No Time to Die

Cinesite’s mission, for the 25th Bond film, was to deliver 130 VFX shots, under the supervision of Salvador Zalvidea. Work on the ninth film completed by the Cinesite team to date was shared across our London and Montreal studios.

In No Time To Die, Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica. His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter from the CIA turns up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.

The most technically challenging of our sequences involved the creation of a deadly poison gas, which is released at a party from a concealed jet in the ceiling. As it descends onto the unsuspecting crowd of people below, it is illuminated in the beam from a spotlight.

Cinesite’s task was to add the mist in CG, matching or in some instances replacing mist which had been filmed practically on set for some shots. The gas has an iridescent quality and a unique rainbow look needed to be established, to underline its deadly importance in the sequence. It is beautiful, yet lethal.

The VFX team sought methods to decouple the look from the render, not only in the conceptualisation of the look itself, but also in the generation of the spotlights which were also added to each shot.

Head of CG Andy Hayes explains, “We wanted to be able to rapidly tailor each shot, ensuring that the spotlights and iridescence could be tweaked to fit the composition perfectly of each shot as we saw fit. The aim was to enable us to work on the different elements in parallel, rather than serialize the process by baking that information into a render, which could take several hours. By bringing the illumination aspect into Nuke, we could iterate many times a day without the need for expensive volumetric renders, enabling us to have far quicker iteration time compared to a more linear pipeline of relying on renders.”

Cinesite’s team also handled a variety of other shots, from adding bubbles and particulate to underwater sequences to environment composites and a stunning long-shot at the height of the film’s climax.

Read more about No Time to Die on the film’s official website.

  • Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga
  • Producers: Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli
  • Production Companies: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Pictures, Eon Productions & Danjaq
  • Distributors: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Universal Pictures
  • Cinesite VFX Supervisor: Salvador Zalvidea
  • Release Date: 30.09.2021
Trailer