Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/710451
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST JULY 2016 Summer B L O C K B U S T E R S I t was 1996 when alien invaders first attacked the Earth in hopes of eradi- cating the human race and taking over the planet. The film was Independence Day, and it grossed more than $306M at the box office. Directed and written (with Dean Devlin) by Roland Emmerich (see Post's June issue for a full inter- view), the film won an Academy Award for outstanding work in visual effects. Fast forward 20 years and Emmerich, along with many original cast and crew including VFX super Volker Engel and VFX producer Marc Weigert, return for Twentieth Century Fox's summer release, Independence Day: Resurgence. In this long-awaited sequel, which was shot in Albuquerque, NM, and Los Angeles on Red Epic Dragon cameras, the aliens are back, in much stronger force than before and trying yet again to take over the planet. Engel and Weigert, who have also worked with Emmerich on 2012 and White House Down, and together on Hugo, re- cently spoke exclusively with Post just one day after finalizing the film about what the 2016 film looks like compared to its 1996 original. Just under 1,800 visual effects shots were completed by numerous VFX hous- es, including Weta, Scanline, MPC, Image Engine, Digital Domain, Cinesite, Luxx Studios, Trixter, and Engel and Weigert's own Uncharted Territory. According to Engel, audiences can expect just about every type of visual effect, from environ- mental to CG work. "In the first movie, we were very restricted with showing the aliens" he says. "It was back in the days with puppets and some creature-type work, where we could only show the upper torso. But there was an actor in there — a man-in-suit effect — so we used lots of fog to hide everything. Patrick Tatopoulos, who did the creature effects and one of the designers on the movie, did a fantastic job. But in the new film, the aliens play a much bigger part. We show the versions of the aliens we had in the first movie but we also have a different, sub-species kind of soldier aliens and a much bigger version, which is the queen. So, those presented some challenges. "There's also much more interaction with the actors and a beautiful chase be- tween the queen and a school bus around Area 51 on a lake in broad daylight. That's a pretty exciting sequence. This movie has it all. Set extensions, big disaster pieces, a moon base, a space battle, a dogfight, bluescreen shoots — everything." Having won an Oscar for the visual effects work in 1996, it begs the question whether or not the two felt any pressure working on the new film. "It's really more like you see yourself as fan of the first movie and so you want to do it right," says Engel. "You want to deliver a movie that holds up and is not a wimpy version of the first one." Weigart agrees, "You're trying to honor the legacy of the first one by doing the best work that you can, but that's what you always do anyway, the best work that you can." According to Engel, the grand size and scope of the new film was predominantly driven by the script — which resulted in roughly four to four-and-a-half times as many VFX as the first film (400 shots). Also, since the first film, the technol- ogy used to complete the visual effects work has advanced considerably. "Back in the day, 20 years ago, it was about 90 percent miniatures on the first movie and probably less than 10 percent that was computer generated. We did this calcu- lation at some point and we shot around 4,000 different miniature elements that were then, of course, composited with Flame and Inferno. It was all shot on stage with miniatures. Here, not a single minia- ture in the whole movie." Twentieth Century Fox ups the ante on VFX for Independence Day: Resurgence Alien Invasion BY LINDA ROMANELLO