Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
November 2009 20 n n n n Visual Effects studios that created the most complex sequences: "We didn't have a huge number of shots, but they were really hard shots with a specific type of destruction and specific problems to solve," says Mohen Leo, who supervised Digital Domain's 97 shots, which included the characters' terrifying flight through and over earthquake-riven Los Angeles. Alex Wuttke, visual effects supervisor at Double Negative, which destroyed Yellow- stone National Park and St. Peter's Basilica, also notes that the shot count was deceptive. "We had 200 shots, of which 130 were partic- ularly heavy 3D with ridiculously complicat- ed layers," he says. "We had creative challeng- es and technical challenges, and sometimes we just plain ran out of disk space." "I don't think we've ever pushed as much geometry through a raytracer as we did for this film," says Peter Nofz, VFX supervisor at Imageworks, where artists built mam- moth arks inside a digital cave in the digital Himalayan Mountains. Scanline floated those giant arks on waves that surged over mountains and, in another sequence, sent water rushing through Washington, DC. "Usually when you do effects, you have a range of shots," says Stephan Trojansky, visual effects su- pervisor. "We had huge tidal wave shots in dimensions no one had ever seen before, and hundreds of miles of floodwaters. It was really tough." As for Uncharted Territory, Engel believes they saved some of the most complex se- quences for themselves, especially the shots in which the characters drive through a Los Angeles earthquake in progress. "Every three seconds there's a new, big event," he says. "It was one of the most complicated in the movie in terms of all the destruction happening." Uncharted Territory: Breaking LA and Las Vegas, and the 'Hub' Early in the film, limousine driver Jackson Curtis arrives at his ex-wife Kate's house to rescue her and their children. Kate's boy- friend is there, too, so Curtis piles the whole group into the limo and makes a mad dash for the airport as a 10.5 earthquake col- lapses Los Angeles around him. Because the script didn't provide details beyond that, Uncharted Territory created a rough previs for the path Curtis would take, the events, and the camera angles along the way. Once approved, Pixomondo, which, according to Weigart, provided previs for 90 percent of the show (and which the postproduction houses highly praised), created the final pre- vis for the three-minute, 93-shot sequence. Weigart describes the action: "e fam- ily barely makes it out of the house. As they drive to the airport, the street ripples, buildings break, high-rises fall down, the big doughnut from Randy's Donuts rolls down the street. A cement truck slides off the freeway, right in front of the limo, and crashes into a gas station that explodes. To the right is a parking garage that col- lapses and spews out cars parked there. ey drive under the freeway as it breaks apart. And, at the end of the sequence, two glass high-rises tip over as the limo drives between. e high-rise on the left crashes into the building on the right, and as it crumbles, the limo escapes out on the other side. To create the sequence, the postproduc- tion team started with live-action elements of the limousine shot in Vancouver, Brit- ish Columbia, on an 800-foot-long asphalt road surrounded by bluescreen. For this film, Emmerich used a Panovision Genesis HD camera, which allowed Weigart to de- velop, with Sony and Imageworks, a 100 percent digital pipeline that Uncharted Territory used for its own workflow and as the hub for shots from other studios mov- ing through the process. "We had a 400tb server at Sony and a fiber-optics line," Weigart says. "As soon as the editors finished, we had software that converted the EDL [edit decision list], renamed the files, moved them onto our (At right, bottom) Uncharted Territory geared up to destroy LA buildings by helping fund Cebas development of a volume breaker for its ThinkingParticles software. (At right, top) A combination of simulations—rigid body for buildings and cars, soft body for trees, and cloth for grass—caused the all-digital environment to move realistically (above).