Author: Barbara Robertson

No question about it: Audiences will get their money’s worth of eye-popping, end-of-the-world vfx in Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie, 2012.

This month’s disaster-zeitgeist movie 2012 isn’t only about destruction, but when a story centers on the Mayan calendar’s end of the world in 2012 and the director is Roland Emmerich, you know that planet-wide destruction plays a major role. The wreckage begins with a crack in the firmament, soon ratchets way up to a big earthquake sequence in’where else?’Los Angeles and from there, all hell breaks loose.

Sixteen studios, under the overall supervision of co-producers Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, created the breakage. Engel and Weigert’s own Uncharted Territory led the mayhem by ripping apart the landscape in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for 400 shots. Studios that contributed around 100 shots or more included Digital Domain, Double Negative, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Scanline. Pixomondo, which previz’d the show, contributed 93 shots. Hydraulx had 60. Gradient, Evil Eye, Factory FX, UPP, The Post Office, Crazy Horse, Alex Lemke FX, Cafe FX and the Picture Mill shared the rest.

‘It wasn’t like we started with three studios and ended up with 16 because we didn’t get the shots done,’ says Volker. ‘We planned this from the beginning. We figured out who would be our best partners.’

Volker and Weigert chose Digital Domain, for example, to do the second half of the earthquake sequence in Los Angeles, which we see from the air. Double Negative bubbled up all the trouble in Yellowstone National Park. Imageworks and Scanline split the third act, with Imageworks creating huge arks inside a Himalayan mountain and Scanline providing the rush of water that floats the boats. Imageworks’ boat-building job extended sets on a massive scale, but for the most part, the studios’ work required rigid body simulation, fluid simulation and particle simulation to create fire, water, landslides, lava slides, earthquakes and general destructive chaos.

‘You can’t give these shots to small houses,’ Weigert says. ‘You have to give them to a sizeable house with the people, the pipeline, and the programmers who have done this before. So many mid-sized visual effects houses have closed down there’s literally a shortage of houses that can handle this kind of business.’

Splitting huge sequences into pieces helped manage the global destruction, as did finding smaller sequences for smaller studios. Hydraulx, for example, cracked a supermarket in half near the beginning of the film, and later destroyed Hawaii with volcanic eruptions and lava flow. ‘They are typical Hydraulx shots with complicated computer graphics and particle simulations,’ Engel says.

For their part, Engel and Weigert set up shop for their production company Uncharted Territory on the Sony Pictures studio lot. As they had for earlier projects’Independence Day and Coronado‘they staffed and equipped Uncharted Territory specifically for 2012, buying machines and software and hiring over 100 people to handle the effects and manage the project. ‘We wanted to be close to Roland [Emmerich] in editorial,’ Weigert says. And, close to the 400 terabyte server, too, that sent the digital files wherever needed during the post-production process thanks to a proprietary project management system, and then, when finally approved, moved them to editorial.

The artists working at Uncharted Territory used Autodesk’s Maya for modeling, 3ds Max for effects, and The Foundry’s Nuke for compositing. They also used Cebas’s finalRender, a hardware-accelerated ray tracer for rendering, and that company’s Thinking Particles system, a 3ds max plug-in, for the destruction.

‘We learned that they were developing a volume breaker that made it possible to destroy buildings without having to cut them apart by hand,’ Engel says. ‘We made a deal with them to finance part of their development, which gave us exclusivity during production and a close collaboration.’

To create the Los Angeles earthquake sequence, Engel and Weigert started with three lines from the script. ‘[The script] read kind of like, ‘They run out of the house and as they drive in the limo, buildings crumble around them,” Weigert says. ”And then they arrive at the airport.”

At first, they considered filming the route and replacing only the buildings they wanted to destroy, but they soon realized they’d need to create an entirely virtual environment except for the limousine, which they shot on a blue-screen stage in Vancouver. ‘In a lot of the shots, we even had to replace the road because it breaks in the shots,’ Engel says.

To expand the three lines into what became a three minute sequence, the crew at Uncharted Territory created a previz using simple geometry. ‘It was like a little LEGO set,’ Weigert says. Once Emmerich approved the basic idea, Weigert and Volker moved the previz on to Pixomondo, which previz’d around 90 percent of the film.

‘We had really good previz,’ says Mohen Leo, who was visual effects supervisor at Digital Domain for 2012. Digital Domain handled the L.A. earthquake sequence from the point at which the limousine arrives at the airport. ‘Pixomondo worked a long time to get the layout and camera that Roland [Emmerich] was really happy with. We did previz ourselves or made changes on a handful, but the whole flow was established. We just had to flesh it out.’

