- This episode of "Movies Insider" looks behind the scenes of Hollywood disaster epics.
- We show how practical and visual effects came together to bring natural catastrophes to life.
- We break down sequences from "The Impossible" and "Pompeii" to "2012" and "The Day After Tomorrow."
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Following is the transcript of the video.
Narrator: This is a shot from the biblical deluge in "Noah." It may not look like it, but this was filmed entirely at night under special balloon lights. And it took a massive custom rain machine to dump up to 200,000 gallons of water on set each night. All that, just so you can clearly see the raindrops in the final shot.
Hollywood goes to extreme measures to portray the force of natural disasters as close to real life as possible, from creating seven different types of CG dust for a sandstorm to obsessively building accurate replicas of an ancient city just to destroy it in a single act.
Here's what eight apocalyptic movies looked like behind the scenes.
Director: Go!
Narrator: To make an earthquake feel visceral, it isn't enough to just shake the camera. All the characters, buildings, and objects in a scene need to be affected by the same force.
The effects team took this literally for "2012," advertised as "the mother of all disaster movies." To show the world being shaken to its core, the filmmakers built sprawling sets on top of hydraulic lifts so they could shake everything in a scene, from individual actors to entire houses.
The crew went through 500,000 tons of steel building the shaky decks, some of which measured several thousand square feet. And massive mover rigs underneath made it possible to put cars, trucks, planes, building facades, and palm trees on the same set, so everything could react to an earthquake-like force in a consistent way.
The team did have to use CGI for this scene, where a 10.5-magnitude earthquake chases John Cusack through the crumbling streets of LA.
Getting the destruction and the ocean-wave-rippling movement the director wanted required building Wilshire Boulevard from scratch in the computer and writing a new volume-breaking system called Drop. The artists could enter a whole CG building into Drop, and the program would cut it into as many as 90,000 little shapes. But even for this almost entirely digital sequence, the team shot what they could practically.
Here, the actors were filmed inside the limousine, attached to a gimbal that simulated the effects of the quake.
In "The Impossible," filmmakers had to recreate the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These climactic scenes where the tsunami slams the coast over the course of 10 terrifying minutes required millions of gallons of actual seawater, darkened with food coloring and tints to make the water look dirty.
Naomi Watts and Tom Holland filmed most of their scenes in Spain in an almost 400-foot-long seaside tank, the largest water tank in Europe and second largest in the world. Inside the tank, the actors sat in baskets that moved on rails pulled with steel cables. This system allowed the crew to control the speed at which the actors moved in the water, keeping them at the same speed as the current.
The film also had to show the water slamming the entire resort area, pools, palm trees, and all.
[water crashing]
Since the real site in Thailand didn't look the way it did in 2004, the production designers built a model of the former resort at one-third the scale. That was the smallest model that would interact with the wave in a realistic way.
When it was time to film the water destroying it all, the crew had to get it right in one shot. To ensure the wave impact looked right, the team did test runs at Edinburgh Designs, a company specializing in wave generators.
The company usually tries to create a precise, perfect wave, but the filmmakers on "The Impossible" wanted a wide, ugly, and chaotic one. They achieved that messiness by rushing 1,000 gallons of water over the model set with the power of eight F1 racing cars behind it. The cinematographer set up an apparatus of 10 cameras to make sure he captured every angle.
[wave crashing]
For the dystopian world of "Mad Max," director George Miller wanted a disaster sequence that would feel apocalyptic -- a toxic sandstorm with twisters sucking cars up into the sky and spitting them out. And it was the biggest VFX sequence in a movie known for its practical stunts.
The crew started by filming the actual cars racing through the desert in Namibia. They used this footage to perfect the layout, movement, and scale of the storm effects. The practical shots were then relit to fit the unique lighting of the storm and combined with digital effects, swapping in CG cars and drivers as needed.
They relit these shots of Tom Hardy with more firelight to reflect the fuel that was leaking from the car and catching fire. To make the cars look like they were driving faster through the storm, the VFX team went with a conceal-and-reveal approach. They replaced the ground in many shots and added massive digital dust clouds, so viewers could only get occasional glimpses of cars as they raced down the desert.
Any given shot has up to seven types of CG dust coming up from the ground, from the lower levels of fine dust blowing around the surface to lumpy dust that went up to about mid-car height to massive eddies of dust billowing around.
For the historical disaster movie "Pompeii," the filmmakers had to accurately recreate this ancient city and destroy it with just as much accuracy. But what we know about Pompeii is mostly based on scientific hypotheses, written records, and what remains of the ruins. So director Paul W.S. Anderson and his team spent six years researching and imaging the city, including taking a laser scan of the ruins.
They used that to build a life-size set based on the real dimensions of Pompeii, with streets sized precisely down to the last millimeter. The visual effects team also had to replicate the whole set digitally for the disaster sequences, creating over 100 CG buildings and over 200 CG props. All this work, though, had to be destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupts, collapses buildings, triggers a tsunami, and ultimately wipes out the city.
