Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/639267
38 cgw j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 South Tower), completed in 1973, was 1,362 feet high. They were the tallest buildings in the world at the time of their com- pletion and boasted 110 floors. That height had a major impact on the film's story line. "Sometimes movie reality is an exaggerated version of real reality," says Baillie. "But what [Petit] did was so crazy in and of itself that we didn't need to exaggerate the buildings in terms of their height." According to Baillie, the tops of the towers in the movie were "exactly as tall as they were in real life, and what you get to experience up there on the wire [in the film] is what you would have experienced out there in 1974." The VFX artists worked from the actual architectural blueprints to reconstruct the buildings digitally "in their most perfect sense." To that end, the group spent weeks with each panel and win- dow, introducing slight imperfec- tions. "It's that personal touch of introducing human imperfec- tions into this giant monolithic structure built by humans that made our CG structure look realistic," explains Baillie. So, the artists built the most realistic version of the towers they could possibly construct, though there were instances that required judgment calls, since every reference photo showed a different aspect of the buildings. "There were times that if we turned le, they would have looked harder-edged, more menacing, and if we turned right, they would have been soer, more inviting. When that happened, we tended to turn right, hearkening more positive memories of the towers. And the void between the towers would be something that was calling to Philippe, rather than being menacing," explains Baillie of the direction the artists took. Zemeckis's directive was that the towers had to look 100 per- cent real, but they also had to be a supporting character, not an antagonist – they beckon and call to Philippe. "The height is terrifying in and of itself, espe- cially if you see the movie in 3D," says Baillie, "yet it feels inviting in a way." When Gordon-Levitt steps out onto the wire, there is a beautiful orange fog that clears from below, and the lighting at the start of the walk is at magic hour, with pink and orange flints off the building. "It is a kind of magical moment that is meant to feel more like a ballet than anything threatening. But at the end of the walk, there is a sequence when [Gordon-Levitt] begins to have doubts and feels like the towers may have had enough and are telling him to get off his wire," says Baillie. "It is at this point when we made the weather a little stormier and the lighting grayish. The towers have not turned on him yet, but they are getting a little impatient." C I R C A 1 9 7 4 A great deal of research was done to achieve the desired level of realism. Baillie and the artists looked at reference photography in books and at Google images, as many people had posted pictures of the tops of the towers from various time frames. "But it was not until right aer we finished shooting when the full gravity of what we needed to do really hit me," he says. That was when Baillie and others spent two days taking reference footage from a heli- copter to see, for instance, how light changes within the city, how traffic moves at various times of the day, and so forth. As if re-creating New York City from scratch wasn't daunting enough, the group also had to turn back the clock to 1974. "It looks totally different there now, obviously," says Baillie. "We had hovered [in the helicopter] in the exact position where Philippe had been when he walked between the towers, and I remember looking down and becoming overwhelmed by this simultaneous feeling of awe and respect at what he had done, and also the sheer terror of how high we were." That was when Baillie realized the importance of integrating that emotional sensation of danger and awe into the film through the visual effects. "If a shot didn't make me feel that, I knew something was wrong and we had to figure it out," he adds. "It had to be technically accurate and emotionally accurate, too." DIGITAL ARTISTS HAD TO RECONSTRUCT THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN EXACTING DETAIL FOR THE WALK.