BD: There’s the whole final act which
takes place in the street in Hong
Kong where everything is moving
backwards, but our protagonists
are moving forward. So you have a
world that’s traveling in reverse and
you have your key artists moving
forwards, and the universe is changing speeds. So that was incredibly
challenging to execute, and there
was a lot of methodology that went
into working out how we were going to do it, and what it needed. We
used motion control, because there
were shots where we needed to
move the camera at incredibly fast
speeds while the camera was shooting at high speeds. For instance, we
might have been running a camera
at a thousand frames a second, and
we needed to move it 12 feet in two
seconds.
There were also sequences
where Benedict travels through other dimensions, which really required
a lot of interactive lighting effects to
represent the environments. So we
built rigs that we could program the
environments into, and then projected them onto Benedict so he fit into
the environment. Those sorts of sequences were a challenge, but they
were a lot of fun for me. I learned a
lot on this picture.
What did you enjoy most about
the project?
BD: What I enjoy most about big-budget projects, particularly this
one, are the challenges. The concept
artists that have the ideas should
not be restricted by the facts of
how they’re going to make those
ideas happen on screen. We worry
about that. It comes to myself and
the visual effects supervisor, and
we have to work out how it’s going
to be done. We start testing different methods to execute an idea, and
that’s what I enjoy on a film like this.
I enjoy those challenges!
Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) supervises a training session
Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is ready for action
Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) learns to harness his powers
P
ho
t
os
co
u
r
te
sy
of
Ma
rv
el
St
u
d
i
os
