The Brief

Rising Sun’s involvement in Watchmen centres on the transition from live action 1985 Manhattan to the cell animated Tales of the Black Freighter. This involved 2 distinct types of VFX work; Set extensions and comic book stylisation / transitions.

Set work involved extending a single street intersection to include the distant streets and urban skyline. The live action component of the work was crucial in setting up and developing the back story and introduction to the Black Freighter material. All the shots involve the newsstand and associated characters; the two Bernards.

The Black Freighter material involved seamless transitions from live action plates of Bernard reading the comic, to full-frame single panels of the artwork. As the camera zooms into these panels, they transition from a halftone 'Gibbons' look, to the final clean animated material.

The Creative Process

One of the sequences, a street intersection at night, featured a complex steadycam move, foreground characters crossing in front of the camera, and greenscreen elements. Nuke was used to construct virtual 3D environments within a 2D platform ; allowing a 2D artist to control the final layout of scene elements. A multi-level city scape was created by projecting multiple matte paintings onto simple geometry and then enhancing this with the addition of animated smoke, traffic and neon light elements.

For the Black Freighter transitions, three of the transition shots required an inserted element to begin as a small panel within the frame (about a 1/5 of the frame). Slowly the panel becomes full frame and eventually begins to animate, losing the printed halftone feel that matched Dave Gibbon's original artwork style.