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Ryo Sakaguchi: When we first got on the project, the tools that we had in hand, did not handle this amount of destruction. In the beginning there was a phase for about three months that we were unsure if we could do this size of destruction. We ended using the Bullet route, but even when we were developing it obviously we were doing a lot simulation tests, it took us three months to even tell ourselves that "oh maybe we can do this project" with the route we took. There was definitely a phase when we were we scared of whether we could really pull this thing off or not.
At what point did you know that you could pull off the required effects for 2012?
Sakaguchi: There is usually one test that we run. Which we had run which was in the third month, it was a small building test where it fell over and it looked really realistic when it fell down. It fell down on the ground and it squashed in half, those are the moments we were like maybe you can this project after all.
How do you know where to put the most work into a shot?
Sakaguchi: We kinda know usually when it is far away we can get away with a lot of hacks and tricks. If you go right up on the breaking building we know it’s going to be tougher, so we tackled the close up ones first to make sure we can handle those close ups.
What was your favorite sequence to work on?
Sakaguchi: There is one shot were the plane is flying through, the camera pans, and it kinda goes with the plane. You basically so the whole Miracle Mile collapsing, starting form the Japanese building, the Samsung building over here and the Graves church over here, pretty much the whole street of Miracle Mile collapsing. That would be my favorite shot, for the sheer amount of destruction we got to show off.
How were you able to create such realistic effects for the earthquake sequence?
Sakaguchi: I think it’s the complexity of the destruction and we achieved that by considering physical building structure within the model we were building. So we ran allot of test to try to collapse this bungalow model, to get that to realistic we first start with chop the building up and let it collapse. That looked kinda okay but it did not look that realistic. What we ended up doing was we made all the pillars with in that structure, pretty close to what the physical architecture would do. We had the pillars running vertically on the wall and we and the roof top holding pillars, these were all modeled to do precisely to what the real thing would do. We would even set constraints on the wall to be a little bit stronger or the supporting structure to be stronger. Then you run a simulation and the roof would collapse fast because it’s built that way. The strength is weaker and you see some parts of the house are go first but you can tell the supporting structure is trying to hold on to it. That kind of detail in how we modeled it, constrained it and rigged the dynamics really added to the complexity of the simulation.
Can you tell us about how your team was able to pull off the effect of the earth splitting during the wide shots of the escape?
Marten Larsson: We had a lot of what we called the fissure. We were concerned with how far you could see in the fissure, and how to generate that for so many shots. You normally see a few miles down the fissure so we actually came up with a little library system. Where we basically took a chunk of the ravine or the fissure and pre-simulated it. We pre-simulated dust for it and even a few things that could fall over. Then we generated a few of these blocks and repeated the blocks with a little bit of offset and timing down the fissure. That way it worked out pretty easily and fast so we could dress up the first pass of the fissure. We could just draw path and it would put these blocks down. We started up with random offsets on each block and pretty fast we got a first test of what the shot would look like and hand adjust timing or swap out blocks. That’s kinda how we avoided redoing the fissure in every shot.
Initially, our plan was for each of these blocks we would simulate the top surfaces as well as the road, building and cars. In the end we realized that it’s pretty forgiving with the dirt collapsing but you could quickly see repetitive patterns or the director wanted specific things to fall down and add an extra house here. It ended up being more work than it was worth to actually pre-simulate all that. After we had the fissure we started hand placing things we were gonna throw over the fissure. They did not interact much with the dirt because they were free falling. We could simulate them separately.
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