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www.postmagazine.com 28 POST JUNE 2015 TOMORROWLAND needed to look iconic from a distance." The audience will first see that iconic look beneath the Disney logo in the opening of the film. 1984 ALL OVER AGAIN It's the teenage girl Casey, cast as a modern-day Frank, who visits the ide- alized 1984 Tomorrowland. The story takes place in 2014-2015, but when Casey receives a pin identical to the one Athena had given Frank 50 years earlier, the pin sends her back in time to 1984. "The only time we see Tomorrowland flourishing is in Casey's pin experience, which is only a vision," Pasquarello says. "She takes a five-minute walk through all of Tomorrowland and experiences the full Utopian vision." Although her walk plays as one con- tinuous shot, several locations provided the setting. Compositors at ILM pieced together 15 individual parts shot on Stea- dicam in Canada (British Columbia and Alberta), Spain, and Florida, to create the fantasy world. The shot begins with Casey in a wheat field. "The gag is that she thinks she's in Tomorrowland, but she's in her current reality," says compositing supervisor Francois Lambert. On location, Casey — that is, Britt Robertson — mimed pressing her fingers against a window. ILM artists added white spots to make the pressure con- vincing and re-positioned her hands. "She didn't really lock her hands into place," Lambert says. "We placed the geometry of the hands in 3D space and placed her hands over the geometry to see how much sliding she was doing. We warped her hands to match her perfor- mance to the 3D hands, articulated her arm to keep her hands in position, and reconstructed the wheat field." Then, the compositing action really began. Lambert points to the monitor and counts eight different moments — plates shot in eight different locations — that they needed to stitch together seamlessly. "Basically, she's experiencing life in Tomorrowland," Lambert says. "In the big reveal, we have swimmers diving down from one floating pool to another. We needed to make that look realistic. For shots inside the monorail, we stitched two or three plates together: one shot on bluescreen in Vancouver and another shot in Valencia." When the pin starts to run out of time, Casey gradually moves from her vision- ary trip into Tomorrowland back into the real world. "You see her starting to get wet, then she's walking through water, and in 10 seconds, she's inside a swamp in Florida," Lambert says. "So, the shot starts with her in a wheat field, journeys through the city, and ends up in a swamp. It was the biggest work we had to do in terms of time and resources. And, it's all in 4K HDR, which added to the complexity." ABSTRACT EFFECTS The three Tomorrowlands and a Paris sequence that involves a rocket ship rip- ping through the Eiffel Tower (see "Paris to the Moon" sidebar, online), all needed to be grounded in reality. Other effects were more artistic. What, for example, does a portal effect that goes through a tachyon — a hypothetical particle that moves faster than light — look like? "We needed to send our hero back into Tomorrowland through a time portal," Lambert says. "It was pretty challenging because it's all up to inter- pretation. We had some designs, but when they moved into compositing, they needed to be animated. So, we had to come up with a look that matched the director's vision. We did that with RGB passes as well as multiple effects passes. It was all done in compositing." Similarly, the compositing artists needed to create a time-bomb effect and gun blasts from concept art de- signs. "We must have done 50 different looks," Lambert says. "The director said he wanted a look that was like television from the '50s, that when you looked at the bubble, you'd see that static on old TVs. We did lots of rounds on how to interpret that. Even the gun blasts had a '50s retro-futuristic look." One of the first sequences the ILM team worked on set the tone for the rest of the film. In that sequence, audio ani- matronics break into Frank's house. "We chop them into bits," Pasquarel- lo says. "Even the shapes left by their weapons. It played out like a comic book. It set the tone for Brad's sensibility of action and fun." Most sci-fi films rely heavily on visual effects, and Tomorrowland is no exception, but the effects in this film are not typical because the story is so atypical. And, because some of the best and brightest helped design and create them. www.postmagazine.com FOR THE FULL 'TOMORROWLAND' STORY, VISIT US ONLINE AT ILM seamlessly pieced together more than a dozen locations for the "1984" sequence.