To do that, the Digital Domain crew shot reference for the parts in Los Angeles that Emmerich wanted to see destroyed in the fly-over, and then built break-apart models of buildings, fire hydrants, traffic lights and so forth to match. Proprietary technology split the geometry into pieces procedurally. To hold the objects together until they shattered, the studio developed Drop, which is custom code built around Bullet, an open source rigid body solver. Both proprietary systems worked inside Houdini, which gave artists the ability to manipulate the simulation.

For Scanline, though, the previz wasn’t as useful. ‘There’s a big difference between a polygon wave,’ says Stephan Trojansky, visual effects supervisor, referring to the previsualization of moving water, ‘and a simulation that shows in detail how the water moves.’ Finding the right speed to move the huge amounts of water realistically, yet within the time allotted for particular scenes, was a particular challenge because changing the speed of the simulation also changed the look. For example, water shooting off a fast moving wave vaporizes, but at a slower speed, looks like droplets.

At Double Negative, the challenges were literally groundbreaking. Using proprietary software implemented through Houdini, the studio caused a pool of lava to erupt through the Earth’s crust in Yellowstone Park and then created an ash cloud from which lava bombs and chunks of earth shoot after a fleeing RV.

‘This film pushed the limits of everything,’ Weigert says. ‘When you have to move and break the entire environment, it makes everything more than ten-fold as complex.’

When work on 2012 ended, Weigert and Volker disbanded Uncharted Territory, but will start it up again for Emmerich’s next film, which takes place in 16th century London. ‘When we learned we needed to create 100 percent photoreal environments, we just laughed,’ Weigert says. ‘We said, ‘No problem. Nothing has to break.”

Sony’s 2012 is now in theaters nationwide.

How the sharp crew at ILM helped shape the breath-taking, fiery climax for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Toward the end of Warner Bros.’ film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore and Harry travel to a secret cave to retrieve Slytherin’s locket, which contains a Horcrux, one-sixth of Voldermort’s soul. They arrive at a beach, 30-feet wide, and walk into a crystal cave. Inside the cave is an underground lake with a crystal island in the middle, which holds the locket. The dark, vast cave is protected by the Inferi, the trapped souls Voldermort has charged with defending his slice of soul. When they drag Harry into the water, Dumbledore conjures a firestorm 100-feet tall that scares the Inferi. As Harry swims to the surface, a firestorm swirls around Dumbledore and the Inferi quickly disappear.

A crew of around 60 people at Industrial Light & Magic worked for about a year to help bring this difficult, climactic scene to cinematic life, ‘We started with a small crew to develop the fire,’ says Tim Alexander, visual effects supervisor. ‘We didn’t know how to do it.’

While the fire developers worked on their magic trick, layout artists took the storyboards from the sequence and created visualizations of the parts of the cave that the camera would see. Director David Yates filmed two sections on set: the entry and the island. ILM created the rest. ‘We oriented the scene with our layout department, rendered those layouts, and did rudimentary lighting with a hardware render to give [visual effects supervisor] Tim Burke and the director a good sense of what the sequence would look like,’ Alexander says.

To build the cave, the crew developed two techniques. The first was to instance crystals using the crowd pipeline. ‘It’s a heavy approach,’ Alexander says, ‘but it gave us randomness and a crystalline structure.’ For the ceiling, they stacked pieces of simple do-nut shaped geometry and turned them into rectangular crystals with a shader. Matte paintings filled the far background.

The Inferi are CG characters that look like skinny people. Some shots have 10 Inferi; others had thousands. Animators keyframed the creatures in shots with less than 100. For shots with more than 100, the crew used particle simulation with sprites instanced onto cards. The cards have images of the animated creatures doing any of eight cycles for around 800 frames. ‘We rendered cycles and populated the whole underwater areas of the cave with sprites,’ Alexander says. Although they’re sprites, ILM didn’t bake in their lighting. Instead, the technical directors rendered multiple passes with normals so they could light the cards with 3D lighting.

To create the shot with the Inferi pulling Harry into the water, stunt actors in scuba equipment grabbed at actor Daniel Radcliffe and pulled him down into a tank of water on a green-screen stage. Radcliffe held his breath until the end of the take and then one of the scuba divers sitting just out of frame gave him a mouthpiece so he could breathe.

In the film, though, Harry/Radcliffe is in CG water. ‘When we’re underwater, it’s mostly about atmospherics,’ Alexander says. The crew rendered a water surface so when the camera points up and we see the surface turn orange from the fire, we also see water ripples. Otherwise, they achieved the illusion that Harry is underwater because his hair and clothes truly are floating. When seen from above, the water is a CG plane with a 2D simulation on top for displacement that’s rendered with refraction.

