How Framestore built a living, breathing and under siege Washington, D.C. for Civil War. From befores & afters print magazine.Alex Garlands Civil War tells the story of a United States of America in a state of unrest, with an authoritarian federal government under attack from the Western Forces looking to reach Washington, D.C.The story is told from the point of view of a team of journalists seeking to interview the President in the capital. The film follows their trip from New York City and culminates with a major confrontation outside (and inside) the White House.Scenes of warfare playing out around the journalists, including in particular in Washington, D.C., were predominantly realized by shooting on purpose made set pieces in Atlanta, and then via significant augmentation and digital city builds by Framestore.In this conversation with production and Framestore visual effects supervisor David Simpson, befores & afters learns how the filmmakers orchestrated the chaos on Washington, D.C. streets, and for several other moments leading up to the final White House confrontation.b&a: How did you get started on Civil War?David Simpson: When I came onto it, we were still working on Men. We are in the edit suite and we finished doing a review and Alex said, Ive got this other film. He started talking to me about it. He had bits of paper in front of him and hes drawing maps and hes bringing up Google Maps and starts talking about this advance through Washington, D.C. and how were going to start at the Lincoln Memorial and well go down this street and up this street and well end up at the White House. He mapped it all out for us.Alex was very clear from the beginning that the film would only work if it felt believable. Its a situation that cant feel Hollywood, it cant feel like its a blockbuster movie. It has to sink you in and make you think its almost a documentary. He was very keen on that kind of approach to it to try and make it as documentary as possible. We graded the last shot of Men about 24 hours before we first started filming Civil War in Atlanta. b&a: You mentioned Washington, D.C., lets start there. Obviously, you cant film this in Washington, but in the movie, you are totally immersed in the story and feel like they are in amongst the streets of D.C.David Simpson: The entire film was shot in Atlanta, with the exception of a handful of shots in New York City, which Alex actually filmed himself. He was out there for something, took a camera and just shot a few plates of New York. And then we went in and painted out traffic and added tents on rooftops and things like that to make it feel a bit more Civil War-y.One of the first things we did, though, was fly to D.C. and walk the route that Alex had described in that first meeting. We did it at night in January and theres about three feet of snow everywhere. We figured out the path. Then the idea was, we would find somewhere in Atlanta that could play for D.C. So we took lots of photographs, we got a sense of the buildings and the landmarks, and then we got to Atlanta and we started doing all of these recces. I mean, with Atlanta, you can usually find anything. Theres some flashback moments from the Middle East and Africa, and those are all shot in Atlanta as well. But, we could not find anything that worked for D.C. And we tried everywhere.We found one street that was alright and it wouldve worked for the scene where that Apache helicopter comes in and shoots up the buildings. But the problem was, we wanted to shoot at night, and its in downtown Atlanta, were going to have soldiers and guns and tanks tearing up all the tarmac, and then were going to have a helicopter thats going to fly in and gravel is going to go everywhere, its going to ruin all these very expensive buildings. And all the buildings were basically, No way are you flying a helicopter that close to us. So it wouldve just been a logistical nightmare and it wouldve also meant theyd have to have compromised creatively on what they could have done.So, we pivoted to visual effects. In Atlanta, theres a place called Stone Mountain, which is big national park with a great big Stone Mountain in it. What production ended up using was the Yellow Daisy Festival parking lot of Stone Mountain, which is basically just a big empty parking space. We built three setswe had the Lincoln Memorial set, the Pennsylvania Avenue set and the 17th Street set, which is where the Apache helicopter comes in. And thats where we filmed the majority of D.C. scenes.b&a: Was it built up to a certain level and then, say, bluescreen, used for the rest?David Simpson: Exactly. The Lincoln Memorial set was on one side of the car park. It was up against the trees. Then in the other direction, its just a wall of bluescreen. The bluescreen had a hole cut in it with a huge great big white rectangle that represented the Lincoln Memorial so everyone knew what they were looking at. And then we had a few props in the foreground, concrete barricades and the vehicles. There was a hot dog stand just to give it a bit of life. But everything youre seeing beyond the vehicles is CG. That was the smallest and simplest of the sets.In the middle of the car park was the Pennsylvania Avenue set, which was just a big crossroads with a barricade wall section. On the other side, we built the first story of two buildings, but its literally just the one intersection and theres only one building on each side of the road and the barricade wall beyond that. We taped out the road that leads up to the White House and the curve that comes off up to the White House so that when the cars drive awaywhen the limo skids outwe wanted to get all of that in camera for real because we wanted all that natural weight and the dust that gets kicked up.We marked a route where they could drive that would work for us. But theyre just driving through essentially an empty car park. When we came to tape out the lines on the road, we found out that our car park was a tiny bit smaller than we thought it was, so we had