The sequence you did for the first Sherlock Holmes movie had a lot of "succes" for itself. On youtube, you can found tutorial to do animation in the Sherlock way... Even myself, as a designer, I get some clients briefs than can be summerized as "we want to Sherlock Holmes effects" ;) On your side, I also see a Vicks commercial for which the brief must have been the same... Knowing that, how did you start to work on the second movie ? Do you share what U2 feel after recording Achtung baby ;) ?

Well, actually I started by doing things that were in the opposite direction - I came up with an idea Ilya Abulhanov worked with me on that involved a 3d chessboard connected to cables and all of these moving boxes that opened up and released all kind of objects from Holme's study - notes, pill bottles, books etc. VFX Supervisor Jose Ortiz and his team made an excellent motion test to prove the concept.

All the producers and the director loved it, but in the last hour they decided to do the same kind of thing again. It was sad at first but once we got going we were able to find ways to overcome repeating ourselves completely. I thought it would be good to have everything painted on this time and to make better use of 3d space. We were also to add more detail to the illustrations and render everything more like real paper.

Does the movie team, or Guy Ritchie himself, gave you a biref this time or follow you seeing what you have done on the first movie ?

When they decided to do the same kind of things as last, they gave us a brief of making everything look like the magazine TheStrand - a very popular mag that was read by everyone around the turn of the century. It was probably the Vanity Fair or Interview Magazine of the day. I asked one of our producers Kate Berry to find the earliest copy of the original Holmes stories she could find. Luckily, she was able to find an old Memoirs Of Sherlock Homes from @1900 that was in great shape, so we ended up using a lot of that for the page designs.