BUF’s main work on “The Dark Knight” by Chris Nolan was to make Batman’s sonar vision visible. The new technology developed is able to detect the electromagnetic waves emitted by cell phones. By scanning the waves’ behavior in space, the device basically allows him to visualize in three dimensions any environment in which a cell phone is turned on.
Since nothing like this exists in the real world, Pierre Buffin and Dominique Vidal started with the concept of the sonar: a device generating waves to reveal all the volumes around it. However, sonar waves are not visible. A long process of research, supervised by Xavier Bec, head of R&D, lasted eight months. Waves, metaballs, smoke, particles, and more were tried out. Chris Nolan wanted the waves to bounce back off obstacles, but also partly to travel through them. In addition, the device needed to feel harmless and not look like X-ray. The research process continued to determine how fast the waves should be, what fraction should bounce back, how fast it should dissipate and how, so as to find the right combination of wave frequency, speed and rhythm. Finally, the result is like a CG wave to which we have added some noise. The environments in which the wave animation takes place are mainly in the Prewitt building sequence, where Batman uses it to locate hostages, and in the Batcave monitor room, where dozens of monitors visualize different locations. Each environment was built by modeling layers upon layers of geometries, since all volumes are translucent except when hit by a wave. The vision had to cross the rooms all the way through and include the city’s street life in the background. The process was very complex and needed to be repeated for each scene in the monitor room.
Finally, BUF created the film signature’s flaming logo that opens the movie. All the work was created using exclusively proprietary software.

VFX Supervisor (BUF): Dominique Vidal; director: Christopher Nolan; production: Warner Bros

Dominique Vidal (FR). With a masters degree in mathematics and visuai art and technoiogy, Dominique Vidal joined BUF’s team in 1995. He has collaborated on over 20 feature films and 50 commercials, including "Batman and Robin" (Joel Schumacher), "The Matrix Reloaded", "The Matrix Revolutions" and "Speed Racer" (Wachowski Brothers), "Alexander" (Oliver Stone), "Arthur and the Invisibles" (Luc Besson), "Spider-Man 3" (Sam Raimi), "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight" (Chris Nolan), and recently "Knowing" (Alex Proyas). As the Supervisor of SFX development, Dominique is involved in graphic and technical research in addition to supervising the post-production.