With "Panic Room", the French 3D production studio BUF radically expands the path started with "Fight Club". The completely digital storyboard allows the director to create previously non-existent image worlds - the camera becomes the eye of the director in the broadest sense. In this perspective, "Panic Room" thus represents a milestone in the further development of contemporary film.

1999: „Fight Club“: David Fincher asked BUF to produce some visual effects for the film, in particular the shots transcribing the schizophrenic visions of Edward. BUF did six 3D sequences (19 shots).
End 2001: Kevin Tod Haug, the visual effects supervisor of „Panic Room“, contacted BUF for a shot called “The Big Shot”. David Fincher wanted to create a long sequence moving through a house made of various live actions elements which needed to be seamlessly linked together into one virtual camera move.
The freedom of action gained during „Fight Club“ made the director confident that BUF could carry out the „Panic Room“ project. Reconstructing parts of the sets in 3D would enable BUF to create a virtual camera, and then be free from space limitation, speed and time constraints. (Passage through bars of the banister, inside a keyhole, through a ceiling …).
A team from BUF went on set to take photographs in the same environment and lighting set-up used for principal photography and collected data necessary to the reconstruction of elements and sets. According to the method BUF is using, once the sets are remodeled, the photographs taken on sets enable the digital artists to get the exact textures and material details. This way, the transitions in camera become imperceptible.
It took over a year between the first production meetings and the end of the work. At the end, BUF worked on 21 shots, among others:

VFX 1010 – “Big Shot”
A character tries to break-in a house. The camera follows from inside the house as he is progressing outside.
The overall idea was to treat this sequence as a shot sequence of 2mn51: The computer generated images enabling the different live action shots to be linked together. To obtain this result, BUF took photographs on location of all sets of the house, which needed to be recreated in post-production. Thus, with these photo-references, BUF was able to reconstruct the different sets in 3D: using modeling mapping.
To guarantee a coherence of camera movements between computed generated images and live action images; BUF had to recreate all the camera movements in 3D so we could travel through the 3D seamlessly.
Once David Fincher approved the camera movements and the timing of the shot, BUF took care of the rendering of the 3D shots, the atmospheric effects and the final compositing of the 3D elements in the filmed scenes.

VFX 1110 – “Through the Banister”
In this shot, the goal was to be able to go through the bars of the banister with the camera. For this effect, BUF had to recover in 3D the camera movement of the live action shot in order to integrate the banister in a very coherent manner. The banister was modeled in 3D using the photos taken on set as references and then, integrated in the live action shot. As a result, the effect gives the illusion that the camera is really going through the bars of the banister.

VFX 1130 – “Through the Door” – “Unpacking”
The camera progresses in a hallway and intrudes into a bedroom revealing Jodie Foster emptying boxes. Originally, the work of BUF was to reconstruct in 3D and integrate the wall on the right side, which concretely prevented the camera from going between the door and the wall. BUF had to recover in 3D the camera movement of the live action shot in order to integrate the missing part of the hallway. Finally, due to too many vibrations in the camera movement, the whole hallway had to be totally reconstructed in 3D in order to obtain a stable camera movement.

VFX 1140 – “Push in to ECU of Wall” – “Pulsing Wall”
This shot is entirely in 3D. David Fincher wanted to go from a very wide shot to a very narrow shot (macroscopic) on the wall of the Panic Room, vibrating under the pounding of the sledgehammer. Fine particles of dust had to fall from the wall. For this effect, BUF started with photos in macro of the wall in order to reconstruct in details the protruding bits. Then, BUF animated the dust particles in 3D using dynamic animation tools recreating the same physical dust particles so the fall of the debris would be synchronized with the pounding on the wall.

VFX 1410 – “Macro flashlight”
In this sequence, David Fincher wanted the camera to start with a wide shot of a ventilation pipe inside which we see the girl communicating with Morse code by flashlight through the pipe. We are inside the pipe. The camera gets closer and closer to the flashlight until we have a macroscopic view of the wire.

VFX 1510 – “Through the floor”
BUF was supposed to provide a fluid link between two live actions shots. The camera goes through the floor of the Panic Room and emerges from the lower floor where we discover the intruders breaking the ceiling with a sledgehammer. The mezzanine was entirely build in 3D based on the photos taken on location. BUF, then, animated the debris and the sledgehammer destroying the ceiling from the inside of the mezzanine. The camera movement was entirely reconstructed in 3D in order to match the carpet of the Panic Room and to integrate the mezzanine and the ceiling of the lower floor.

VFX 1520 – “Through the Wall”
The camera goes through a wall from the Panic Room to the common bedroom. BUF rebuilt the partitions and their insides in 3D. Then, BUF integrated them in order to provide a perfect match of movement and color between the two shots.