For this scene in the crumbling arena, the crew filmed 500 extras inside the actual set, then had VFX artists digitally extend the set and double the extras. To animate the digital crowd realistically, the artists used mo-cap footage of stuntpeople pretending to escape the wreckage.
Next there was the tsunami, which capsizes a boat in this scene. The crew filmed part of that practically, using a gimbal as the boat deck.
Then the city streets. For this chariot chase, the crew filmed the horses and stunt doubles on a dirt track in front of 400 feet of green screen, then used face replacements to swap the actors into the close-up riding shots. But the hardest part was replacing all the backgrounds with CG sets, all of which were getting pelted with lava bombs.
Not everything was digital, though. The Canadian studio Dynamic Effects filmed actual footage of fireballs and explosions along with some practical shots of stunt actors being set on fire and ash raining down on the city.
When earthquakes strike in "San Andreas," the earth splits open in ways that haven't been seen in real life, at least not yet. So the filmmakers had to depict these giant chasms with a terrifying realism.
Older movies might've created a background like this with a matte painting, but these environments had to stand up at so many different distances and camera positions that creating a matte painting for every angle wasn't practical.
So they built many detailed environments digitally, including this expanse of rural California, with an 85-foot-wide, 300-foot-deep chasm. The VFX artists referenced a smaller earth crack in Sonora, Mexico, to see how the ground crumbles as soil pulls apart. They used that to place the boulders, small rocks, and dust crumbling from the edges of the cliff and the layers of plants, leaf litter, rocks, sticks, and tire tracks in the surrounding area.
But grounding the CG in reality also meant going the extra mile to place actors in the digital space, like in this scene, where falling rocks cause a driver to veer off the road and over a cliff. For the most dramatic shots, like showing the car flying through the air, the VFX artists swapped in a partly or entirely CG car, along with a digital double for the driver. And for the dramatic rescue that follows, the filmmakers built a special set in Australia with a car hanging from a hydraulic rig and a helicopter without rotor blades hanging above from a crane. They then filmed the actors strapped in place, with The Rock doing his own stunts on set.
Ray: I'm gonna get you out of here, OK?
Narrator: Everything came together with the VFX team, swapping out the helicopter for a CG one in some shots or adding digital rotors and exhaust fumes in others.
For the big rain-soaked battle in "Noah," the team had to create an apocalyptic deluge on a literally biblical scale. But it's surprisingly hard to make rain show up well on camera. Plus, the crew would be filming on an outdoor ark set about the size of two football fields.
To cover all this ground, they came up with a giant custom rain machine made up of a vast system of rain bars. Over 3,000 feet of pipes carried water from 100,000-gallon tanks into an array of rain sprinklers. One type of sprinkler released smaller sprays of mist, while another produced larger droplets; they called those sprinklers "goose drowners."
So, massive amounts of rain?
[rain pouring]
Check.
Noah: Speak to me!
Narrator: The complex system made it possible for the team to dump 5,000 gallons of rain a minute on about 500 extras. Over two weeks of shooting, that added up to over a million gallons of water, roughly as much as two Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Still, the filmmakers had to make all that water translate well on screen, which had everything to do with lighting. Special effects artists have a general rule: "Front-light snow, backlight rain." The deluge sequence was supposed to be set during the daytime, but if they filmed during the day the sun would constantly be moving, making it impossible to consistently backlight the rain.
So the team shot exclusively at night, using huge balloon space lights on the rain-bar structure to light the area without shadows. They might've filmed in the pitch-black night, but in the final scene, you can make out every drop of rain.
To create the tornadoes in "Into the Storm," filmmakers did as much as they could practically, with giant wind blowers, real tree parts, and massive rain machines. They even dropped real cars out of the sky, "Fast and Furious" style.
But an effect they couldn't do practically was the fire tornado. Believe it or not, firenados do actually happen in real life, but it's a phenomenon that could easily look fake in a movie. So the crew lit an actual fire on set when filming the original photography for the scene.
This provided a reference for how the firenado would realistically light up the actors and surrounding structures. The digital artists then applied appropriate lighting to CG structures, like this church. That glow on the sidewalk and on the church's facade? A digital add-on that seamlessly matched the footage.
What wasn't a digital add-on was the moment where a character gets sucked into the firenado and killed. The team actually filmed that moment with a stuntman attached to a harness.
[stuntman screaming]
"The Day After Tomorrow" had to depict a superstorm that looked like it could bring on the next ice age, but ice and frost are notoriously difficult to depict realistically. And many of the sequences set in an extreme arctic environment were impossible to pull off practically, like this scene, when Dennis Quaid's character walks with his colleagues across the snow-covered roof of a shopping mall.
To safely depict the roof cracking under the characters' weight, the crew built miniature models of the mall. They composited blue-screen shots of the actors with shots of the model, then added a mix of practical snow elements and CG particle snow to make the whole scene look frozen over.
How 8 movies brought natural disasters to life, from 'Mad Max: Fury Road' to 'Pompeii'
Source: Kalayaan News
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