Double Negative - Vanessa Boyce's talk at Bradford Animation Film Festival

I am not into stop motion animation; however, I am very interested in animation, filmmaking and concept art and design, which is why Vanessa Boyce’s talk was what I most enjoyed at Bradford Animation Film Festival.

Double Negative is a British visual effects and computer animation company located in Soho, London. The company was created in 1998 with a team of about 30 staff and has since grown to over 1000 staff, making it Europe's largest provider of visual effects for film. They have worked on major blockbuster film such and the dark Knight franchise, the Harry Potter franchise, Inception, Captain America, Iron man, Sherlock Holmes, Skyfall and many more, they are currently working on Zack Snyder’s new Superman movie ‘ Man of Steel’. However their biggest challenge to date is their work on the new adaption of Total Recall. Len Wiseman (the director) had asked them to create two very different yet both very futuristic cities completely in CG. In order to create these cities they mainly used a program called ‘CityEngine’ which is an architectural computer program that allows you to create individual building components and then define rules for how those pieces fit together. Double Negative had to not only create both these cities, but they both had to have specific atmospheres about them, The United Federation of Britain had to look rich and organized, almost like a cross between a futuristic London and New York but hugely overpopulated, with houses and apartments leaching everywhere in the city like a bacteria spreading. And the other being the Colony, which whilst is wildly overpopulated in the same way it is more of the suffering city, where people struggle to make a living. Not only did they show this through architecture but also through colour scheme, for example the Federation of Britain is mostly made up of grayscale with hints of blue, white and browns, these colours represent London quite well, especially the richer areas and signature pieces of architecture such as Buckingham palace and the houses of parliament, whereas the Colony is visually much more decaying, with browns and beige with sparks of musty grey clouding the city.

This was the first time Double Negative created an entire city, and their next big release is Man of Steel, and they are using CityEngine once again in order to create a completely CG Metropolis, since their biggest task to date was a huge success, you could expect them to stick with a winning formula. After hearing Vanessa Boyce’s talk I felt compelled to watch Total Recall, and so I did, and when viewing the piece it really makes you realize how important and crucial their work was to the films narrative and overall success.