to shrink our world slightly. If you are a D.C. expert or a groundskeeper at the Eisenhower building or the White House, youll probably notice that it is a hair smaller than it should be. b&a: Youre going to get emails about this, David.David Simpson: Itll be in the IMDb trivia section. Then, over the other side of the car park was our 17th Street set, which was also a crossroads intersection and the first story of each building. There was about 16,000 feet of bluescreen we ended up using. We had them on pettibones which let us wheel them in and drive them around.One of my favorite things in 17th Street was that we were in dailies one day and our environments lead Matt Chandler showed us a work in progress and said, Something broke in this and the windows are round and were going to fix it. Just dont look at the windows, well fix it. Its fine. And he showed it to me and I just fell in love with the round windows. I said, Im going to show it to Alex and see what he thinks, because I loved the round windows. We put it in front of Alex and he was like, Yeah, we have to keep them because no one would think that that is CG.Round windows is a decision that you make if you are a 1970s architect whos trying to make a statement on this brutalist building. But you wouldnt do that if you were a 2023 VFX artist whos building a procedural city. So we kept the round windows because you see them and your brain just assumes it has to be real.Another fun thing with 17th Street was when the helicopters come in blowing everything up and then theres a tank that drives over that car barricade. There was one take where the tank throttle got stuck and they couldnt brake and it drove through a bluescreen. We joked for a while that our VFX crew T-shirt should just be a blue T-shirt with a hole in the middle of it.b&a: Oh, I wish you had! Since you were recreating Washington, D.C., what was your process of getting reference for the city?David Simpson: We sent one of our data wranglers, Corey Burks, and our VFX producer, Michelle Rose, out to Washington, D.C. when we had a quiet VFX period. They took a lot of photographs, a lot of textures and a lot of data. We started by recreating those three intersections because those were where the battle took place. The CG city was very much localized to those three worlds at the beginning and it was looking really, really good.Alex had always wanted an establishing shot like a helicopter shot, and the plan originally was to get a helicopter to fly over D.C. and then add destruction and add smoke and fire and build on top of that. But the city we were making looked really, really good and the discussion became, Is it better to go with a full CG city or to go with a real plate city? The thing with flying over D.C. is they are obviously very careful about it and they wont just let anybody fly a helicopter over the White House, especially.If wed gone ahead with that approach, youd have had to have compromised the story. And its very important for the story that you get a sense of this progression and this advancing across Washington. So it was important that the shots took place in certain areas in order to get that movement. We started weighing up the option to turn our localized parts of the city into a full Washington, D.C. And the attention to detail of Washington, D.C. that the environments team put in was just remarkable.b&a: Tell me more about the actual build.David Simpson: It covers about 13 square miles, what they built. They wanted to make it feel like a real city. It is, of course, based on the real DC. There are 75 landmarks that theyve built that are recreated. Every street has traffic lights, the traffic lights work, and they work on a pattern that works. Every bulb and street light bulb is slightly different so that you get a feel that some are faded, some are not, some are off.Every building has interiors. So as you fly over the top and you see through windows, youre not just seeing a window box, youre seeing a room with a procedurally laid out desk structure with monitors and keyboards, and there are pot plants and water coolers. Theyve got emergency exit signs, theyve got elevators in there, theyve got motivational posters on some of the walls. Some of the offices have sofas. On the ground floor, some shops have shop fronts with displays in them.We did the post here in London and I was walking home from work one night looking at the streets of London and I just saw loads of cranes. You look into the distance in pretty much any direction, you see cranes and they have blinky red lights on them. Or, you see buildings with scaffolding on them. And you see roadworks. So we decided to start putting those things in as well to make sure everything didnt look so clean.The idea, narratively, was that Washington was the last stronghold. Washington wasnt abandoned. Washington had people in it, and then as the troops have advanced, people have indeed fled. We wanted to still have computers that were on. So some of the computers are still on in the offices and theyve got screensavers up or lights that are on. We noticed when you walk down the road and you look up at an office block, each floor is often owned by a different company so they have different ceiling tiles. So when you look up and you are on ground level, it feels like each floor is slightly different. Perhaps they all get their light bulbs from a different provider. We added a slightly different tint to each floor as you look up.Once wed built that living city, we added the war to it. Theres that shot at the beginning where it starts looking down and it tilts up to the Washington Monument. Its the first time you see Washington at war and youre looking down at tennis courts and a golf course. If you find that location on the internet and look at it on satellite view, that is exactly what you would see.As it tilts up in the film, you see the freeway is blocked out and barricaded with cars. People have tried to escape and theyve not been able to get out. And then it comes up