Framing the Firestorm Finale

For the firestorm, which Alexander describes as looking like a giant wildfire in the forest, the crew considered using a heavy-duty particle sim that they would render volumetrically. ‘That’s the standard approach,’ Alexander said. ‘But [CG supervisor] Chris Horvath had another idea.’

One of the reasons fire simulations had not been as realistic as they wanted in the past was that it took too much compute power and time to simulate them in high resolution. Horvath’s light-bulb idea was that because edge detail is more important than depth when simulating fire, it might make sense to do the simulation in two dimensions rather than in a three-dimensional volume. That would allow them to concentrate all the compute power on a full 2K image, rather than reduce the resolution to simulate the fire in three dimensions.

The trick would be to create the realistic motion. The answer was to start with a low-resolution 3D simulation to produce a fluid particle motion. Then, to slice the volume like a loaf of bread and do high-resolution simulations on the slices in two dimensions. The number of particles in a slice affected the temperature, and therefor, the color. ‘When it’s really hot, we get less smoke and more fire,’ Alexander says. ‘When it’s cool, we have more smoke and less fire.’ As the simulation runs’that is, as the fire burns’parameters control the type of fire, which can range from a bonfire to a lava flow.

To render the scene’the crystal cave, the water, and the flames’wasn’t as difficult as it might seem. ‘The question was how black is black,’ Alexander says. ‘It’s a dark cave with two light sources without the fire. When we see the fire, we have internal scattering and refraction on the crystals, but the cave is so huge, it gets dimmer behind the island.’

This is the third Harry Potter film that Alexander has worked on at ILM, and although the studio’s work represented only 160 shots, the shots required new technology and painstaking work. ‘One thing that was really nice is that we got involved at a design level,’ Alexander says. ‘Second, having all our shots in one sequence meant we could really dig in and do the whole thing. It was a moderate-sized Potter for us, but focusing in on one sequence with water, fire and a giant environment was really nice.’

Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens in U.S. theaters on July 15.

Up, the 10th feature from John Lasseter’s unbeatable hit-making studio is described as a ‘coming of old age’ movie and travels to some unchartered territories.

Sometimes the most amazing animated projects simply begin with just a single image. ‘We were goofing around and someone drew a house with a bunch of balloons floating it,’ says Pete Docter, who shares directing honors with Bob Peterson for Disney/Pixar’s latest feature animation, Up. ‘As animators, we aren’t always the most social people, although we can be, and sometimes we like to get away,’ notes Peterson. ‘So, we do what anyone would do, which is tie balloons to our house and fly away.’

But who lives in the floating house? As Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and Peterson (story writer on Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and story artist on Toy Story 2) searched their imaginations for an unusual character, they realized that a senior citizen, the kind of character Walter Matthau might play or The New Yorker cartoonist George Booth might draw, had never starred in an animated feature.

‘The thought of a cranky old guy with brightly colored balloons made us laugh,’ Peterson says. And thus began the animated life of grumpy old Carl Frederick, retired balloon salesman and widower, in 2004. For the next three years or so, Docter, Peterson and storyboard artist Ronnie del Carmen pulled Carl back through his childhood and propelled him forward into his future. In Up‘s opening scenes, we learn that Carl and his wife had wanted to have a great adventure like their hero, the pilot Charles Muntz, but life always got in the way. So, when Carl finally adventures off in his balloon-powered house, he pilots toward his long-lost dream. An enhanced version of Pixar’s dynamics program made it possible for 10,000 balloons to interact in the wind’and crash land at exactly the right place.

‘In our first draft we had him crash land on a tropical island,’ Docter says. ‘But, that’s been done so often. The table-top mountains in Venezuela gave us everything we needed. They could be stuck somewhere in a way we’d never seen before.’

‘They’ includes Russell, an excitable eight-year-old boy who accidentally stows away on Carl’s floating house. Russell isn’t the only member of Carl’s new family, though.

‘Most characters have empty parts that the other characters can help fill,’ Docter says. ‘Carl lost his wife and he’s not connected to life in any exciting way. Russell is all excited about everything, and he doesn’t have a father. But, Carl is a tough guy to turn. We needed more than just one character.’

The other characters include a 13-foot tall exotic bird and a goofy dog named Dug who talks via a high-tech collar that translates his thoughts into words. ‘Pete and I are lifelong dog lovers and big fans of fantasy movies that keep you surprised,’ Peterson says. ‘So when the idea of a talking dog came along, we decided to try it. It’s more emotional to hear the thoughts of a dog, and the collar afforded us a way to have natural dog behavior while their thoughts were coming out.’

