Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/426326
www.postmagazine.com 19 POST NOVEMBER 2014 ing in and smothering the town at one point, and the majority of that is achieved in-camera. "Scott Fisher, our special eff ects coor- dinator, did an amazing job actually mak- ing a physical dust storm — with great big air movers out on the set and blow- ing dust through the streets. But when we established the thing, we see the big dust clouds coming towards us — that was a computer-generated eff ect. So there was quite a lot of physics simula- tion work that went into that. We spent a lot of time looking at archived footage of real dust storms — and, of course, look- ing at the old 16mm B&W fi lms and The Dust Bowl itself, that amazing Ken Burns documentary, which was a big source of inspiration. What was interesting about that work was that it sort of set the tone for a lot of the terrestrial work." What about the other planets? "Later on, our astronauts travel across the universe and they land on this water planet, which is very close to the black hole, and one of the eff ects of the black hole is that it raises these colossal waves on the surface of the planet. There's an actual location we found in Iceland, this amazing coastal lagoon, which is about two feet deep, fed by glacial melt water, and it stretches off completely fl at in all directions for about two or three miles. We erected our space ship set in there, and we had our cast lumbering around in the water. "What we had to do digitally, were these giant waves. The idea is, these waves are truly enormous — they are 4,000-foot- high mountains of water, bigger than any wave we've seen on Earth. And, this sweeps up the spacecraft and they go on this wild, roller coaster ride down the back of the wave, and we did a bit of work there. Again, Scott Fisher provided us with water canons on the location to have water hitting the spacecraft and hitting the cast. But everything else was done with visual eff ects, which meant, simulating this giant wave, which we animated using straightforward animation performers, so we could control the shape very carefully with what you might consider to be, for lack of a better term, traditional computer animation techniques." How diffi cult were the water scenes? "To create the surface of the water over this thing, there's a huge amount of physics simulation that went into that. Using our own proprietary [fl uid simula- tion system], Squirt, and a lot of off -the- shelf software [including Maya, Houd- ini, Nuke, Photoshop, Renderman and Mantra], it was a very laborious process. Remember, we're doing this all at IMAX resolution and I would see an early ani- mation of the wave sweeping the space ship up and I would say, 'Great, now let's add all the wave crests, the spray, the white water and the foam.' On average, it would be at least a month or six weeks before I would see anything because it would take that long to crunch all the numbers. It was a tricky process, but the result is truly spectacular. I think that visual eff ects, at their best, can really take you to a place that doesn't exist, yet make it look believable." Wasn't there also an ice planet? "Yes, the third of the planetary environ- ments we fi lmed on-location in Ice- land. We went down into a glacier, and we spent a week out on one of these extraordinary glaciers and the weather was incredibly challenging. At one point, we had a 100-mile-an hour windstorm that blew us off the glacier and we were pelted by rocks and ash from volcanic planes. You can see a little bit of that in the fi lm. Matt Damon and Matthew Mc- Conaughey are inside their space suits, so they were protected a little bit and could keep acting, but you can see there's one bit where Matt Damon is getting belted by the wind. Shortly after, we were kicked off the glacier — it was unsafe. "The glacier itself looks incredible and it gave us this amazing reality. But we also had these big green and black volcanic mountains, and this black volcanic ash covered in green moss. And, as spectacular as that looked, we didn't want to have that because we didn't want to have any kind of clue that this was a terrestrial environment. So, we replaced all of that with digital matte paintings, environments created from both the landscapes of Iceland, and also with lots of aerial footage that I shot with the helicopter crew over clouds and cloudscapes that we found over Iceland. So, doing all this 3D work, soaring landscapes of big arches of ice and rock and stuff that soar over the landscape. The idea is, on this planet, it doesn't have any real surface in the classical sense. That's all the planetary work." Stars Hathaway and McConaughey. The fi lm features more than 700 VFX, all created by Double Negative. VISUAL EFFECTS www.postmagazine.com FOR MORE ON DOUBLE NEGATIVE'S UNIQUE APPROACH TO CREATING THE SPACECRAFT ENDURANCE, THE ROBOTS TARS AND CASE, AND THE REAL-LIFE SCIENCE BEHIND IT ALL, VISIT US ONLINE AT For the water surface, Double Negative relied on its proprietary Squirt fl uid simulation system, along with Maya and Houdini.