and you see down the street and you see the anti-aircraft fire in the sky and theres smoke. Basically every shot we then added warfare to.We also added a whole bunch of soldiers in there. We had two fantastic motion capture artists, Ace and Jordan, who came in. Jordan is ex-military, and we wanted all of our soldiers to behave like they knew how to hold a gun. If one of our animators had put the suit on, it wouldve looked like they were doing laser tag or something. So, having a real soldier do it was great. I think we had about 127 mocap clips in the end. The animation team took those soldiers and they put them in different streets and created little battle scenes around the city. As youre flying over the top, you see hints of battle happening elsewhere, its not just isolated to where the journalists are. Then youve got police cars driving around, youve got Humvees and tanks driving. So we didnt just create a CG city, we created a fully functioning war zone. b&a: In terms of that war zone, I was also really impressed with how close the journalists get to explosions and gunfire. Was some of that able to be done practically on set and then others as Framestore augmentations?David Simpson: Alex and I have had a rule that if we can film anything, we will. Even if its not going to be the final thing, just getting something in there is important, i.e. not having just an empty space that someones reacting to. So every explosion except for the Lincoln Memorial onebecause that was just a bluescreenwas a practical SFX explosion. Some of those are brilliant and weve barely done anything, we havent had to touch it much at all. And others, we took that as a guide and an inspiration and we built upon it to make it feel more dangerous.b&a: How did you orchestrate that Lincoln Memorial rocket blast?David Simpson: Ive got a feeling Alex has always had that shot in his head. In our first meeting when he talked about the Lincoln Memorial, he brought up a photograph that was pretty much exactly that shot. When you see the Lincoln Memorial in real life, it is a great big brightly lit box on a wall of black because theres nothing really around it. Its on a hill, its dark, theres no lights around it. Its just this big white cube. And the angle of the camera that is in the film is pretty much the exact angle of that photograph.We built the Lincoln Memorial in CG. The hill is CG and the memorial and all the stuff you see behind it is CG. The memorial even has Abraham Lincoln inside it, even though you never actually see it. Thats just the sort of attention that our artists put in.For the explosion in the Lincoln Memorial, in the script it says Javelin missile hits the Lincoln Memorial. We found as many clips of a Javelin missile hitting something as possible, and we put them together. We sat with Alex, we watched them all, and we called the process casting our reference. We would pick the reference that we thought was best for the story at that point. And that became our hero reference that was like our anchor to reality.We did that for literally everything in the film. When you see people being shot, we looked at black and white footage from World War II of firing squads, and its horrible to look at and really heartbreaking to look at. But we didnt want it to feel like an action movie, we wanted it to be shocking. When you watch that real footage, you get that moment where it hits you in the chest and it has a different effect on you than what were used to seeing in cinema. We wanted to try and dissect that and figure out what that was and try and capture it.Because, if youre going to make a film thats about war, I think you have a responsibility to do it as truthfully as possible, and show people what it could be like. I think if we had gone the blockbuster movie route with the blood spurts and the arms flying everywhere, it wouldnt have been true to what we were trying to make as a film.b&a: Another explosion is the suicide bombing in Brooklyn.David Simpson: That was shot in Atlanta. We found an intersection in Atlanta that felt like it could play for Brooklyn. It is such a cheap solution, but all you need to convince someone that youre in New York is the Manhattan skyline. You put a couple of skyscrapers in the background. Literally, all we did was put the Manhattan skyline in the distance and we went onto the internet and we brought up a map and we scoured the streets until we found an intersection in Brooklyn that looked like the one wed shot in Atlanta. We looked at what the view was and what youd see and we then sent one of our staff members who was in New York out with a camera to take photographs of the skyline and we put that in.For the protesters, most of them were real people on set. We had about 100 extras, but its never enough. No matter how many you have, its never enough. It always feels like theres a gap. And so we plugged the holes with protesters who were Framestore employees who we shot on greenscreen in the basement downstairs.Also, Alex and DP Rob Hardy loved to shoot really, really fast and they had about five cameras filming at any one time. So they were always in each others shots. This meant that, often in that protest scene, we had to cover up camera ops with people from Framestore.For the explosion itself, we had stunt performers who were on cables who could be yanked away and we had an SFX explosion that was going to blow up. But, again, you cant really do too much with an explosion without harming people. The stunt performers needed to be very close to it. So the explosion was only ever going to be there as sort of a framework for us to work from.One challenge, too, was that all of the stunt performers were getting psyched up, ready to be yanked awaytheyre not acting. So theres a shot where the bomber is running up to the tanker and what we got in camera was a row of about 10 stunt performers standing there, building themselves up, ready to go. But the plate had no other rioters because you couldnt have extras standing behind them since they