Somehow, that brought Matt and his team to Glasgow. Cinesite’s work included numerous aerial shots of the city in chaos, blocks of traffic jams, huge crowds running in panic, zombie attacks, scores of digital doubles, CG vehicles, a runaway garbage truck and other elements of mayhem and destruction often found with a zombie apocalypse and the explosive destruction of a city. As the zombie infection hits the city, our hero, Jerry Lane, played by Brad Pitt, struggles to escape to safety, climaxing with his frantic efforts to get his family to a rooftop rendezvous with a rescue helicopter. With over 430 shots primarily comprising the first half of the film, Cinesite’s greatest effort involved the recreation of various environments and action in and around Philadelphia.

Who knew creating a traffic jam on the streets of Philadelphia could be so complicated? The stated goal was always to make the visual effects seamless and invisible, the action grounded in real-world physics with a documentary-like reality. Listening to Matt Johnson describe Cinesite’s efforts in Marc Forster’s World War Z, your first thought is, “Jeez, I wish I owned the coffee concession on that shoot!” Keeping the look of the film “photographed” rather than “rendered” required multiple crews working around the clock, complicated onset logistics, large amounts of data capture and ultimately, attention to details that no one in the audience would probably ever know or appreciate.

World war z images