Scene stealer: 'Blindness'

Achieving 'Blindness' ' washed-out look: Cinematographer Cesar Charlone's efforts to get the right look.

The inspiration for the washed-out look in "Blindness" came directly from the source material -- José Saramago's novel -- which described the onset of sudden blindness as an excess of light, looking like a sea of milk.

Cinematographer César Charlone figured out what that might look like by filling a photo developing tray with milk, white paint and water. Then he took images displayed on his laptop and reflected them onto the mixture. There was his look, but re-creating that on set took some coordination.

"It was a whole concept we worked on between the art departments," Charlone says.

Because the film images would be washed out, the reality of the world had to be heightened.

"If you want clothes to look dirty, filming with normal exposure, you put a certain amount of dirt. If you're going to wash it out, that amount is going to disappear. So the level of dirt was much greater." It all took heavy planning, with the costume department showing its work to Charlone two months before shooting. The work continued into post-production. "After Cannes, [director Fernando Meirelles] wanted the cinematography toned down. He thought it was a little bit too stylish. We made it look more human."

-Patrick Kevin Day

VISION: Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo amid the washed-out look of “Blindness.” Miramax.

The makers of "Eagle Eye" wanted to keep the computer-generated imagery in their high-tech action thriller to a minimum; so for a sequence in which a Predator spy plane chases stars Billy Bob Thornton and Shia LaBeouf into a tunnel, shoots a missile at a semi and causes the semi's trailer to come rolling and bouncing after our heroes' car, the spy plane was CGI but everything else was real. Special-effects coordinator Peter Chesney had to become skilled in the art of blowing up real 60,000-pound shipping containers and get them to roll properly in just six weeks' time. "You spend all of your time with a broom trying to brush Murphy out of the equation," Chesney says. After creating detailed pre-visualized drawings using complicated physics equations and many days of testing, the crew shot the truck explosions on a runway at the former El Toro Marine Base. "This was beyond the realm of stuntmen," Chesney says. "Because we just couldn't protect them." Everything in the shot, from the seven cameras to the cars to the giant rolling sea container, was pulled by cables timed within seconds of each other. Luckily, the results came out just as predicted by the drawing.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photos courtesy Peter Chesney / DreamWorks)

In "Ghost Town," stars Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni bond over the mummified remains of the Egyptian pharaoh Pepi II. But production designer Howard Cummings had no idea just how much of an undertaking creating that single mummy body would turn out to be. Cummings and prop master Vinny Mazzarella spent days scouring the Internet, collecting books and subscribing to Egyptology magazines to find information on mummies, particularly the body of Ramses II, who served as Pepi's model. They then had to have an authentic-looking body built from scratch, even though director David Koepp had just written the mummy-heavy "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." "I tried to go through their art department to find out who their mummy sources were," says Cummings, "but I didn't have much luck. I don't think Spielberg wanted us copying their mummy." The delivery of the resin-and-latex mummy, which ended up costing about $15,000 and had the texture of an old leather shoe, wasn't the end of their work. Cummings was also tasked with creating a 4 1/2 -minute lecture on the mummy, complete with a 50-photo slide show, for Leoni's character to deliver. "My crew was getting mad at me," Cummings says of the time-consuming research. "But the lecture had to make sense. I didn't realize how much the mummy wove through the story."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django,” an homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, opens with a super-stylized flashback featuring a cameo appearance by the homage-loving Quentin Tarantino. But due to a conflict with Tarantino’s schedule, they were forced to move the shoot from a wide open field to a very small soundstage at Daiet studios in Tokyo. According to cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita, this was both a blessing and a curse.

“We were forced into the situation, but we ended up being happy because we came up with the look when we knew we were shooting in the studio,” Kurita said. Inspired by an exhibit of 200-year-old woodblock prints by the artist Hokusai, the filmmakers created a backdrop for the flashbacks showing a Fuji-like mountain and a blood-red setting sun that calls attention to the artifice of the setting. Kurita selected a reversal stock film that created great contrast in colors.

And that’s where the location became a curse. Because of the film stock’s low sensitivity to light, Kurita’s team had to crowd the small soundstage with roughly 10 times the number of lights normally used, driving the temperature up to 104 degrees. “It felt like a desert,” Kurita said. “We had air conditioning, but it didn’t matter. Tarantino was sweating. We didn’t realize it would get that hot.”