would get hit as the stunt performers get yanked on their cables. So, we had to add in a CG crowd of people running away. The advantage there was that it covered up that row of stunt performers who were preparing themselves to be launched.Its horrible to say, but we would look for references that would make you understand how that sort of an event feels and how sudden it is, and that its not glamorous and poetic and its not diving for cover. It is not a slow motion scene, as well. It happens with a lot of brutality. We wanted to try and figure out what real is so that we could be authentic.b&a: In the film there are several travel scenes when youre in the vehicle with the journalists and you are going past a community or youre on a freeway, where youve seemed to add lots of results of war, but also it seems like you had to erase cars and things like that. Is that how it worked?David Simpson: Every time youre in a car, we are really in a car and were really on a road. Theres no greenscreen stuff in the car, theres no LED wall stuff in the car. Theres times when I look at our footage of driving plates and I know we were in that car and I still look at it and I go, Man, it feels like we put the background in! But I promise you every single one of them is real driving.We had three cars. First we had a bog-standard car, and that was often used for if theyre pulling up to stop and get out. Here, one of the actors would drive the car. It was also used for doing stunts when it skids off the road, again, thats just a plain old car. Then we had another car that had a pod driver on the roof, where the driver is up there steering and controlling the car. If we had a long scene where theyre driving and talking, you dont want your actors having to worry about driving and talking. So the driver on the roof handles all that and the actors get to act. Then we had the car that was our rigged car or our camera car, and that had, I believe nine cameras mounted around it in different positions trying to frame each other out so that theyre not in each others shots.That rigged car had two Sony Venices on the hood looking back, the rest were Sony A7S that were around the side of the car. The thing that was great about that is you can drive the car down the road and get an entire scene covered in one go and you can get all that interaction between the cast. You can get pretty much everything in one take, every angle. That car was relied on quite a lot. Youve got the advantage of everything outside the window being real.For the world outside along the freeway, wed be doing things like painting out other vehicles as they drove past them. Or wed paint out pedestrians, too. We even painted out planes flying overhead because we thought, its going to be a no-fly zone. It just adds to that sense of weirdness. Its subtle, but it adds to it.b&a: Theres one shot where youre following the car along the highway or freeway and theres another road perpendicular to that and apart from them, its completely empty, and eerie.David Simpson: That road, we had control over. We had a handful of bombed-out cars that the art department had dressed in and it gave us something to weave through and everyone to look at and frame it, and then we extended them on into the distance. For the roads perpendicular to that, we cleaned out any fellow traffic.b&a: The forward operating base of the Western Forces is a pretty exciting series of shots with helicopters taking off and landing. What did they have there? What did you need to add to that sequence?David Simpson: Thats in a park in Atlanta that is called Chattahoochee National Park. We had a pretty large contingent art department-wise of tents, and tanks, and Humvees, and MRAPs, and soldiers that took up maybe a quarter of the space. That was great for all of the scenes which are dialogue scenes because youve got enough to get in there and move around and shoot with. But as you are coming into it, you really want to feel like this is a huge army thats amassing outside D.C. So we extended beyond and we added helicopters, we added parked vehicles, we added soldiers, we added as much as we could to build that up the scene.Fred North and his helicopter team flew back and forth for a couple of hours. Those guys are amazingyoud be there setting up for a shot and theres this thing that goes right past your head. They shot about an hour of random helicopter flying footage and then Alex edited it together and he wanted continuity between them, but obviously the helicopters are in a different position in every shot. So we ended up creating a narrative by adding in a CG helicopter and seaming them that way.b&a: Theres also a scene just before the Western Forces scene where they drive through a forest fire. How was that accomplished?David Simpson: We had a stretch of road in this forested area that we had control over that was maybe about a mile and a half long. The SFX guys set up what they called flame trees, which were metal sticks with things coming off them that could be set alight. Then, as we drove down the road, they created this device that was like an oil drum that churned out embers, these big chunky flaming embers, and they mounted it to the back of a truck.We had a little convoy of three cars, and our press vehicle would be driving along with our actors in it. Then just in front of them would be the ember vehicle, just churning it out. As we drove down the road, the embers are going backwards and its hitting the car behind and youre getting all those incredible shots. And then following along was us in a minibus to get the video signal.The embers are real in all but three shots. The only reason we didnt use it for every shot is because every so often youd get too far apart and the vehicles would get too separated and the embers wouldnt be close enough anymore. So all VFX did for that entire scene is fill in the gaps on a couple of missing ember shots. That was just the most amazing thing to shoot because its real.Read the full issue about invisible effects.