Maybe it’s a kind of penance, or community service. Now that German director Roland Emmerich has successfully savaged the planet in every imaginable way in his big-budget S&M epic 2012, he and his visual effects team are hard at work building a major city from scratch for their next collaboration, Anonymous. The new film, which began prepping last week in Germany, is a literary-political thriller that explores whether the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by the 17th Earl of Oxford. To give the new movie the same level of visual authenticity as 2012 — on one twentieth the VFX budget! — visual effects supervisors Volker Engel and Marc Weigert are constructing 16th-century London by developing an existing CGI technique in ways they say have never been done before.

“It’s called photogrammetry,” Weigert told 30 Ninjas. “What you do is, you can build models in the computer based on photos only, so I could photograph your house, for instance, from several different angles, put that in the computer, and based on those photos I can build a 3-D model of that house, map those photographs on it like a wallpaper, and then it looks like a real building.” The pair used the technique in 2012, and plan to make it faster and more expansive for Anonymous.

So how do you get hold of photographs of Shakespeare’s London, when the camera wasn’t invented for another three centuries? Several weeks ago, Weigert criss-crossed England by car, logging more than 5,000 miles as he shot high-resolution digital photos of every 16th-century house, church, and stable he could find.

“Of course, we’ll have to alter it a little bit because there’s always new elements — new signage, new windows, it’s not dirty enough, and so on,” Weigert said. “But otherwise, we’ll use all these buildings, pop them all together, and make a big city out of them.”

Sounds convincing enough, so why do I have trouble believing that Roland Emmerich is capable of building such an elaborate city without immediately turning around and smashing it to smithereens? What sounds more likely to you as Emmerich’s next movie, anyway? A period film about Elizabethan drama, or Godzilla vs. The Bard?

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s VFX Wizards Reveal How They Flattened the White House With an Aircraft Carrier and Scared the Bejesus Out of Director Roland Emmerich (Part 3)
• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s Visual Effects Wizards Tell Us How They Destroyed the World in 1,315 Simple Steps (Part 1)
• Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s VFX Geniuses Reveal How They Flooded the Himalayas (and Sent That Poor Monk Scurrying for His Snorkel) (Part 2)
• Sony Tells Congress Anonymous Was the PSN Security Breach Culprit
• Anonymous Targets Sony
• 2012 Review: The End Is Near! (But Not Near Enough)