jet engine was too dangerous to have sitting on site, so this was made in CG.