Visual effects help The Kite Runner soar.(USER FOCUS: BACKDROPS)

There's an adage that says a picture's worth a thousand words, and for the feature film The Kite Runner, that certainly held true.

The Paramount Classics film is an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini. However, the absence of the book's first-person narrator made the film's visual elements essential to the audience's understanding of place and history, culture, and emotion. Handling all the visual effects in the film was CafeFX, which worked hand in hand with Kevin Tod Haug, the film's visual effects designer, and Leslie McMinn, the film's visual effects producer. The facility created a virtual Kabul, Afghanistan, seen decades apart in history, as well as the film's breathtaking kite-fighting sequences.

The Kite Runner unfolds in Afghanistan, but filming there would have been impossible due to the dangerous political climate. Instead, the film was shot on location under rigorous physical conditions in Kashgar, a city in China's western desert bordering Afghanistan. CafeFX visual effects supervisor David Ebner accompanied director Marc Forster and his crew during 30 days of the shoot in China. Meanwhile, visual effects producer Les G. Jones oversaw VFX production at CafeFX.

Kashgar bears a resemblance to Kabul, and its people are ethnically similar, but the landscape is flat, and there are no surrounding mountains. Kabul of the 1970s and later in 2000 is represented with digital matte paintings of snow-capped mountains in the distance, CG buildings extending the view of the city's streets and terraced hillsides, and several entirely CGI aerial shots stretching to an endless horizon, which had to evoke the city's political and physical changes over a span of two decades. These sequences are a perfect and seamless blend of foreground China and background Afghanistan.

Depending on the shot, the background buildings and surrounding hills were created in NewTek's LightWave and Autodesk's Maya, with its integrated Mental Ray tool. The matte paintings, meanwhile, were crafted with Adobe's Photoshop. Topographical aerial maps provided the accuracy to re-create terrain exactly as it would be in Kabul. Also, a 360-degree matte painting of the exact mountain range that would be seen from Kabul was used in all the aerial shots.

Flying High

The simple beauty of kite flying provides the film's most lyrical moments, conveying the joyfulness of life before the Soviet invasion and oppression during the Taliban era. In traditional kite-fighting tournaments, children compete by slicing through the strings of their opponents. Before re-creating this activity in CG, CafeFX consulted a world-renowned Afghani kite-fight champion Basir Beria, who offered his invaluable knowledge of kite construction as well as flying techniques and strategies. Using this information, CafeFX animation lead Leif Einarsson previs'd the kite-flying shots in Maya. The previs files then served as the literal basis for the final animation, which was also completed in Maya and rendered with Mental Images' Mental Ray.