Extensive New ‘Batman v. Superman’ VFX Reel Shows Us Everything That Was Never There
It’s no secret that Zack Snyder productions rely heavily on visual effects: every set involves green-screen, every shot it color-graded to within an inch of its life. Batman v. Superman is a superhero story of epic proportions, and as such required a ton of enhancements in post-production. A new VFX reel breaks down a bunch of key shots to show us everything that was never actually there during the shoot.
There are a ton of sequences in this movie that were done entirely in post-production: a lot of the flying, the explosions, and the Batmobile scenes are completely digital. What I like about this reel is that it shows the scenes from the movie first, and then breaks them down into their component parts — the background, the layers in the foreground, the extras that were there, the extras that were added in later, and finally our heroes front and center. And all that rain! CGI artists must have been absolutely sick of rain after creating so much of it. There’s also a cool bit about seven minutes in that shows just how much work went into Doomsday’s birth sequence.
For all of the criticism out there about how dark Snyder’s movies always are, he and his team do manage to blend their own footage with the stuff they have to add in later. The trick? Stylize everything. There are some great split-screen comparisons that focus on the close-ups of characters’ faces, and in those you can see how much the color grading was finagled with in post. When everything looks a little dreamlike and unreal, the genuine and the digital blend together seamlessly.