After a 10+ year long gestation, the first instalment of Feng Shen, Director Wu Ershan’s take on the epic fantasy burst into Chinese cinemas on Thursday. The first in a planned trilogy, the film’s opening weekend box office take of $USD56M made it the number one movie in China and third largest grossing film worldwide behind Mattel’s Barbie, and Oppenheimer from Universal. These results, combined with its 7.8 audience score on Chinese review aggregator Douban bodes well for the future of the franchise.

The film-featuring massive battle scenes, sorcery, and fantastical creatures-would not have been possible without the extensive use of of visual effects to enhance an already epic production. Douglas Smith, the film’s Academy Award winning Visual Effects Supervisor: 

‘From the beginning (director) Wu Ershan was clear that this film would need to be a milestone in the evolution of China’s film industry. Making this goal a reality meant approaching things a little differently with visual effects and picture post being managed by Myth Image, a company we helped set up with offices in Beijing and Los Angeles. The design of the company included a robust and international data pipeline that allowed us to share information with internal and external teams around the world. It was a new way of doing things for the China side but they were very open to what has become a fairly standard way of approaching digital production in Hollywood.’

In addition to the technical challenges, the rich mythology of the source material presented a unique set of challenges to the largely non-Chinese VFX effort. Says Smith:

‘The director had a very specific vision for both the film’s fantastic and more historical elements. Months were spent during prep and pre-production making sure these deeply meaningful cultural elements were translated faithfully into the computer generated work we were doing. Honestly, a lot of the ideas were quite refreshing for the international VFX artists who were learning about this world and these creatures for the first time.’

With the tremendous success of the first film, audiences are already clamouring for the next instalment of the planned trilogy. On the work ahead Smith says 

‘If anything, II and III are even more ambitious than the first film so it’s great that the hard work of building up technical infrastructure and the operational practices around that has already been done. It’s going to be exciting to see those investments pay off as the next films come together.’

With Myth Image successfully up and running Smith has turned his attention to the future with Mixel Media, a company he has recently founded with fellow Hollywood visual effects veterans Ming Pan and Jeremy Ball. ‘Putting together a pipeline and seeing it function as well as it has has been tremendously rewarding, but with the technology constantly changing the next one is always going to be a little different and hopefully we’ll be able to build on what we learned from this implementation in China.’