Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/526878
8 cgw m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 5 by a retro future, a '50s view of the future, we also looked at contemporary and green archi- tects," 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 sculp- tural 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 mostly 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 build- ings, flying cars, and other ob- jects in Tomorrowland. North- cutt, who came from a digital matte-painting background, relied on Adobe's Photoshop and Autodesk's 3ds Max. "Once the generalist [the dig- ital 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 buildings. 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 dystopian 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, getting 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 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. 1 9 8 4 A L L O V E R A G A I N It's the teenage girl Casey, cast as a modern-day Frank, who visits the idealized 1984 Tomor- rowland. 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 Tomor- rowland 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 experi- ences the full Utopian vision." Although her walk plays as one continuous shot, several locations provided the setting. Compositors at ILM pieced together 15 individual parts shot on Steadicam 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 Fran- cois Lambert. "Then she hits an invisible wall." On location, Casey – that is, Britt Robertson – mimed press- AT TOP, THE ENTRANCE TO THE 1964 WORLD'S FAIR CREATED BY ARTISTS AT INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MAGIC. AT BOTTOM, ILM ARTISTS ALSO BUILT THE 1984 TOMORROWLAND SEEN IN A VISION.