Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/954507
www.postmagazine.com 18 POST MARCH 2018 BLACK PANTHER huge gorge. It took a tremendous amount of rendering and simulation." Because Wakanda's "golden city" and sur- rounding environment were so important to set the film's tone, the filmmakers began working with the crew at ILM early. Craig Hammack, who received an Oscar nomination last year for Deepwater Horizon, was the visual effects super- visor for this film at ILM. "Hannah [Beachler] had worked with Ryan [Coogler] to get the right Afro-futuristic feel, so we had a fair amount of concept art," Hammack says. "The nation was far ahead of the world in technolo- gy, but Ryan and Hannah wanted to feel the history. "Wakanda is hidden for protection, but it's present in today's world," Baumann explains. "The cities have skyscrapers, but they have a connection to Africa and the past." For example, although a traditional thatched roof wouldn't make sense on a 1,000-foot building, Coogler wanted to see a representation on skyscrapers. "They wanted the feeling of old-world mate- rials, even if built in steel," Hammack says. "We'd develop part of the city, and he'd say, 'Those glass domes don't belong here.'" To base the environment on locations in Africa, Baumann's team captured locations in South Africa, Lesotho, Uganda and near Zambia's Victoria waterfalls with photography and scans to give the visual effects studios photogrammetry and textures from those areas. "We expanded the valleys, but it gave us a real-world base and scale," Baumann says. "We'd drop footprints from cities we're accustomed to, like New York City and Chicago, into the valleys and see how they felt relative to the mountain size. The hard part was breaking away from the square blocks and building something with a circular, not gridded, base." AFRO-FUTURISTIC CITY A non-Wakandan traveling through or flying over Wakanda would see a poor African nation with small huts and farmers. They wouldn't see how carefully the Wakandans guard these borderlands, or that part of the apparently dense jungle seen from the air is a hologram. Wakandan spies in high-tech airships flying home from the outside world dive through the hologram to go inside their country, which harbors several different tribes and environments. Inside Wakanda, the people wear tribal costumes. Outside, they blend into whatever milieu they're investigating. The CG city built inside Wakanda by ILM artists in Vancouver and San Francisco occupies an area approximately three miles wide and six miles long, formed with two main centers created with con- centric rings. The palace is in one area; a business district occupies the other. "Different tribes are in distinct districts," Hammack says, "the Merchant Tribe, River Tribe, Mountain Tribe. As we did urban planning and layout, we tailored the architecture and colors to the tribes." ILM's generalist [digital environments] super- visor Dan Mayer was on set during filming in Atlanta to do some quick city-blocking. "Fortunately, that gave us a huge head start," Hammack says. "We got direct feedback from Ryan, Geoff and Hannah for a couple months, so we could hit the ground running in post produc- tion with a good organization of the city and how it fit into the landscape." Modelers at ILM built highly-detailed buildings in Autodesk's Maya — skyscrapers, medium-sized buildings, two-story storefronts and so forth — that went into kits that artists working in Autodesk's 3ds Max used to lay out the city and do look-de- velopment. They rendered the environments with Chaos Group's V-Ray. "We'd do a scatter plot of the layout to blanket the city," Hammack says. "Once we had that, we could divide the city into sections that we gave to artists to start building streets, adding larger structures and then smaller buildings around those. To make the city feel like it was built in a jungle, we created vast parts with relatively raw landscape and huge swaths of trees. We even put greenery on the buildings to ground them in that African forest feel." Practical sets in Atlanta provided environments for the actors to work in — a tribal council room with a bank of windows that, later, would show ILM's CG city outside. A market street with dirt roads and shop fronts that ILM extended. ILM artists also built environments for a dream sequence, burned the special herb beds and built the hero spaceship-like vehicle T'Challa flies in. That ship takes part, along with dragonfly-shaped airships built at Method Studios, in an aerial dog- fight ILM created during the third act. The dogfight starts outside the city, flies through the city, across a lake, into a canyon and through the canyon — a huge digital environment created at ILM. "The city was most difficult," Hammack says, "the scale and the aesthetics. Also, these long environment shots with slow flyovers. It was a huge part of the movie and important to get the flavor right. It helps the audience understand the history of the civilization, how they interact, and how they fit into the world. It felt like that tapes- try was one of the main goals of the movie." Most of the film's environments, predominantly created by ILM, were based on Africa.