Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57248
n n n n Visual Effects Planet Hollywood While Double Negative and The Moving Picture Company artists had their hands full of character development and ani- mation, Cinesite moved ahead with the environments, eventu- ally creating four different areas of Mars in 800 shots: the city of Zodanga, the city of Helium, the air battles, and the thern sanctuary (see Thern Blue, pg. 14). Sue Rowe led the visual effects effort at Cinesite. a time when the director says, 'Wouldn't it be great if…,' and we were able to accommodate that with Carter." When we first see Zodanga, it's a power-of-ten shot through the clouds onto the surface. "Suddenly, you're be- hind the city, looking at these holes in the ground where the city mined the resources and left it," Rowe says. "When you go inside, it's like Mumbai, a huge, bustling, overpopulated city. Then, when you go to the top, the quarters are all clean and beautiful." Cinesite modelers built Zodanga work- ing from artwork by art director Ryan Church. To populate the giant vessel, the crew photographed people on set and used Massive software to control their movement. "We shot on sets in the UK in winter, and every day it rained," Rowe says. "The sets weren't big enough. There were trees, motorways. I thought, How will I make this look like Mars? But we did a lot of prepara- tion with greenscreen coverage. In a lot of the wide establishing shots, we removed the real set and replaced it with a digital set. That's the advantage of building [com- plete 3D models of] these cities for real. We can swing the camera around and do what we want. One of the things I'm most proud of is the city of Zodanga." The production crew built the set for Helium in a warehouse in North London, which had enough interior ground space. In Edgar Rice Burroughs' version of Mars history, and in the film, Zodangans and Heliumites, two cultures of men whose red tattoos depict their station and rank, have been fighting each other for centuries, largely in solar-powered airships with wings that spread for hundreds of meters to capture light. Zodangans live in a mile-long metal tanker that crawls over Mars, a moving refinery that drills for radium, a disappearing resource. Stanton describes Zodanga as a city that "picks a spot, hunkers down, takes what it wants, and moves on. A majority of poor citizens live wherever they can within the superstructure, just trying to make do, and then you've got the few elite who reside up in the palace." Helium is the opposite. A solid city constructed of stone, grounded, with a Palace of Light in the center. "It's white, pure, like a blue droplet of water in this harsh Martian en- vironment," Rowe says. To Heliumites, the well-being of its citizens is important. This is home to Princess Dejah Thoris, John Carter's love interest in the film. Rather than use matte paintings, Rowe had the artists at Cinesite build complete 3D environments. "I was keen about that after doing Golden Compass and Prince of Persia," she says. "You need to build these things because of the scope you can get within a big 3D city. And, because there's always 16 February/March 2012 "The problem was that it wasn't very high, and the camera needed to look up 400 feet at a central building. So, work- ing from Halon's previs, I did a tech vis." In the tech vis, given the camera and film format, Rowe calculated which lens would give the director what he wanted and where to place the camera. Stanton shot much of the film in Utah, so Rowe and a few others came from London to shoot photo reference and watch the process. "It was the hottest place I've been in, but the environment was amazing," she says. "My matte painters did a great job making sure the footage taken in London had everything we got from that red-hot environment. They used a lot of the HDRI photography and added their own touches, working in our Nuke environment, which can cope with these huge environments." Huge, in fact, describes the entire project. "It was the hardest and smartest thing I've worked on," Rowe says. "We went from one city covered in dust, scarred, with metal grat- ings, to another made of glass, where we worried about get- ting lost in raytracing hell, and then we had a huge Master and Commander battle in the air. I'm glad I had done this for a long time before or it would have scared the pants off me." –Barbara Robertson