'Catching Fire' Visual Effects Team on Bringing The World of Panem To Life
Molly Wed, March 5, 2014 
Plus Check Out Some New Stills From The Film!
I think we can all agree that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was visually stunning. Francis Lawrence delivered the follow up to The Hunger Games with grander scope and scale than the first installment, showing us a whole lot more of Panem. But you probably didn't realize just how much of Catching Fire's Panem was actually created by the visual effects department.
Flickering Myth just posted an amazing interview with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire visual effects team where they discuss all the technical aspects of creating the film's digital world. Trevor Hogg chatted with production visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs, visual effects producer Mitchell Ferm, and visual effects supervisors Adrian de Wet, Stéphane Nazé, Paul Butterworth, and Guy Williams about bringing to the big screen a spinning island, raging monkeys and a futuristic society that stages lethal survival games.
What We Learned:
Effects in movies are a bit like magic tricks that rely on deception and misdirection; having visual effects, special effects, and stunts keep the audience guessing as to what exactly they are looking at, or how the shots are achieved.
The Arena is not really the Arena:
The jungle arena could never exist in reality or be built as a practical set, so a good amount of VFX work went into creating a virtual environment for a hyper-reality that we’re hoping people would swear was shot on location.
We couldn't have created a full-on practical spinning Cornucopia island for the scene where Plutarch rotates it, so that action sequence had to be fabricated from a full-size static set, a smaller SPFX-spinning partial set piece, and a completely digital island, all working in conjunction with one another.
We constructed a 360° blue screen around a rotating Cornucopia partial set piece [dubbed the ‘spinning biscuit’]. All that churning water is CG.
All the water-based action scenes at the centre of the Arena were shot almost entirely at a waterpark outside Atlanta, where we constructed a full-size island, two spoke-like rocky paths leading from it, and a couple of the pedestals that the Tributes emerge up into the Arena on. In the final shots, the entire surrounding ocean water, beaches, and jungle blowing in the breeze have all been added digitally. It takes a bit of will power to continually overlook Katniss running past childrens’ water slides, and ornamental fountains, for many weeks [during shooting], until the real jungle environments finally start to show up in shots, and the sequence becomes what was originally intended.
Ironically, the real Hawaiian shorelines didn’t feel tropical enough to match the hot/humid environment we were trying to convey, and their look was based more upon jungles you might find in places like Costa Rica, right down to the condensation on the wet leaves, and hanging mist rolling down from the hillsides. The challenge with creating the digital jungle was really just the sheer complexity of the foliage. Trees had to be modelled and rigged down to the individual leaf and frond detail level so that we could get them to realistically flutter, and sway in a simulated breeze [without which the jungle would have simply looked dead].”
The Avenue of The Tributes is almost all digital
The chariots in the Avenue scene were all shot in a big empty parking lot at the Atlanta Speedway, and the only pieces of physical set construction were a partial archway [and immediately adjacent bleachers] that the chariots emerge from, and the Presidential seating area. Everything else – the other archways, bleachers, crowds, and surrounding buildings were all added digitally. We only had six practical chariots so you’re often looking at digital Tribute doubles and horses/chariots in the wider shots. Only the actors, chariots, and a few small sections of bleachers for that sequence were real, shot against green containers stacked a few stories high.
All the Capitol buildings, details, road surface, skies, and mountains are digital. The cheering, waving crowd in the bleachers are a mixture of crowd elements shot over a couple of days of second unit photography, and motion captured digital extras.
And of course we created the fire effect on Katniss and Peeta’s costumes. We took our inspiration from the ornate patterns on the costumes themselves that we imagined as radiant hot metal elements. We added licks of gas-like orange flames, flying embers, and a hint of dirty smoke to complete the look.
Katniss' Arrow Count Continuity Was A Huge Task (and they sort of failed - we counted!)
An interesting continuity task involved keeping track of the arrows in Katniss’ quiver. Whilst Jennifer sometimes had a number of real arrows in her quiver on set, she could never actually fire a real arrow for safety reasons, so all of the arrow firing was mimed and CG arrows added. We always needed to make sure she had the right number of arrows in her quiver at any point in time, always accounting for ones that she had fired along the way. You’d be surprised at how long it took to lock the arrow counts down!
There is SO much information in the article, so please head over to Flickering Myth.com to read the entire thing - it's a massive article. They talk about everything from the practical aspects of making Katniss' mockingjay dress transformation believable to the holograms in the training center and the slight redesign of the hovercrafts.
;)