--Patrick Kevin Day

The makers of "Ping Pong Playa," the comedy about a wannabe basketball star turned pingpong champion, hoped to have star Jimmy Tsai whipped into tournament-level pingpong-playing shape for filming -- even though Tsai had only two months to prepare. But he could not have found better teachers than Diego Schaff and his wife, Olympic and Hall of Fame pingpong player Wei Wang, who own two table tennis clubs in Los Angeles.  So, did they whip Tsai into top shape? Not quite, but Schaff could also improve the actor's game as visual effects supervisor. "I choreographed their moves without a ball. Then I drew the trajectory of the ball, made sure it had the correct speed, and they sent it to a special effects house," Schaff said. For scenes that required bad guy Gerald, played by Peter Paige, to play pingpong on camera, Schaff stepped in as a body double. Schaff even wore Paige's costume -- the small-budget production had just the one. "We had to swap clothes several times that day, and they got pretty sweaty," Schaff says. "There was a lot of cringing and apologizing."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Early in "Traitor," writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's sprawling, international terrorist thriller, the main character, a rogue ex-U.S. special operations officer played by Don Cheadle, finds himself in a confrontation with a Middle Eastern tough guy in a Yemeni prison yard.

As the two men exchange threats, they slip casually between Arabic and English. Nachmanoff swears this isn't purely a conceit designed for the ease of American movie audiences. "It was convenient for dramatic purposes, but it's also very common. English is used as the common language when you have people from different countries, even if they're from different Middle Eastern countries."

The scene may have been authentic, but in reality, these two actors only understood half of what they were saying to each other. "Don learned Arabic phonetically," Nachmanoff said. "He knew what the lines meant, but he listened to tapes of them being spoken to get the accent. He didn't learn Arabic."

Farid Regragui, who played the tough guy, speaks Arabic fluently but little English. Nachmanoff says the lack of language comprehension works well for the scene. "The audience knows it's a showdown, and the words are much less important than what's going on with their faces."

-Patrick Kevin Day

TOUGH TALK: Don Cheadle, left, with Said Taghmaoui, listened to Arabic tapes to get his accent right for a bilingual scene in a prison yard. Overture Films.

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: 'Eagle Eye's' exploding truck

The makers of "Eagle Eye" wanted to keep the computer-generated imagery in their high-tech action thriller to a minimum; so for a sequence in which a Predator spy plane chases stars Billy Bob Thornton and Shia LaBeouf into a tunnel, shoots a missile at a semi and causes the semi's trailer to come rolling and bouncing after our heroes' car, the spy plane was CGI but everything else was real. Special-effects coordinator Peter Chesney had to become skilled in the art of blowing up real 60,000-pound shipping containers and get them to roll properly in just six weeks' time. "You spend all of your time with a broom trying to brush Murphy out of the equation," Chesney says. After creating detailed pre-visualized drawings using complicated physics equations and many days of testing, the crew shot the truck explosions on a runway at the former El Toro Marine Base. "This was beyond the realm of stuntmen," Chesney says. "Because we just couldn't protect them." Everything in the shot, from the seven cameras to the cars to the giant rolling sea container, was pulled by cables timed within seconds of each other. Luckily, the results came out just as predicted by the drawing.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photos courtesy Peter Chesney / DreamWorks)

In "Ghost Town," stars Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni bond over the mummified remains of the Egyptian pharaoh Pepi II. But production designer Howard Cummings had no idea just how much of an undertaking creating that single mummy body would turn out to be. Cummings and prop master Vinny Mazzarella spent days scouring the Internet, collecting books and subscribing to Egyptology magazines to find information on mummies, particularly the body of Ramses II, who served as Pepi's model. They then had to have an authentic-looking body built from scratch, even though director David Koepp had just written the mummy-heavy "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." "I tried to go through their art department to find out who their mummy sources were," says Cummings, "but I didn't have much luck. I don't think Spielberg wanted us copying their mummy." The delivery of the resin-and-latex mummy, which ended up costing about $15,000 and had the texture of an old leather shoe, wasn't the end of their work. Cummings was also tasked with creating a 4 1/2 -minute lecture on the mummy, complete with a 50-photo slide show, for Leoni's character to deliver. "My crew was getting mad at me," Cummings says of the time-consuming research. "But the lecture had to make sense. I didn't realize how much the mummy wove through the story."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django,” an homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, opens with a super-stylized flashback featuring a cameo appearance by the homage-loving Quentin Tarantino. But due to a conflict with Tarantino’s schedule, they were forced to move the shoot from a wide open field to a very small soundstage at Daiet studios in Tokyo. According to cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita, this was both a blessing and a curse.

