Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/526086
www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JUNE 2015 ousel of Progress" in Walt Disney World; a Bahamian beach; Paris; the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain; Cape Canaveral in Florida; a winter wheat farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta, Canada; and a cornfield in British Columbia. One practi- cal set, the Bridgeway Plaza, which took six months to build, is half the size of a football field and features a fully-func- tional monorail. Even so, the majority of ILM's work was in creating digital environments and set extensions, according to Pasquarello. TOMORROWLAND — TIMES THREE "We visit Tomorrowland three times," Pasquarello says. "When Frank was a child in 1964, again in 1984, and the third, when things go wrong." In the film, the 1964 Tomorrowland is under construction, the 1984 version is an idealized city seen in a vision, and the third is a dystopian version of Tomorrow- land. Although Disney's first Tomorrow- land opened in 1955, it was Walt Disney's vision of tomorrow for the 1964–65 New York World's Fair that captured the imag- ination of Tomorrowland writer Lindelof and, soon, writer/director Bird. It began with a mystery box discov- ered accidentally in a Disney Studios closet. The box, labeled "1952," contained models and blueprints, photographs, and letters related to the inception of Tomorrowland and the 1964 World's Fair. Lindelof imagined that the contents were a guide to a secret story that nobody knew, and a place called Tomorrowland that was not a theme park but existed somewhere in the real world. So, the Tomorrowland writers send young Frank to the World's Fair. He is carrying, in his backpack, a jet pack that he made from Electrolux vacuum cleaner parts. He visits the "Carousel of Prog- ress" and sees a demo of the "Probability Machine" in the IBM pavilion. When he sits on a bench, a character named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) gives him a pin. Odd. Frank picks up his pack, moves on, and sneaks aboard an "It's A Small World" boat. "We had to faithfully re-create Disney rides at the World's Fair, true to what they looked like in 1964," Pasquarello says. "We were able to use some things that they shot in Disney theme parks, and then did set extensions — the Pepsi booth, the "Tower of the Four Winds." We used the water ride entrance at Dis- ney and added a monorail." As the Small World boat nears the Eiffel Tower, a laser scans Frank's new pin. The track drops, becomes a ramp, and shoots the boat downward. Frank is alone, underneath Small World, in a secret pas- sage, and on his way to Tomorrowland. After Frank enters Tomorrowland, he finds his way to the top of an unfinished skyscraper. From there, he sees builder robots hard at work, and he meets one named Goliath (see "Animating Giants," sidebar online). When a series of events causes him to fall, he straps on his homemade jet pack, and, in an all-CG shot, takes us on a great fly-through of Tomorrowland under construction. "The environment is all ours," Pasquarello says. "Brad [Bird] wanted ev- erything in an under-construction phase. The art director, Scott Chambliss, worked with a lot of people here for years." Thang Le, ILM's visual effects art director, spent three years designing environments for the film with help from concept artist Brett Northcutt. The artists imagined buildings in their finished form and under construction. "Although we were inspired by a retro future, a '50s view of the future, we also looked at contemporary and green architects," Northcutt says. "Zaha Hadid. Santiago Calatrava. The MAD architects in China." Northcutt pages through concept art on his monitor. U-shaped buildings. X-shaped buildings. Spirals. Buildings covered with plants. "Brad pushed us to do sculptural and whimsical shapes," Northcutt says. "Tomorrowland has technology that makes physics unnecessary, so we drew buildings inspired by fern fronds. Thang did tree-inspired buildings that are most- ly gardens. There were six of us throwing out ideas as fast as possible." The team then created the city using buildings and aspects of buildings that Bird preferred. Le primarily worked in The Foundry's Modo (formerly from Luxology) to create the buildings, flying cars, and other objects in Tomorrowland. Northcutt, who came from a digital matte-painting background, relied on Adobe's Photoshop and Autodesk's 3DS Max. "Once the generalist [the digital matte-painting] group put the city together, we realized that some areas weren't tall enough and the shapes looked too conventional," Northcutt says. "So we went for more sculptural build - ings. We moved buildings around to give the idea of a swooping landscape. We added a waterfall and 'Space Mountain' from Disneyland. Then Thang [Le] spent time coming up with a final design." To show the futuristic buildings under construction, Le designed an extruder that 3D-printed a building made from rings. "The extruder fires up and makes non-concentric rings to form a helix," Northcutt says. Finally, to change the ideal world into one overcome by destruction, the artists chose not to add wear and tear to the buildings. Instead, they created the dys- topian Tomorrowland using both lighting and mood. "Designing a city with all that detail was hard," Northcutt says. "When you're just designing individual buildings, you can pull from a lot of sources. But, get- ting them to sit in the environment with a sense of urban planning was daunting. We tied them together using a super tower in the background. Tomorrowland Tomorrowland is represented at different points in time, including 1964's World's Fair (top).