Dug, a Golden Retriever/Lab mix voiced by Peterson, has a big nose and an extra floppy tongue. He’s a nerd and eager to please. Though when we meet the rest of the talking dog pack, led by Alpha, a Doberman also voiced by Peterson with an electronic assist; Beta, a Rottweiler; and Gamma, a Bulldog, we soon realize they would rather hunt than please.

‘We barely exaggerate anything with the dogs,’ says Scott Clark, supervising animator. ‘The way we animate them is dog-like. But, they have almost human expressions built into their rigs that add a little flavor. I loved cracking the code with the dogs.’

Odd Bird

Kevin the bird, on the other hand, a giant flightless creature with an orange beak, long blue neck and purple tail feathers, gave the animators a way to stretch their wings.

‘We gave it realistic motion, but it can do silly things,’ Clark says. ‘We had a lot of fun animating Kevin. It cradles Russell like a baby and throws him up in the air like a monkey. Pete came up with the idea of having the bird’s eyes always stuck in the middle to give it a dumb quality.’

For the human characters, Pixar leaned toward caricatured versions of real people, and those caricatured designs affected the performances. ‘Ricky and I tend to be attracted to simplified characters,’ Docter says, referring to production designer Ricky Nierva.

For example, Carl, voiced by Ed Asner, is only three heads tall. He has a square head, square liver spots, and stocky arms and legs. His default expression is a scowl. ‘He’s an old man who has shriveled into his suit,’ Clark says. ‘He’s so short, it looked like he didn’t have elbows and knees, so for certain poses we lengthened his arms and legs in the rig. It’s like the kind of cheat we’d do in drawn animation.’

The caricatured design also had an impact on cloth simulation. ‘We have an amazing tailoring system, but we’ve never had a character quite this pushed,’ Docter says. ‘We wanted the cloth to look real, but we didn’t want a ton of wrinkles when he bent his knees. It took a lot of back and forth.’

To create the 78-year-old’s performance, the animators concentrated on ‘less is more’ as well. ‘The key to his success was not moving him,’ Clark says. ‘I remember something Chuck Jones told me as an intern, that animators most of the time think of over-pushing things. You can exaggerate. But sometimes, ‘exaggerated’ is how much you don’t move.’ Sometimes, for example, the animators would leave Carl’s face sculpted into one pose and just have him blink.

Russell, by contrast, is in constant motion. Pixar found Jordan Nagai, who provides Russell’s voice, through a multi-city casting call that resulted in 400 voices to consider. ‘[Jordan] was talking about activities at home and he made me smile just by talking,’ Docter says. ‘But, he wasn’t an actor and wasn’t very interested in pretending. So, we did a lot of physical activities with him. I’d hold his arms and tell him to see if he could wriggle free while saying, ‘Let me go.’ Or, I’d have him run, run, run, up to a microphone before he’d say a line.’

The animators loved the result. ‘We had the same quality as from an improv performance, or a Nick Park film,’ Clark says. ‘There was something about having a non-actor that makes Russell seem more human. I love the dogs, but I also love it when something quirky and human comes through in a character. That’s the hardest thing to get’true human acting and emotion. This film has it in spades.’

The Simple Art of Blocking

Working with Clark were three directing animators, Shawn Krause, Dave Mullins and Michael Venturini, who cast groups of animators by action and emotion’an animator who is particularly good with acting would work on subtext; another who excels with physics and weight would handle action shots.

All the animators started by presenting a first blocking pass during dailies. ‘They show a basic series of poses,’ Clark says. ‘A palette of acting ideas. The best animators have an elegant sense of blocking. They use the fewest amount of controls and poses to tell the most.’

Clark believes that constructing the scenes in this slow way through dailies builds the best performances. He uses a scene with Muntz, voiced by Christopher Plummer, as an example. ‘Something’s not quite right in Muntz’s head but we didn’t want to play him crazy, just suggest that in a subtle way. We did that through dailies, through animators seeing each other’s work. It’s like Brad Bird says, ‘The best animator is all of us together.”

Pixar is known for creating animated films that tell new and interesting tales, that open audiences’ minds to an art of animation that extends beyond cartoons. Up is a masterful extension of that tradition.

‘This is some of the most fun I’ve had working on a Pixar film,’ Clark says. ‘I really enjoy the fact that we’re making new stories that will be around in 50 years, not just cranking out merchandise.’

Disney/Pixar’s Up was the opening-night movie at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (May 13). The feature is currently playing in theaters nationwide.