Despite Life Of Pi's many fantastical ingredients, including an island with enough mystery meerkats to launch its own insurance company, Ang Lee insisted that all its elements were grounded in reality. The need to cleave close to the natural world for inspiration provided its VFX crews with a challenge that sent them scurrying to some unusual places. Dossiers of photos, or 'references', assembled during the research process were a handy go-to guide for complex CG shots.

"Everything we did had to be based on something real, so to recreate the freighter Tsimtsum, we used 1960s freighter designs and blueprints. We also went down to Vancouver harbour and shot thousands of photos of ships to get details of hulls and portholes. We also did a cyberscan of Suraj (Sharma) using hundreds of photos, so we could build a visual version of him for the shots Ang couldn't get in the tank."