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How much interaction did you guys have the other studios that worked on 2012?
Engel: A lot of interaction with the other effects houses, we had out own in-house set up with our own company Uncharted Territory. We did the bulk of the work 422 that we did in house out of the 1315 shots that the movie has. Then the rest of the shots were divided up between the 14 other houses that we work with. There were really like 5 or 6 main houses and then there were the other houses that did like 5 or 12 shots.
Weigert: The scope of it varied on depending on where they were.
Engel: We were the hub, that was the important thing.
After handling the bulk of the shots and supervising how they’re handling it at the other studios, what became the most challenging shots that you had to deal with?
Weigert: Two sequences, one was the water mass rushing through the Himalayan Mountains. You have enormous scale and water. Scanline handled that and it was believed that because of their propriety system that they were the only ones that could pull that off in such a short time, with such a short turn around.
Engel: From the get-go you know once you start discussing this like world wide two or three companies could handle something like that.
Weigert: The second one: the early earthquake is split into two parts, one was an in house sequence. Where they would drive a limo through earthquake as everything is breaking apart and moving and falling. The second part done by Digital Domain where we taking the Cessna plane and flying through a chasm that opens up and eventually through downtown as it’s crumbling. Those two were for sure the most challenging scenes in the movie.
Engel: The earthquake sequence was so challenging because in the screenplay it was about three lines! They are running out of the house and into the limousine as the house was crumbling around them. They are going towards the freeway, go take the freeway then the freeway crumbles… and pretty much at the airport they arrive; which became a 114 shots in three minutes. It was three-minute sequence in the movie and it was very organic. We worked with Roland -not really while we were making the CG shots- but very early before we started while we were doing pre-visualization on it. It just became a pre-vis sequence that was so minute in detail that if you play it side by side with actual film it was ninety-five percent the same. We were happy to have a director, who doesn’t come to set and reinvent the whole thing after we did the pre-vis for several months. He actually shoots the pre-vis. That of course is a dream come true for us.
Were there any shots that had to be cut due to time? Or money restraints? which you wanted to make it into the final cut?
Weigert: While you are working on the shots you get stopped because the editor decides to re-cut it. However it was not an entire scene which is sometimes the case, so we wont have any of that for the DVD unfortunately. Fortunately everything for us is in [the theatrical release].
Engel: That is so typical for Roland; it was the same way for Independence Day. The studio came later and said hey we want to do the director’s cut and the extended version and so where are all the visual effects that were not finished? And we said we didn’t have any. There was one shot with a bus that was crashing through a Stargate billboard. It was not composited in it was just a single model shot that we did. Once it was actually cut in we all looked at it. It was in the middle of a serious destruction sequence, where people’s lives were at stake. All of a sudden it was this finy moment of this bus crashing through a Stargate billboard and it was just not working. You did not want to laugh at that moment.
Weigert: All the decisions to edit the shots are usually done while we are in the post-vis stage or the shots are about to be built and then the editorial finds out the pacing doesn’t work out one hundred percent or like in this one it doesn’t quite fit in there because it’s too funny or too serious or what ever. It’s really just little shots here and there, but nothing that we wish we could have done and didn’t do. Really everything we planned and wanted is in the movie.
Engel: For example, the freeway breaks down and there is a cement truck rolling down and it’s crashing into a gas station. Originally there were two more shots but there were at least one more where you’re looking out the back of the limousine window and you see the fire still going and shooting over the street. That was detailed in pre-vis but didn’t go much further than that.
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