The Batman is back in Warner Bros. Pictures’ new feature film, directed by Matt Reeves, which sees Gotham City’s vigilante hero investigating the dark deeds of sadistic serial killer The Riddler.

The Third Floor’s LA studio was guided by the filmmakers and the visual effects production team including VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon and VFX Producer Bryan Searing to visualize shots and document technical shooting plans for production and post. 

This included creating postvis for a dramatic car chase, working from photographed plates to temp in CG assets and effects as the film team further developed the look and action of the sequence. TTF also post-visualized third act scenes, including an action-fuelled fight, where artists used Unreal to quickly iterate filmmaker ideas for looks and lighting real time “in engine.” 

“The Third Floor’s Mercury pipeline, which incorporates game engine in a way that allows us to rapidly tweak and upgrade the lighting and rendering of the assets and environments we’re visualizing, was fully implemented for our postvis on this project.  We authored a new render layer system that allows us to separate CG renders in Unreal so we can bring in each layer individually. This means filmmakers can work step by step and grade by grade,” remarked Visualization Supervisor Brian Carney. “For example, this gave us a greater degree of control in postvis over lights in the backgrounds to finesse colors and masks more effectively and accurately.” 

Techvis supported production planning for several sections of the movie, for establishing shots, additional photography shoots and large environment shots.