HBO Max has released a new behind-the-scenes featurette that shows how director Matt Reeves and the team behind The Batman made Gotham City comes to life using the same technology first used on the Disney Plus series, The Mandalorian.
The four-minute The Batman featurette from HBO Max begins with Reeves discussing his desire as a filmmaker to have as much 'real' in the frame as possible. As he talks about the process, fans are shown footage of the crew setting up the massive LED sound stage often referred to as The Volume. Producer Dylan Clark asks, "How do you create Gotham for real?" as the camera reveals the finished sound stage in all its glory. Production designer James Chinlund explains that they're "trying to do as much in-camera as possible" while also using new technology to create photorealistic landscapes with practical lighting.
The behind-the-scenes video continues with director of photography Greig Fraser, whose previous work with the Volume was extremely influential. Fraser calls the new technology a "game-changer" and really highlights how it will be impossible for the industry to go back to traditional blue or green screens after using The Volume. This is further highlighted by VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon, who explains how The Volume allowed them to essentially freeze time and shoot scenes during any time of day. The end of the video shows how the Volume was used to create the now-famous car chase scene between Robert Pattinson's Batman and Colin Farrell's Penguin, which serves as an excellent example of just how effective this virtual technology is.
Created by influential visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, The Volume was first used on the Disney Plus series The Mandalorian to help create large virtual backgrounds on alien homeworlds such as the desert planet of Tatooine. In the video, Reeves actually discusses how this technology was previously only used to create desert landscapes, and that using it to create cityscapes was a new challenge for him and his team. After The Mandalorian premiere, it became very clear that The Volume was going to change the filmmaking landscape forever.
In the current age of superhero blockbusters and massive science fiction and fantasy productions, the need for digitally composited backgrounds has become essential for creating an alien planet and fictional landscapes that simply don't exist on Earth. The previous standard of creating artificial backgrounds in movies and television was green/blue screen, a type of visual effects technology that essentially allowed visual effects artists to insert a digital background using a blank colored canvas. While this technology is effective and widely used, it had its limitations and to this day can still look unrealistic to the viewer.
The Volume, on the other hand, uses massive LED screens to create virtual backgrounds, allowing filmmakers to use real lighting. This also means that actors are actually able to see what is present in the scene, as opposed to a green screen where they would have to simply use their imagination until the finished product. In the past, many actors have discussed the difficulty of acting off a green screen, and this is also highlighted in The Batman behind the scenes video. While it is a relatively new technology, and not yet accessible to every filmmaker, the use of The Volume in a film as big as The Batman clearly shows that it could soon become the new industry standard.
The Batman is streaming exclusively on HBO Max.
Source: HBO Max | Youtube