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"  Kevin Durrand in Legion. (Photo Courtesy of Screen Gems) In It&amp;#039;s a Wonderful Life, giving an angel wings was simple: Just ring a bell. But for the visual-effects artists working on Legion, out Jan. 22, it wasn&amp;#039;t that easy. &amp;quot;Usually when you&amp;#039;re working on a visual effect, it happens and then it&amp;#039;s over,&amp;quot; says VFX supervisor Joe Bauer. &amp;quot;But in Legion, the angels&amp;#039; wings are always there. They don&amp;#039;t just appear at a certain point, and they can&amp;#039;t just hang there. They have to perform when the actors perform. Getting the realism in the hundreds of shots of these wings that react like another part of the body for the full duration of the movie ... I&amp;#039;ve never seen that done before.&amp;quot; In Legion, God has once again lost faith in man. But instead of calling up a global flood, God sends angels to eradicate humanity. Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) believes that God is wrong about man and breaks rank, journeying to a remote desert diner to protect a waitress pregnant with the next messiah from foul-mouthed grannies, long-legged, crab-walking ice cream men and all other manner of beasts. In the film&amp;#039;s climactic sequence, Michael and former comrade Gabriel (Kevin Durand) face off on a mountaintop.  Initially, director Scott Stewart tried to use practical wings on the actors, but quickly realized they wouldn&amp;#039;t do the trick. &amp;quot;After a couple of days, the studio and Scott looked at the dailies and said it looked stupid,&amp;quot; Bauer says. &amp;quot;It was also a pain for the actors because the rig was so heavy and awkward.&amp;quot; So Stewart made the decision to ditch the wing rigs and go CG. To start, animators took scans of Bettany and Duran. This allowed the artists to create three-dimensional computer-generated models of the actors in the computer, which they would use in scenes where the environment and the actor were fully CG. On set, the actors wore tracking LEDs, which would later help animators determine where the joints of the wings were on the actors&amp;#039; bodies in postproduction.  Creating CG wings might have been much easier for the actors, but it was a daunting task for the filmmakers: Everyone has seen a bird and is familiar with what wings look like, so if the angels&amp;#039; CG wings didn&amp;#039;t have the subtleties of real wings, they would look fake to an audience. Stewart and Bauer turned to Toronto-based VFX house Spin Effects to create the wings. Animators began by studying high-speed footage of owls and hawks in flight and swooping down on prey, which was essential in determining how wings and feathers move. &amp;quot;You can really tell how the air moves through the wings,&amp;quot; Bauer says. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re not rigid at all. The wings are always adjusting subtly and the feathers are always reacting to the wind.&amp;quot; Animators combined the coolest characteristics of owl and hawk wings to create the angels&amp;#039; wings; the end result were hawk-shaped wings that behaved like an owl&amp;#039;s, Animators built them from the inside out--Bauer says there are over 20 layers to the wings, including bones, musculature, feathers, black densities, saturation and lighting, among others. &amp;quot;When you don&amp;#039;t have those layers ... that&amp;#039;s what makes the difference between wings that look very plastic and cartoony versus ones that look as though they were in the room with the actor on the day of photography,&amp;quot; Bauer says.  To meld the CG wings with the live-action actors, VFX artists overlaid the torsos of the actors&amp;#039; 3D CG doppelg\u00E4ngers over the actual photography. &amp;quot;As soon as the model&amp;#039;s head and torso line up with the actor&amp;#039;s head and torso, you know the wings will be in the right place,&amp;quot; Bauer says. Next, animators applied motion-tracking technology--which identifies certain points in a frame and then tracks those same points through all the frames of a shot--to make sure the wings were consistently where they should be.  Much of the R&amp;amp;amp;D on the wings came in the compositing phase, when animators were determining just how much of each layer to incorporate into the CG creations. &amp;quot;The whole compositing step is as complex as the CG,&amp;quot; Bauer says. &amp;quot;Getting the balance is a recipe you have to work on until you happen to hit it, and then it&amp;#039;s subtle variations on that recipe for all of the shots.&amp;quot; For the mountaintop fight scene--of which some shots were entirely computer-generated--animators spent extra time rendering wind blowing through the giant feathers.  Creating realistic angel wings took a long time: There were as many as 70 versions of the wings in the early shots, and Bauer estimates that animators worked on the wings up to 65 hours a week for nine months. But Bauer is more than satisfied with the result. &amp;quot;No matter where the wings are, even if they&amp;#039;re right up in your face,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;you still believe that they&amp;#039;re real.&amp;quot;      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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