“We were forced into the situation, but we ended up being happy because we came up with the look when we knew we were shooting in the studio,” Kurita said. Inspired by an exhibit of 200-year-old woodblock prints by the artist Hokusai, the filmmakers created a backdrop for the flashbacks showing a Fuji-like mountain and a blood-red setting sun that calls attention to the artifice of the setting. Kurita selected a reversal stock film that created great contrast in colors.

And that’s where the location became a curse. Because of the film stock’s low sensitivity to light, Kurita’s team had to crowd the small soundstage with roughly 10 times the number of lights normally used, driving the temperature up to 104 degrees. “It felt like a desert,” Kurita said. “We had air conditioning, but it didn’t matter. Tarantino was sweating. We didn’t realize it would get that hot.”

--Patrick Kevin Day

The makers of "Ping Pong Playa," the comedy about a wannabe basketball star turned pingpong champion, hoped to have star Jimmy Tsai whipped into tournament-level pingpong-playing shape for filming -- even though Tsai had only two months to prepare. But he could not have found better teachers than Diego Schaff and his wife, Olympic and Hall of Fame pingpong player Wei Wang, who own two table tennis clubs in Los Angeles.  So, did they whip Tsai into top shape? Not quite, but Schaff could also improve the actor's game as visual effects supervisor. "I choreographed their moves without a ball. Then I drew the trajectory of the ball, made sure it had the correct speed, and they sent it to a special effects house," Schaff said. For scenes that required bad guy Gerald, played by Peter Paige, to play pingpong on camera, Schaff stepped in as a body double. Schaff even wore Paige's costume -- the small-budget production had just the one. "We had to swap clothes several times that day, and they got pretty sweaty," Schaff says. "There was a lot of cringing and apologizing."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Early in "Traitor," writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's sprawling, international terrorist thriller, the main character, a rogue ex-U.S. special operations officer played by Don Cheadle, finds himself in a confrontation with a Middle Eastern tough guy in a Yemeni prison yard.

As the two men exchange threats, they slip casually between Arabic and English. Nachmanoff swears this isn't purely a conceit designed for the ease of American movie audiences. "It was convenient for dramatic purposes, but it's also very common. English is used as the common language when you have people from different countries, even if they're from different Middle Eastern countries."

The scene may have been authentic, but in reality, these two actors only understood half of what they were saying to each other. "Don learned Arabic phonetically," Nachmanoff said. "He knew what the lines meant, but he listened to tapes of them being spoken to get the accent. He didn't learn Arabic."

Farid Regragui, who played the tough guy, speaks Arabic fluently but little English. Nachmanoff says the lack of language comprehension works well for the scene. "The audience knows it's a showdown, and the words are much less important than what's going on with their faces."

-Patrick Kevin Day

TOUGH TALK: Don Cheadle, left, with Said Taghmaoui, listened to Arabic tapes to get his accent right for a bilingual scene in a prison yard. Overture Films.

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene stealer: How 'Ghost Town' gained a mummy

