To contribute to the setting, Silberling hired Emmanuel Lubezki as the cinematographer because he was impressed with the trio's work on Sleepy Hollow. Lubezki compared the cinematic similarities to Sleepy Hollow, notably the monochromatic look of both films. He also chose a specific color palette backdrop for A Series of Unfortunate Events. "The story is very episodic, so we picked a different color scheme for each section. For example, Count Olaf's house has a lot of greens, blacks and grays; the house of Uncle Monty has a lot of greens and browns and a bit of yellow; and the house of Aunt Josephine has blues and blacks." The railroad crossing set was constructed on a cyclorama, which was the most ambitious set piece for the art department on using elements of "in house" special effects and matte paintings. Visual effects Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), supervised by Stefen Fangmeier, created the film's 505 visual effects shots. The filmmakers used as few digital effects as possible, though the train and smoke for the railroad crossing scene were created entirely by computer animation. ILM also used color grading techniques for the Lake Lachrymose scene, which required complete animation for the leeches. The digital animators studied footage of the 2003 Atlantic hurricane season to accurately depict Hurricane Herman, which was ILM's most ambitious use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the film. Nexus Productions designed the opening "Littlest Elf" animated sequence by modeling it after stop-motion animation and completing it with computer animation. The snakes at Monty's house were a combination of real snakes and animatronics. The animatronics, primarily the Incredibly Deadly Viper, were used as reference models that ILM later enhanced using CGI. Because working with infants was sometimes risky in producing a film, four scenes involving Sunny Baudelaire required CGI with motion capture technology. Among these are the shot of Sunny hanging on to a table by her teeth, catching a spindle with her mouth and the scene where she is entangled with the Incredibly Deadly Viper. Animation supervisor Colin Brady used his baby daughter for motion capture recording. Kevin Yagher designed a remote-controlled animatronic of Sunny. Release Marketing In October 2002, Nickelodeon Movies hired Activision (which actually had a partnership with DreamWorks) to create the film's tie-in video game. The agreement also included options for sequels. Silberling delivered his first cut of the film to the studio in August 2004. Fearing