Eaglewing Enterprises — Eagle's View Report

One of the year's major success stories was the release of District 9, a science-fiction film set in South Africa that worked as an unconventional buddy film, a gritty action movie, and an imaginative parable of Apartheid and xenophobia. In the film, produced by Peter Jackon's Wingnut Films, extra-terrestrial visitors have been segregated to a section of Johannesburg known as "District 9", where they live in squalid conditions as their mysteriously disabled mothership hovers overhead. The story follows an officious bureaucrat, Wikus, who finds himself in an unlikely partnership with an alien named Christopher Johnson after he inhales a mysterious substance that starts to transform him into an insect-like alien body. If Wikus can help Christopher and his child, an alien pipsqueak known as Little CJ, get their mothership up and running, they can make him human again before they blast off for their home planet. All of this happens on a reported $30 million budget.

Vancouver's Image Engine grew to a crew size of 110 and completed 311 visual-effects shots for the film, with the responsibility of animating three main characters — aliens based on conceptual designs from Weta Workshop — as well as the larger numbers of aliens populating the film. So how did a largely unheralded Vancouver VFX facility land the job of creating amazing CG aliens for one of the coolest movies of the summer? He might not have known exactly how it would turn out, but that's the kind of project VFX Executive Producer Shawn Walsh had in mind when he started working at Image Engine in 2006. "There wasn't really a film presence at the company," he tells Film & Video. "My job was to create that."

Over the next couple of years, Walsh says, he helped build the company from a 20-person firm specializing in HD television work to a feature-film VFX house that could staff up to more than 100 people. High profile projects included Mr. Magorium's Magic Emporium, The Incredible Hulk, and this year's Orphan, and that kind of growth caught the attention of District 9's director, Neill Blomkamp, who had his own background as a Vancouver VFX artist working for The Embassy and Rainmaker Visual Effects. When Weta, swamped with work for James Cameron's upcoming Avatar, was unable to do the digital creature work for District 9, Blomkamp started to shop the project around.

"Ultimately I think it was a combination of our pitch to Neill after he contacted us, with a dialogue back and forth – and some of the financing things I helped him with in a more pure exec-producer capacity – that ended up landing the work in Vancouver," Walsh recalls. "And certainly Neill was a huge advocate of doing post and VFX in Vancouver." The company wasn't built using solely Vancouver talent, however – Walsh estimates that a third of the staff is native to Vancouver.

The bidding process for District 9 happened from January to March 2008, with Image Engine winning the project in April, Walsh says. Asset-building began in May, and work began in earnest in September, as Image Engine worked full-bore to make assets and tools before plates started arriving at the beginning of October, according to VFX Supervisor Dan Kaufman. Work continued through June, 2009.

Image Engine had already made significant investments in its pipeline – including an R&D department tasked with developing custom tools and augmentations to existing tools — so the District 9 job required only "incremental" new expenditures, Walsh says. "Ingesting large amounts of motion-capture data was not something we had done before, but we had people with the experience who would be able to do that," he says. "We hadn't painted out an actor in a grey suit to the extent that we were going to be doing it on District 9, so we wrote custom tools to make that process easier."