FlickeringMyth got a chance to talk to the Catching Fire team about the visual effects used to produce the movie. Read more HERE.


“I’d worked with Francis Lawrence a few years ago on I Am Legend [2007] and we had a productive, and entertaining relationship on that picture,” explains Janek Sirrs who won an Oscar for being a member of the visual effects team responsible for The Matrix (1999).  “Francis likes shooting photo storyboards and seems to enjoy [perhaps a little too much] having me embarrassingly play the part of the zombie, the monkey, and the frightened girl for him.  Our schedules didn’t really sync up immediately afterLegend and so I ended up drifting off into the Marvel universe for a couple of shows before our stars could align again.”  The duo was reunited for the cinematic adaptation of the futurist young adult series created by Suzanne Collins about survival games and a civilian revolt.  “My teenage girl years are a little bit behind at this point in my life so I can’t really claim to have been an avid reader of the books!   Obviously, the first Hunger Games [2012] movie was such a box office hit that it was impossible to not know something of the source material though.  When I started on the project, the script was still a work in progress, as is often the case these days.   However, the book was always going to be the template for the film so we could refer to that while we waited the screenplay to be polished, and made fit for general consumption.”

“One of the primary goals of Catching Fire [2013] was to expand upon the scope seen in the original movie, not just in terms of the visual effects, but also across every other department from production design to wardrobe,” explains Janek Sirrs. “That meant we weren’t slave to anything from The Hunger Games as such, and could start with a bit of a blank slate.  The only thing we really inherited was some of the designs, such as the Avenue of the Tributes, but even then we rebuilt and expanded the scale to make things visually more impressive.  Compared to Catching Fire, the original Hunger Games visual effects were more limited in terms of budget and schedule.  Within reason, you only get what you can afford to pay for, so with more funds available this time around we could create a ‘bigger’ picture.”  Sirrs notes, “Francis is a very visual director, probably as a result of his earlier music video experience; the key thing for him was having the visual effects, and the movie as a whole, visually tie in with the Katniss’ character.    The whole film is almost always shot from Katniss’ perspective so that the audience can see what she sees, and experience what she experiences.   That was always the mandate for how Francis wanted the visual effects shots to function.  It was also important to Francis that the shots were as naturalistic as possible, to tie in with the feel of the rest of the movie.  Some fantastic things do happen, but hopefully we conveyed them in a manner that was more plausible, rather than stylized or extreme.”