In "Ghost Town," stars Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni bond over the mummified remains of the Egyptian pharaoh Pepi II. But production designer Howard Cummings had no idea just how much of an undertaking creating that single mummy body would turn out to be. Cummings and prop master Vinny Mazzarella spent days scouring the Internet, collecting books and subscribing to Egyptology magazines to find information on mummies, particularly the body of Ramses II, who served as Pepi's model. They then had to have an authentic-looking body built from scratch, even though director David Koepp had just written the mummy-heavy "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." "I tried to go through their art department to find out who their mummy sources were," says Cummings, "but I didn't have much luck. I don't think Spielberg wanted us copying their mummy." The delivery of the resin-and-latex mummy, which ended up costing about $15,000 and had the texture of an old leather shoe, wasn't the end of their work. Cummings was also tasked with creating a 4 1/2 -minute lecture on the mummy, complete with a 50-photo slide show, for Leoni's character to deliver. "My crew was getting mad at me," Cummings says of the time-consuming research. "But the lecture had to make sense. I didn't realize how much the mummy wove through the story."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django,” an homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, opens with a super-stylized flashback featuring a cameo appearance by the homage-loving Quentin Tarantino. But due to a conflict with Tarantino’s schedule, they were forced to move the shoot from a wide open field to a very small soundstage at Daiet studios in Tokyo. According to cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita, this was both a blessing and a curse.

“We were forced into the situation, but we ended up being happy because we came up with the look when we knew we were shooting in the studio,” Kurita said. Inspired by an exhibit of 200-year-old woodblock prints by the artist Hokusai, the filmmakers created a backdrop for the flashbacks showing a Fuji-like mountain and a blood-red setting sun that calls attention to the artifice of the setting. Kurita selected a reversal stock film that created great contrast in colors.

And that’s where the location became a curse. Because of the film stock’s low sensitivity to light, Kurita’s team had to crowd the small soundstage with roughly 10 times the number of lights normally used, driving the temperature up to 104 degrees. “It felt like a desert,” Kurita said. “We had air conditioning, but it didn’t matter. Tarantino was sweating. We didn’t realize it would get that hot.”

--Patrick Kevin Day

The makers of "Ping Pong Playa," the comedy about a wannabe basketball star turned pingpong champion, hoped to have star Jimmy Tsai whipped into tournament-level pingpong-playing shape for filming -- even though Tsai had only two months to prepare. But he could not have found better teachers than Diego Schaff and his wife, Olympic and Hall of Fame pingpong player Wei Wang, who own two table tennis clubs in Los Angeles.  So, did they whip Tsai into top shape? Not quite, but Schaff could also improve the actor's game as visual effects supervisor. "I choreographed their moves without a ball. Then I drew the trajectory of the ball, made sure it had the correct speed, and they sent it to a special effects house," Schaff said. For scenes that required bad guy Gerald, played by Peter Paige, to play pingpong on camera, Schaff stepped in as a body double. Schaff even wore Paige's costume -- the small-budget production had just the one. "We had to swap clothes several times that day, and they got pretty sweaty," Schaff says. "There was a lot of cringing and apologizing."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Early in "Traitor," writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's sprawling, international terrorist thriller, the main character, a rogue ex-U.S. special operations officer played by Don Cheadle, finds himself in a confrontation with a Middle Eastern tough guy in a Yemeni prison yard.

As the two men exchange threats, they slip casually between Arabic and English. Nachmanoff swears this isn't purely a conceit designed for the ease of American movie audiences. "It was convenient for dramatic purposes, but it's also very common. English is used as the common language when you have people from different countries, even if they're from different Middle Eastern countries."

The scene may have been authentic, but in reality, these two actors only understood half of what they were saying to each other. "Don learned Arabic phonetically," Nachmanoff said. "He knew what the lines meant, but he listened to tapes of them being spoken to get the accent. He didn't learn Arabic."

Farid Regragui, who played the tough guy, speaks Arabic fluently but little English. Nachmanoff says the lack of language comprehension works well for the scene. "The audience knows it's a showdown, and the words are much less important than what's going on with their faces."

-Patrick Kevin Day

TOUGH TALK: Don Cheadle, left, with Said Taghmaoui, listened to Arabic tapes to get his accent right for a bilingual scene in a prison yard. Overture Films.

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: 'Sukiyaki's' hot opening scene

Japanese director Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django,” an homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, opens with a super-stylized flashback featuring a cameo appearance by the homage-loving Quentin Tarantino. But due to a conflict with Tarantino’s schedule, they were forced to move the shoot from a wide open field to a very small soundstage at Daiet studios in Tokyo. According to cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita, this was both a blessing and a curse.

“We were forced into the situation, but we ended up being happy because we came up with the look when we knew we were shooting in the studio,” Kurita said. Inspired by an exhibit of 200-year-old woodblock prints by the artist Hokusai, the filmmakers created a backdrop for the flashbacks showing a Fuji-like mountain and a blood-red setting sun that calls attention to the artifice of the setting. Kurita selected a reversal stock film that created great contrast in colors.

