Swordfish.

The Prime Focus Film division in North America for film VFX was previously known as Frantic Films VFX.

The opening sequence of 'Swordfish' , known as 'the Ventura Bank scene', was supposed to end with a massive explosion. Initially, nobody knew exactly how to make the ubiquitous movie explosion 'special'. In the end, VFX Supervisor, Boyd Shermis and director Dominic Sena decided the best way to do this would be to create the largest bullet time shot ever attempted.

After working with Boyd and being nominated for an Emmy with him for work on Stephen King's 'Storm of the Century'. Frantic was called in to create and design the pre-vizualization for the sequence. A detailed computer model of a Ventura street corner was created to animate the elements within the shot allowing the creative team to move the virtual camera to fully design the template for the shot. The final design created was incredibly ambitious and would become the largest single visual effects sequence ever used in a Warner Bros. feature.

Creating the Shot
When the opportunity arose to create the visual effects for this massive shot, Frantic was up for the challenge and beat a number of top visual effects houses to win the contract.

There was a staggering amount of raw footage at an incredibly high 6K VistaVision resolution. The Frantic 3D team created hundreds of elements used in the shot, including ball bearings, glass, smoke and an insane amount of shrapnel. In fact, in the end, 491 of the 526 elements of the 42-second shot were entirely computer generated!

Eleven of the 18 stuntmen were created as computer generated stunt doubles, and appear in frame beside real stuntmen. It was a difficult proposition, but proof of Frantic's success came when the director and producer could not tell which stuntmen were synthetic and which were real.

In the end, the resulting feature film imagery created was called "outstanding, exciting, convincing and seamless" by Boyd Shermis.

Overall the shot delivered the 'Kaboom' that Joel Silver wanted and Dominic and Boyd envisioned.