[starttext]
Did you have any political problems when destroying other cities? There are a lot of famous monuments that get trashed in the movie. Did it present any problems for clearances?
Weigert: Yeah, the clearances were always a fun story, because the studio of course is always afraid of that. That did make us change a few things but they were very minor changes. There are some obvious Las Vegas buildings the Vin, two towers. For instance, the Wynn casino, we went back and forth on, and it was a V and an N and we ended up changing some name on some buildings to not get into these kind of problems. Overall the consensus with that is also with the lawyers actually they say, they can only really sue you if you single out certain things. Let’s say for instance you don’t destroy anything in LA but this one single building; they can say, ’oh you really want to hurt us.’ However we are destroying absolutely everything, so they can’t all possibly sue us for destroying/singling them out, because it’s literally almost everything gets destroyed. We didn’t have much of a problem there except for a few minor changes.
Digital Domain did a lot of work for the earthquake Cessna escape sequence. Could you give us an overview of other studios work on 2012?
Engel: Scanline. They also had two other sequences that they did in the third act of the movie the flooding in the Himalaya, that’s a huge sequence that was the bulk of the work. Then there is Washington DC, where you see in the trailer the shot of the John F. Kennedy [aircraft carrier] rolling towards it and then destroy it. That is a Scanline sequence. In India there is a huge mile high wave rolling over India and that is another sequence they made.
Double Negative in London did the Yellow Stone sequence, from the start where Charlie the Woody Harrelson character and John Cusack are meeting on the top of the hill. The entire caldera explodes and they get chased by the ash cloud and firebombs raining and pieces of landscape falling down as they are trying to get to their plane to get out of it. They are some fantastic shots in that too and a lot of them are in trailer.
Engel: While we’re at it, Sony Imageworks did about a hundred and fifty shots of all the stuff and also in the last third of the movie these giant ships and the places where they were constructed that don’t include any water. Scanline took over for the point where the water comes in. Beyond that it is Scanline and everything before that is Imageworks, for example. Pixomondo did allot of crash scenes, they did alot of pre-vis for us. They also did a whole finished sequence for us, where the Russian transport airplane crash lands onto a glacier. Hydraulx did several sequences throughout the movie.
Weigert: Starting from the very beginning with the large solar eruptions, part of the cruise ship sequence and the very end actually. The breaking of the super market was one of the very first smaller destruction sequences, very intense destruction sequences. The final shots we see literally a zoom out and seeing those three arches and then open out and seeing the earth in space.
With the influx of newer technology, do you find that practical effects play less of a part in movies made today?
Engel: Yes, definitely, we had the discussions in the beginning, a while ago in my notes; even before I was hired I did the first break down. I had this list with all the possible miniatures. It wasn’t that much from the get-go but it was at least things or so that I figured we could do or at least augment. It was like tumbling cars or stuff like that and then it ended up being one; which was the top of the Eiffel tower in Las Vegas where the transport plane hits it.
Weigert: We talked a lot about it because we love miniatures, it’s a lot of fun standing on the set and do the three, two, one and bang! The stuff really explodes; it’s so much more fun then waiting for a computer, waiting five hours to have a simulation done. The fact is that as much fun as that is... there are two different problems with it. One is physical limitation, where obviously in a movie like this we are literally driving with a limo through this earthquake or flying with a plane through it. Just physical limitations with camera rigs, and trying to make that house, tree, building what ever it is break and fall at this correct timing. As well as have the camera drive through it; there are certain limitations to the motion control rigs that simply don’t allow us to get the shot the way we wanted. Also once you get that shot, you are stuck with exactly that. If the director comes up and says I don’t like the way the tree falls, it’s like sorry that’s how it is. With CG you can totally change that.
The second thing is budgetary limitations. May sound weird on a movie like this but if you have a scene where an entire area of Los Angeles -obviously part of it would always be a matte painting- even the stuff that is close is an entire residential neighbor hood or an entire commercial street like Wilshire Blvd or all of downtown. If you had to build all of this as miniature and make it crumble and shoot it, it would become outrageously expensive and absolutely not possible to do. In the computer we can clone the houses, we build three or four and retexture, color and multiply them. There are a lot more options, trees the same thing if you build it as a miniature you have to build every single tree.
[endtext]
0 comments:
Post a Comment