And that’s where the location became a curse. Because of the film stock’s low sensitivity to light, Kurita’s team had to crowd the small soundstage with roughly 10 times the number of lights normally used, driving the temperature up to 104 degrees. “It felt like a desert,” Kurita said. “We had air conditioning, but it didn’t matter. Tarantino was sweating. We didn’t realize it would get that hot.”

--Patrick Kevin Day

The makers of "Ping Pong Playa," the comedy about a wannabe basketball star turned pingpong champion, hoped to have star Jimmy Tsai whipped into tournament-level pingpong-playing shape for filming -- even though Tsai had only two months to prepare. But he could not have found better teachers than Diego Schaff and his wife, Olympic and Hall of Fame pingpong player Wei Wang, who own two table tennis clubs in Los Angeles.  So, did they whip Tsai into top shape? Not quite, but Schaff could also improve the actor's game as visual effects supervisor. "I choreographed their moves without a ball. Then I drew the trajectory of the ball, made sure it had the correct speed, and they sent it to a special effects house," Schaff said. For scenes that required bad guy Gerald, played by Peter Paige, to play pingpong on camera, Schaff stepped in as a body double. Schaff even wore Paige's costume -- the small-budget production had just the one. "We had to swap clothes several times that day, and they got pretty sweaty," Schaff says. "There was a lot of cringing and apologizing."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Early in "Traitor," writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's sprawling, international terrorist thriller, the main character, a rogue ex-U.S. special operations officer played by Don Cheadle, finds himself in a confrontation with a Middle Eastern tough guy in a Yemeni prison yard.

As the two men exchange threats, they slip casually between Arabic and English. Nachmanoff swears this isn't purely a conceit designed for the ease of American movie audiences. "It was convenient for dramatic purposes, but it's also very common. English is used as the common language when you have people from different countries, even if they're from different Middle Eastern countries."

The scene may have been authentic, but in reality, these two actors only understood half of what they were saying to each other. "Don learned Arabic phonetically," Nachmanoff said. "He knew what the lines meant, but he listened to tapes of them being spoken to get the accent. He didn't learn Arabic."

Farid Regragui, who played the tough guy, speaks Arabic fluently but little English. Nachmanoff says the lack of language comprehension works well for the scene. "The audience knows it's a showdown, and the words are much less important than what's going on with their faces."

-Patrick Kevin Day

TOUGH TALK: Don Cheadle, left, with Said Taghmaoui, listened to Arabic tapes to get his accent right for a bilingual scene in a prison yard. Overture Films.

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: How 'Ping Pong Playa' got its moves

The makers of "Ping Pong Playa," the comedy about a wannabe basketball star turned pingpong champion, hoped to have star Jimmy Tsai whipped into tournament-level pingpong-playing shape for filming -- even though Tsai had only two months to prepare. But he could not have found better teachers than Diego Schaff and his wife, Olympic and Hall of Fame pingpong player Wei Wang, who own two table tennis clubs in Los Angeles.  So, did they whip Tsai into top shape? Not quite, but Schaff could also improve the actor's game as visual effects supervisor. "I choreographed their moves without a ball. Then I drew the trajectory of the ball, made sure it had the correct speed, and they sent it to a special effects house," Schaff said. For scenes that required bad guy Gerald, played by Peter Paige, to play pingpong on camera, Schaff stepped in as a body double. Schaff even wore Paige's costume -- the small-budget production had just the one. "We had to swap clothes several times that day, and they got pretty sweaty," Schaff says. "There was a lot of cringing and apologizing."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Early in "Traitor," writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's sprawling, international terrorist thriller, the main character, a rogue ex-U.S. special operations officer played by Don Cheadle, finds himself in a confrontation with a Middle Eastern tough guy in a Yemeni prison yard.

As the two men exchange threats, they slip casually between Arabic and English. Nachmanoff swears this isn't purely a conceit designed for the ease of American movie audiences. "It was convenient for dramatic purposes, but it's also very common. English is used as the common language when you have people from different countries, even if they're from different Middle Eastern countries."

