In “The Tourist”, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie conduct a lengthy conversation on a train that drives from Paris to Venice through the beautiful Tuscany countryside. Unfortunately, no such train route exists. To create this required some clever greenscreening, three VistaVision cameras using only 400-foot magazines, and rehearsal similar to military boot camp. And that was all before any film was shot. Afterwards was another story.
After shooting about 35,000 feet of film backgrounds, the footage was telecined to HDSR and work began on lining it up with the foregrounds to synchronize the shadows. “That turned into a lot of work because of the shot count being almost double what was originally broken down in pre-production,” noted Rae. “So I brought in another supervisor and a second visual effects editor just to work on that. It took seven days to generate Avid lineup pre-comps for all 106 shots.”
