Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/710451
www.postmagazine.com 23 POST JULY 2016 Summer B L O C K B U S T E R S Weigert further explains, "The tech- nology, of course, has changed tremen- dously. On the post side, all the vendors are using everything in the book — mostly Maya for animation, a lot of Houdini for particle effects and so on. Some vendors, including our own Uncharted Territory, are using 3D Studio Max. For rendering, we used V-Ray, Arnold and 3Delight — almost everything. What makes it a bit more difficult now than in the old days is obviously the vendors are not necessarily compatible with one another. And that's always a big challenge, because you have to split up the work. "For example, most of the single parts are too big for any single vendor, especial- ly if it comes down to a time crunch at the end. So, you have to split things up. But you also want to avoid having vendors doing double work with one vendor hav- ing already built, let's say the Area 51 as a huge CG model with hangars and entire landscape and so on. You want to make sure another vendor can ingest that and that's always a big challenge. Every time you do that, the next vendor will have to then kind of reinvent the wheel in terms of rendering and trying to figure out the lighting and the shading and everything that's involved. That's something that's difficult and especially difficult if you're dealing with animated characters. That's why we kept all the regular aliens with one vendor, Image Engine, and then all the queen shots with one vendor, Weta. Otherwise, it would have been way too complicated and double work in the end." According to the two, the entire open- ing moon sequence in the first 20 minutes of the film was completed by MPC with a handful of shots completed by Trixter. Luxx in Germany completed the establish- ing shots of Washington, DC. "Sometimes those sequences were so huge there would be a break in the middle and one vendor would take over from another," says Weigert. "In terms of MPC's moon sequence, as the mother ship is approaching Earth, and arriving there, Scanline takes over and all the destruction on Earth that happens from anti-gravity engines and so on, is com- pleted by Scanline. The dogfight outside of the mother ship was completed by Digital Domain and then our heroes are flying inside the mother ship and that's all Uncharted Territory. So there are many sequences that are passed on from one vendor to the next." The overall size and scale of the film was also a challenge for the various visual effects teams. As Engel explains, "The scale is so enormous — the scale of the mother ship, everything that's happening in that movie — some of it is beyond compare." "The single biggest challenge of the movie was the scale of the mother ship," agrees Weigert. "There's this piece of di- alogue which I think is very funny, where a member of the White House staff says, 'Madam President, the ship is coming down over the Atlantic,' and somebody else asks, 'Which part?' and they re- spond, 'All of it.' (laughs). It's 3,000 miles in diameter. When it hits the ground, it either creates a big tsunami or smashes through half of Washington, DC. It's just an enormous scale. And, when I say scale, I don't necessarily mean the scale of the VFX shots, but to show the scale and size of this ship. It was so, so difficult. It was a little like with the Death Star [from Star Wars]. You had to get very detailed. It had these hundreds of thousands of tiny little lights on it, but this ship is so alien that you don't even have these lights. You have this kind of light pattern on it, and as you start getting closer and closer to it you have to figure out how to show the surface scale and that's another whole challenge." According to Engel and Weigert, pre- vis (completed by Uncharted Territory and Method Studios) also played a critical role in the making of the film. Emmerich relied heavily on an Ncam system, "framing every single blue- screen set extension shot," says Engel. He explains that on-set, "Emmerich was already able to see the gigantic hangar of the Area 51 interior with thousands of aircraft in there. That went so far that the shots were prepared in a way that Roland was able to say, 'I want to see five of the jet fighters lifting off,' and the actors would look after them and the camera would pan with the planes when they flew towards the exit, so all of that was quickly animated on-set right there, in realtime." Having caught the two just after viewing the scenes with Emmerich one last time, Engel says, "We were looking at these final tweaks and making sure all the visual effects shots worked well with all the live action, and it felt really good. You're usually dealing with all these puzzle pieces while you're making the movie, and don't always see the scenes completed. I was thinking, 'Wow, it comes together really nicely.' Resurgence features more than four times as many VFX as its 1996 predecessor.