Making history: the Moving Picture Company and Double Negative use modern tools to create prehistoric CG animals and environments for 10,000 BC.(CG Animals)

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Having shown in the film The Day After Tomorrow what the world might look like if global warming melted the icebergs, director Roland Emmerich and visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas turned the clock back to the day before yesterday. Before a few thousand yesterdays, in fact. Their latest collaboration, 10,000 BC, follows the young hunter D'Leh (played by actor Steven Strait), who falls into the role of tribal leader after a mammoth hunt. When slave traders raid his village and kidnap the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), D'Leh leads a band of hunters on a rescue mission, encountering terror birds and a saber toothed tiger along the way.

Goulekas won a BAFTA award for visual effects that sent walls of water through Manhattan and later froze the New York City in The Day After Tomorrow. In this film, the effects center on the animals, all of which are CG, and on shots near the end, set in Giza, in which we see thousands of slaves and a few hundred woolly mammoths building the pyramids. "The historians are going to go nuts," he laughs.

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Goulekas worked solely with London-based effects houses on this film. Of the 641 effects shots in 10,000 BC. Double Negative and The Moving Picture Company (MPC) handled the 300 most complex shots and all the animals. Senate Visual Effects provided digital makeup, shot fixes, and composites for 105 shots, while Machine worked on composites and added weapons to 104 shots. An in-house team took care of wire removals and more composites to finish the remaining shots.

Prior to filming, Goulekas worked with a team of 18 previs artists at Nvizage in Pinewood Studios (UK), some of whom were hired specifically to previsualize the film. The process extended over two years. "The previs was elaborate," Goulekas says. "I had 14 senior character animators, three asset builders, and an editor." Some members of the team accompanied the crew on location in New Zealand, South Africa, and Namibia. And later, some of the crew continued working on "postvis," that is, integrating the previs into the live-action plates, when they returned to London. The postvis was later handed off to the effects studios.

"It was great," Goulekas says of having postvis in-house. "Of course, the studios did their own blocking for their shots, but they didn't have to do as many iterations to figure out what we wanted. And, what was also interesting is that I handpicked the animation supervisors from the previs team." Rob Hemmings joined Double Negative; Greg Fisher joined MPC.