The Visual Effects of Zodiac
From the extra features on the DVD.
Had no idea any of this was even made with VFX. Cool watch.
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Video Transcript
I've known David Fincher for many years.
We worked in the mat department back in IOM, back in the 80s,
on such films as Indiana Jones, The Temple of Doom,
and some of the Star Trek movies,
and I think The Last Star Wars, The Revenge of the Jedi as well.
We got involved with Zodiac having worked on a number of commercials
and music videos with David, and really were a test bed
for a lot of the things that David wanted to do,
both digitally and using CG, different techniques.
In a lot of ways, he kind of trained me with how he wants to work and looking at Zodiac,
there's some things that he wants to do.
These were just a really good fit and we'd done together before and so it made sense.
Zodiac is not a visual effects picture in the sense that a summer tentpole movie would
have thousands of visual effects shots.
We're going in very strategically to make very realistic shots, maybe 50 shots, something
like that for us.
Our job is to take one of those 50 shots though and each one of those is like 100 normal shots
because it has to have so much detail and information in it
that it looks realistic and credible to the audience as a real place.
Man, you really creeped us out.
The overall approach would be that there aren't any effects.
When the viewer sees these murders happen, you know,
because they really did happen, you want to feel,
wow, I mean, these people really died,
and it's gruesome, it's horrifying,
and you just want to kind of look away, and it's not a pretty thing.
So our job was to make those murders as realistic as possible.
David doesn't like to shoot with squibs or any type of practical blood
because he wants to be able to do lots of takes
and he didn't really want the resetting time,
so we did many takes with the couple in the car
with the intention of adding the actual bullet hits,
the bullet flare, spattered bone blood and minutia in the car,
even on the seats, smeared against the seat.
Afterward, once David had the takes and the way the cut worked,
so it all kind of tied together,
David went back and shot the murderer shooting the gun on blue screen
and then we added him back in.
and little things that come up editorially
that maybe aren't working right,
we're able to just drop back in.
So that was our job to add all the effects type,
traditional stuff you would shoot with afterward.
San Francisco is almost a character in the movie.
We have this beautiful shot of flying over the water,
tilting up to reveal San Francisco from the late 60s, 70s.
So all the front of the waterfront had to be reestablished.
And originally I figured that we would probably go out
and shoot a helicopter plate,
but the whole waterfront looks so different today
