Behind the Scenes

Four sets, none bigger than a garage. A wall of LED panels in a rented unit. Eleven shooting days spread across fourteen months, because that is how long it takes when everyone has a job. Here is how the city got built.hjkhj

Crew silhouetted against a curved LED wall displaying the Rapture skyline — Load-in, day one. The skyline plate running at quarter brightness while the panels are mapped.

The volume

The wall is twenty-two panels wide and nine high — about eight metres by three and a half, curved through roughly a hundred and ten degrees. It is a rental, it was old when we got it, and four of the panels had a colour shift we never fully beat. You can see it in one shot if you know where to look, in the top-left corner of the arcade wide, and now you will look for it, and we are sorry.

Shooting in-camera meant the actors could see where they were. That sounds like a small thing. It is not. Nobody had to be told what was over their shoulder, and nothing in the frame needed to be justified afterwards — the light on a face is the light of the room, because the room is the thing making the light.

Blocking the pump-room reverse

A figure standing in a lit doorway, silhouetted — The doorway. Two practical sources, one of them a work lamp.

Building Rapture twice

Every location in the film exists twice: once as a small practical build, and once as a photographic reconstruction of that build.

The practical versions were cheap and ugly and real. MDF, salvaged brass, three hundred pounds of tile offcuts, and a genuinely alarming quantity of shellac. Nothing was built taller than head height and nothing was built to be seen from more than one side. The Kashmir Restaurant — which in the finished film reads as a forty-cover dining room — is four tables, a section of bar two and a half metres long, and one wall.

An art-deco tower miniature on a workbench under a raking work lamp — The Olympus spire, 1:80. Built for the skyline plate and then kept, because nobody had the heart to skip it.

What the sets cost

Set	Footprint	Build	Materials
Kashmir Restaurant	5.4 × 3.0 m	9 days	£1,180
Bathysphere Station	4.2 × 4.2 m	11 days	£1,640
Pavilion Corridor	6.0 × 2.1 m	6 days	£720
Fontaine's Fisheries	5.0 × 4.0 m	7 days	£930

Capturing the sets

Each finished build was shot as a photographic capture: somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand stills per set, on a single body, at a fixed aperture, with the lighting locked. Those stills were solved for camera position and then trained into a Gaussian splat — a cloud of several million oriented, coloured, semi-transparent blobs that together reproduce the original light field.

The thing a splat gives you that a modelled set does not is wrongness. Real plaster is never flat. Real brass has a fingerprint on it. A modelled corridor has to have that dirt added by a person who is guessing; a captured corridor has it because the corridor had it.

A camera array arranged on a curved track around a deco arch on a scanning stage — Capture day for the Pavilion arch. Seven positions, flat flood, floor markers every 90 cm.

Still from the capture breakdown reel — Capture to volume · 4 min 10 sec

Lighting from inside the wall

Almost every source in the film is in the plate. The pendants in the Kashmir, the sconces in the corridor, the single lit porthole on the bathysphere — those are all captured practicals, and when the gaffer wanted them warmer or dimmer we changed them in the plate rather than on the floor.

Two exceptions. Cora's helmet lamp is a real 2-inch LED on a dimmer, run by hand, because the beam has to move with her head and no amount of clever playback makes that feel right. And the one moment where the city itself lights up — you will know it — is a 4-foot softbox behind the wall, punched through a gap between panels, which is the least elegant thing in the entire film and also the best shot in it.

The day we flooded the corridor

We did not flood the corridor. We flooded four square metres of a corridor, six inches deep, in a tank built from scaffold boards and pond liner, and shot it at 96 frames per second from a height of about forty centimetres. The rest of the water is the reflection of the plate in the actual water, which is the sort of thing you only get away with once.

It leaked. It leaked into the unit below, which was a tattoo studio, and the resulting conversation is the single most expensive line item in the production.

An edit suite monitor showing a point cloud being cleaned up — Cleaning floaters out of the station capture

Point-cloud reconstruction of a warehouse with crates and hanging work lamps — Fontaine's Fisheries, first clean solve

Post

Cut in fourteen weeks, mostly at night. Grade was a single pass on a calibrated display in a borrowed room, working from a print reference: warm highlights, brown in the mids, and blacks that are allowed to be genuinely black because the film is only ever going to be watched in the dark.

The score is small on purpose — an upright piano, a cello, and a tape delay that was already broken when we bought it. There is no orchestra because there is no orchestra down there.

Still from the grade and score reel — Grade and score · 6 min 02 sec

If you want the technical version of any of this — the capture rig, the training settings, the playback stack, what we would do differently — ask on the contact page. We have never once refused to bore somebody about it.