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Smoke & Mirrors is the company responsible for providing the digital effects supervision and postproduction services for the opening title sequence of Eon Productions' latest James Bond film, in which 007 must race to defuse an international power struggle that threatens the world's oil supplies. In the tradition of all Bond movies, the opening titles are a spellbinding prelude to the action and adventure, and Smoke & Mirrors delivered a tour de force of cutting-edge, digital imaging techniques.
"Of course, a Bond title sequence involves beautiful girls and special effects, lots of them," says Sean Broughton, digital effects supervisor and inferno* artist at the London facility. "For The World Is Not Enough, the 19th Bond film, the major theme is oil. So for the title sequence this meant submerging the girls in, or dripping onto them, what appears to be crude oil."
The project started with director Daniel Kleinman storyboarding the entire three-minute sequence, including the transitions to and from the main film. Kleinman and Broughton broke down these boards into the multitude of elements required to realize the director's ideas. In all, some 30,000 frames of film would eventually be scanned by Cinesite UK for Smoke & Mirrors to create the final offering.
"Coincidentally, a couple of months before Danny and I started working in earnest on the project, I'd been toying with the idea of turning figures shot normally against greenscreen into liquid people without the need for any other elements," Broughton continues. "Uncannily, when I showed my R&D tests to Danny...