A signature piece in Gavin Hood’s latest film Ender’s Game is its massive zero-gravity Battle Room -- a place where the titular character played by Asa Butterfield trains for alien war. Seeing the film's young stars float through weightless battle is a wonderful thing to behold -- and something that took astronomical amounts of time and digital trickery.
To create a sense of weightlessness, the filmmakers shot actors in harnesses and on wires against a greenscreen set to place them in a virtual world. Then to achieve the look of zero-G -- and obey the laws of physics -- visual effects studio Digital Domain ultimately retained only the actor’s faces and relied instead on digital doubles of their bodies for the sequence.
The Battle Room is just one of many key visual effects accomplishments in the film. Digital Domain also crafted the epic final showdown, which features more than 300,000 ships simultaneously on screen -- made up of 27 billion polygons -- the highest amount of geometry the studio has ever processed in a single shot.
