VANCOUVER — Sony Pictures’ much-anticipated Angels & Demons arrives in theaters Friday, and while the Ron Howard-helmed thriller was filmed in L.A and Rome, some of the most impressive shots were created at CIS Vancouver.

The post shop was one of four visual effects companies — and the only one outside London — to work on the follow-up to 2006’s The Da Vinci Code.

CIS Vancouver did about 200 of the 1,000 effects shots, mostly recreating the interiors of three cathedrals in Rome that the Catholic Church denied the filmmakers access to: St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, Santa Maria della Vittoria and Santa Maria del Popolo.

‘When you go inside these churches your first reaction is awe and the second is ‘Holy crap, we have to reconstruct this,” says CIS Vancouver VFX supervisor Mark Breakspear, who worked with a team of 40, including VFX producer Chris Anderson.

‘When you see how massive the spaces are; all the sculptures and columns, how the light works in different areas and reflects on the marble floor, you realize what a massive amount of data your eye receives in one second,’ he explains.

In Angels & Demons, Tom Hanks reprises the role of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, who is summoned to the Vatican to prevent an ancient secret society’s plan to kill four Roman Catholic cardinals and destroy Vatican City. Ewan McGregor and Avelet Zurer also star.

The filmmakers chose CIS Vancouver because Breakspear and other members of his team worked on The Da Vinci Code, when the shop was known as Rainmaker Visual Effects.

To recreate the three churches, the team used a similar process as on The Da Vinci Code: combining CG technology with numerous still photos of the interiors, photographed during their visits as tourists.

But while they took an astounding 20,000 interior photos of one Paris church for Da Vinci, they covered all three Roman cathedrals in Angels with about the same number.

‘Since Da Vinci we have refined and matured our process, and developed tools that allow us to combine photos and recreate images in many ways without having to use as many photographs taken from every angle,’ explains Breakspear. ‘We have our own secret recipe — it is all in the way you deal with the images you photograph and build the model and light it. The real challenge came from the increased scale of the spaces we were trying to build.’

Another challenge was the clean-up work — the team had to remove tourists from all the photos — and lighting.

‘We had to take the sunlight out of the pictures as the movie takes place at night, so we had to re-light our photos,’ says Breakspear.

From the outset, the CIS team worked closely with the movie’s DOP, Salvatore Totino.

‘He’s a world-class DP and we, as lowly CG nerds, didn’t want to create a space that he would have lit in a different way, so it was a very collaborative process,’ explains Breakspear. ‘We wanted to make sure he was buying into the lighting we were doing and he gave us ideas and suggestions to develop the look.’

In addition to the three churches, totaling 160 shots, CIS also worked on 40 shots for scenes in which Hanks travels in a car at breakneck speed, going from church to church in a race against time to try to save the kidnapped cardinals.

Shooting the car scenes in Rome would have caused too many headaches because of the difficulties in shutting down streets and all the traffic and pedestrian congestion.

‘The car scenes were shot green screen in L.A. and we added in the backgrounds,’ explains Breakspear. ‘These are tiny shots, but I think they are a really cool bit of work because they don’t jump out and say ‘I am a VFX shot.’ Ron Howard was so impressed with the end result that he commented that he will never do real driving shots again.’