The Jeep promo for HBO's mini-series Band of Brothers ends with a sweeping crane shot of Utah Beach on D-Day. The shot reveals myriad ships, soldiers, vehicles, and hardware strewn on the sand, but it also does something more.

“As we're raking along the beach and out to sea,” explains visual effects supervisor Mat Beck, “ghostly figures of foreground soldiers move past camera, and the scene gradually transforms itself from the gritty Normandy Invasion into a modern-day beach, where three modern Jeeps appear. It's an establishing shot and a transformation shot at the same time.”

Beck's LA-based Light Matters/Pixel Envy created the shot for the New York agency the Arnell Group. “Our mandate from an effects standpoint was to make it look like there was an invasion fleet off of Utah Beach,” recalls Beck. Though he had 75 extras and a fair amount of practical hardware to photograph on location in Normandy, Beck says, “I knew from the get-go that we'd be adding CG elements like ships on the ocean, planes overhead and soldiers in the distance. None of those were on set.”

In order to ensure those elements could be inserted in proper perspective, Beck's team gathered extensive data on the dimensions of the actual beach. “We put stakes in the sand as reference markers, and measured the practical stuff placed there by the art department. This was a huge site, so I even had guys driving 500 yards away with day-glow patches on 55-gallon drums to act as markers. And obviously we noted the camera position really well.”

But adding to the challenge was the fact that both the ‘A’ (vintage) and ‘B’ (modern) background plates were shot separately. “We used a Libra remote head on a Super Techno crane,” notes Beck. “It's gyro-stabilized, which was helpful because it was windy. But we got a lot of high-frequency bumps because these things are never perfect. So it was a tracking adventure.”

While Beck was on location, Robert Stromberg was creating a background matte painting and a CG team was building the digital models that would be tracked into the plate. Using Alias|Wavefront's Maya running on SGI and Linux hardware, they created tanks, planes, ships and soldiers to populate the scene. The surface textures of these models, crafted with Adobe Photoshop and Amazon Paint, were painstakingly accurate, asserts Beck. “With all the stuff we built, we could invade Sicily!”

Extensive rotoscoping was also required because, as Beck notes, “we had people crossing in front of ships and vehicles that weren't actually there. We did a huge amount of roto using (Discreet's) flame and (Interactive Effects) Piranha.” They also had to treat the plate photography by adding smoke and replacing the ocean and the skies, since neither the weather nor the tides cooperated during the three-day location shoot.

Placing all of these elements properly in the plate demanded a lot of hand tracking, and Beck's team also relied on 2d3's tracking tool Boujou. “We had to synthesize the 3D move and do a lot of 2D corrections to make it look right. This was filmed with a 16mm lens, and lens distortion plus the crane's vibrations made tracking difficult.”

The final element that needed to be incorporated into the shot was the contingent of ghostly soldiers that appear in the foreground while the battlefield fades away. Although Beck originally intended to shoot these soldiers against blue screen, the pressures of a tight schedule required some improvisation. He wound up filming them from a low angle against empty sky. “Because they were never going to be 100% opaque, we didn't have to get a perfect blue screen shot. The hazy sky worked like a pretty good white screen.”

These ghost soldiers appear as the shot transitions between the ‘A’ and ‘B’ segments, which Light Matters/Pixel Envy had to tie together. “We specialize in tying wild crane moves together,” laughs Beck. During the shoot, he had used a switcher to line up those master shots, but the creative challenge was to make the transition much more than a straight cross-dissolve.

“We wanted to make it multi-layered — not something that shouted ‘Oooh, look at that morph transition.’ So we developed a hierarchy that determined which things would last longer than others, and where in frame they would be. There was a differential transparency among the various elements. The soldiers disappeared first, while the last things to go were objects on the beach, almost as if they were relics. We felt it should happen almost subliminally, so that there was a sense of a spreading spatial wave, washing the old out to sea. Ultimately, it was a series of reveals and dissolves and moving mattes and shadows. We added some under-cranked clouds and their shadows moving down the beach to help the transition of the old giving way to the new.”

In the end, concludes Beck, “the camera pushes in on a clean background and then the three Jeeps appear. There was a certain amount of tweakage required to make them look good because the weather wasn't as sunny as we needed it to be. That was just one of the many factors about which you can't send a memo to Control.”

While Beck's three-day shooting schedule was tight, the six-day post schedule was even tighter. Light Matters/Pixel Envy is used to working on TV shows (The X-Files) and features (Rock Star, Glass House) so this schedule pushed them to pull out all the stops. “I don't think there is a technique we didn't use,” admits Beck. “Everything from full 3D-CG rendered models to 2D paintings. It was shameless, and absolutely necessary.”