The first step to achieving believable footage was finding the right actors to play the major characters. The team were looking for actors with a similar body shape to the war leaders, taking height, weight and age into consideration.
As computer animation would replace each face for close shots, it wasn�t vital the actors selected for these roles looked exactly like their characters. They were chosen on the basis that the measurements of their face were as close as possible to the facial dimensions of the real leaders. During casting, each actor was photographed and the distance between their eyes, cheekbones, mouth and chin were carefully measured to find out which actor was closet to the real character they had to portray.
Once the actors had been cast, a life-sized bust was made of each of their heads to create a perfect copy of
their faces. These were passed to a sculptor who then used them as a base on which to create life-sized busts for each historical figure. He used archive footage and photographs to recreate each face as accurately as possible by moulding clay onto the bust of each actor.
When the leaders� busts were completed they were scanned into a computer using lasers which picked up each minute detail. The digital information collected enabled the computer to create a 3D image of each
face. The CGI artists then took these images and added colour and texture to create amazingly lifelike 3D electronic masks which would be placed over the faces of the actors during the edit process.
It was important these masks were modelled on the proportions of the actors� faces so that when they replaced them with CGI, the dimensions fitted perfectly. Once the process had been completed, the faces looked so accurate and lifelike that it is now virtually impossible to tell that they were generated by CGI and are not genuine human faces.
Motion capture was then used to bring the masks to life. As each actor spoke, their faces were scanned into a computer; the movement of dots painted on their faces was recorded and a projected grid also mapped their facial expressions. As the information recorded was video based, there was no limit to the number of points which could be mapped. The 3D geometry was built up using 1,500 special tracking points and even very subtle movements were captured. This information was then used to animate the CGI masks to give them the lifelike appearance of moving and speaking as a real face would do.
For some shots, the actors own faces were used and it was up to the make-up designer to ensure that they resembled their characters as closely as possible. This meant designing make-up and hair (and in the case of Churchill using prosthetics) to give the actor exactly the same face shape as the wartime leader. Finally, the costume designer dressed each character in authentic looking costumes which were researched and recreated from photographs and archive footage.
Another challenge was to recreate the surroundings for each of the characters; Churchill�s bedroom, Roosevelt�s train, Stalin�s Dacha and Hitler�s bunker and briefing hut. It was the job of the production designer to create sets that perfectly matched how each of these places looked in 1944, by using archive footage and stills taken at the time. Painstaking efforts were taken over the detail. This included hand stencilling blinds with the same pattern as those that hung on the windows in Roosevelt�s train. Props were carefully researched, located and then added to the sets to complete the picture ready for filming to start.
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