Unbroken
(2014)
Hybride produced a total of 50 undetectable VFX shots including large-scale crowd simulations and a virtual replica of the Berlin stadium for the 1936 Olympic games.
The biggest challenge when recreating historical events is staying true to the story's time period. To ensure historical accuracy, Hybride's artists researched and pored over tremendous amounts of material to accurately reproduce the stadium, the clothing, and accessories from 1936.
Detail oriented, the artists also focused on facts such as the number of athletes present during the ceremony, where they were standing and what time of day it was during the event.
Hybride's graphic designers are also credited with generating and animating several other CG elements such as flags, a torch, fire, smoke and birds.
The size of the environment and camera movements made it impossible to use a green screen so most of the live action foreground plates had to be rotoscoped and integrated over the computer generated backgrounds.
A major design influence for the effects seen in Unbroken was the visual style established in the film by cinematographer Roger Deakins.
The goal was to always have the effects shots fit seamlessly into the beautifully composited and lit shots that made up the live action portion of the film so tracking and layout work required the highest accuracy to be able to perfectly blend the CG elements, and final rendering of the shots needed to be done in accordance with the rest of film's look and feel.