The scene may have been authentic, but in reality, these two actors only understood half of what they were saying to each other. "Don learned Arabic phonetically," Nachmanoff said. "He knew what the lines meant, but he listened to tapes of them being spoken to get the accent. He didn't learn Arabic."

Farid Regragui, who played the tough guy, speaks Arabic fluently but little English. Nachmanoff says the lack of language comprehension works well for the scene. "The audience knows it's a showdown, and the words are much less important than what's going on with their faces."

-Patrick Kevin Day

TOUGH TALK: Don Cheadle, left, with Said Taghmaoui, listened to Arabic tapes to get his accent right for a bilingual scene in a prison yard. Overture Films.

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: 'Traitor'

Early in "Traitor," writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff's sprawling, international terrorist thriller, the main character, a rogue ex-U.S. special operations officer played by Don Cheadle, finds himself in a confrontation with a Middle Eastern tough guy in a Yemeni prison yard.

As the two men exchange threats, they slip casually between Arabic and English. Nachmanoff swears this isn't purely a conceit designed for the ease of American movie audiences. "It was convenient for dramatic purposes, but it's also very common. English is used as the common language when you have people from different countries, even if they're from different Middle Eastern countries."

The scene may have been authentic, but in reality, these two actors only understood half of what they were saying to each other. "Don learned Arabic phonetically," Nachmanoff said. "He knew what the lines meant, but he listened to tapes of them being spoken to get the accent. He didn't learn Arabic."

Farid Regragui, who played the tough guy, speaks Arabic fluently but little English. Nachmanoff says the lack of language comprehension works well for the scene. "The audience knows it's a showdown, and the words are much less important than what's going on with their faces."

-Patrick Kevin Day

TOUGH TALK: Don Cheadle, left, with Said Taghmaoui, listened to Arabic tapes to get his accent right for a bilingual scene in a prison yard. Overture Films.

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: How 'The Mummy' got its army

The terra cotta warriors uncovered in China's Shaanxi province number in the thousands. The replica army created for "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" by production designer Nigel Phelps, head set decorator Anne Kuljian and sculptor Lucie Fournier was significantly smaller: 500 warriors divided into five types, 12 cavalry horses, 16 chariot horses and four emperor's horses. And while every warrior in China was carved with a unique face, the "Mummy" production settled for 20 different head styles. A crew of 20 spent 3 1/2  months building hard plaster warriors using cement re-creations from China. "They had to be light enough to move," Kuljian said. But even still, the warriors weighed around 70 pounds apiece and each had to be screwed into the ground when placed in formation. "If we didn't have them screwed in, it would be like the domino effect. . . . When we dressed the set, someone knocked one and four fell down. That's when we added the screws."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Where 'Step Brothers' got its wacky T's

For costume designer Susan Matheson, finding inspiration for the vintage T-shirts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly wear throughout "Step Brothers" wasn't hard; the challenge was picking the right ones. "We wanted to distinguish their characters as being 40 years old stuck in childhood without making them look insane." Luckily, she had a wide selection to choose from -- the South African-born Matheson has long harbored an obsession with Americana, collecting enough vintage T-shirts over the years to fill a 400-square-foot private storage space. For many of her selections, it was a matter of digging into the archives and hand-making several copies. To find the 15 T-shirts seen throughout the movie, she started out with somewhere between 100 and 200 T-shirts and whittled it down from there. One personal favorite -- Reilly's black T with Converse sneakers hanging around the neck -- was not a favorite of the filmmakers. "The director thought it was too childish. Everyone thought it was hideous. But I was like a tenacious dog with a bone with that T-shirt." It was debated for months. Finally, she won. "From the screenings I've gone to, people tell me that's the T-shirt they want."

--Patrick Kevin Day

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene stealer: 'The Dark Knight's new ride

"The Dark Knight's" new Batpod is a bike so outrageous it's hard to believe it was even built -- not just because it is tricked out with grappling hooks, cannons and machine guns. The front and rear tires are monstrously huge, and the engines are in the hubs of each wheel. The bike also has no handlebars. Instead, it has shields that fit each arm like sleeves and can rotate around the bike's frame, so the driver steers with his arms and shoulders rather than his hands.

