VizWorld.com

The opening shot of Zombieland shows the US Capitol building in all its splendor, before slowly panning down to see the ruins and being mauled by a ravenous zombie.  The scene was created by CIS Vancouver and required some extensive CG and compositing work, which they discuss with CGSociety.

We had to cut a few corners on our build, allowing textures to do more of the work than we would normally want. But 8 weeks was very tight no matter what approach you take and we wanted the end result to look good, so even though we cut a few corners, we invested our resources and time into the areas that needed it most.

Starting the build straightaway, Emond used Google Earth to get an idea for the correct position for all the buildings in the location so we could start blocking out the camera move. Hart continued to work with Paraszczynec and Emond throughout the process refining the matchmove, fixing bumps or slips that showed up from time to time.

via CGSociety – ZOMBIELAND.

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CIS Vancouver completed nearly 110 shots for the fantastic Zombieland, including the opening 90-second shot in deserted Washington, DC and a fun “Seat Belt” lesson.  The Washington shot proved particularly difficult because of what the director wanted, but they describe the whole process in a great interview for AWN.

When they shot this, they didn’t quite know where the capitol building was going to be, but they did give us stills [for guidance]. The problem is that without doing that in a true 3D space, you have a capital building that has to be an accurate size to look real and they placed it based on where they wanted it to look cool. If you wanted it to be in those positions, you would need the capitol building to move freely in 3D space throughout the entire length of the shot. But then when you play it, it looks like it’s sliding around on wheels. So we had to find a middle-ground.

Getting into a Zombieland Mood | AWN | Animation World Network.

Graphics cis, movie, vfx, zombieland