The man behind the machine's design is Nathan Crowley, who created its predecessor for "Batman Begins." But it was Chris Corbould who built the beast.

Director "Chris Nolan and Nathan went for the look of it rather than thinking about the mechanics," Corbould said in an interview with The Times last year. "That was the biggest challenge: Get their vision, but make it work and perform."

Well, they've certainly done something right. The Batpod is featured in several key action sequences in the film, which pulled in a tremendous  $158.3 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend -- the biggest such total to date.

-- Susan Carpenter

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Placing a 3-D T. rex in 'Journey to the Center of the Earth'

As 3-D consultant and visual effects editor for the T. rex chase in "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Ed Marsh helped the filmmakers deal with a worry that most never consider: the physical health of the audience.

The two images visible on screen to viewers when not wearing 3-D glasses -- think of them as right eye and left eye -- had to be adjusted properly so that once the glasses were put on, the dino chasing Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) wouldn't appear to be closer to the audience than to the man it was chasing.

"Small adjustments in 3-D can lead to big changes in perception," Marsh says. "With bad 3-D, [the audience's] eyes are sent through calisthenics. If things aren't perfect, it'll lead to eye strain and headaches." The dual T. rex images were slightly split to keep the carnivore back where it belonged. But moving the two T. rex images even a smidge closer together would cause the creature to appear on the same level as Fraser.

And if filmmakers attempted some kind of impossible-to-perceive M.C. Escher-style 3-D image? "You'd rip the eyes out of the audience," says Marsh. He was kidding. We think.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: 'Hancock's' pavement abuse

According to Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor for Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," director Peter Berg wanted  the character's takeoffs and landings to be huge -- not just a wisp of air, but giant explosions of dust and debris. "There wasn't any place where [he] said, 'This is too much, you should rein it back.' " Luckily for the pavement of Los Angeles, most of these effects were done entirely on the computer. But for Hancock's rough landing on Hollywood Boulevard, a few physical elements were incorporated. The art department built a kind of artificial riser to elevate the street slightly so that they could then dig out a Smith-sized divot and decorate it with chunks of concrete. Not all the physical effects worked out, however. "Special effects had rigged glass to break out of some of those cars and do denting," says Hahn. "The problem was the timing on one of the cars didn't quite work out. It broke too soon. So we erased it and duplicated the effect digitally."

--Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: 'Get Smart's' new Cone of Silence

While preparing the big-screen update of "Get Smart," director Peter Segal got an interesting bit of trivia from his visual effects supervisor. According to a friend who once worked in the CIA, the Cone of Silence, the original series' bit of poorly designed spy-tech,  had been used in the early '70s in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. "It was a plastic device that people got under and they played music so they could have conversations and not be wiretapped. It didn't work very well," Segal says. Segal wanted to give the device an updated look -- a silvery, stretchy beam of light. On the set, the new cone was just a small metal device that emitted a blue light. In post-production, a CGI electronic beam was added, that, Segal says, would "bounce off the ceiling and surround anything that was a heat source -- i.e. a body." To get the full comedic effect, Segal took the half-page scripted scene and  let the actors run wild, ending up with an original cut of the scene over eight minutes long.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

(Photo courtesy Warner Bros.)

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Scene Stealer: Making 'Mongol's' weapons

"Mongol," the first film in a proposed trilogy about the life of Genghis  Khan, is notable for its hundreds of horses and extras battling it out on the steppes of Kazakhstan. But to really bring the era to life, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov relied on art director Dashi Namdakov's heritage in the ancient Mongolian tradition of darkhans (blacksmiths), which helped him use lifetimes worth of experience to create the film's weaponry. Namdakov describes the swords Temudjin (the future Khan) uses in the film as a combination of "artistic fantasy and scientific publications."  Though the design of the weapons were accurate to the 12th and 13th centuries, in reality those weapons were quite plain. Namdakov looked back even further -- to the 1st century -- for decorative ideas, which he combined with his own artistic style. Weapons for the lead actors were hammered and hand-processed in Namdakov's art studio in Moscow, where he used  bronze and silver to decorate. Lest anyone think Namdakov has superhuman abilities, he admits the rest of the weapons used by the 1,500 extras were made in China, using modern techniques.

-- Patrick Kevin Day