Exclusive Interview: 2012‘s VFX Wizards Reveal How They Flattened the White House With an Aircraft Carrier and Scared the Bejesus Out of Director Roland Emmerich (Part 3)

Share on Facebook posted 11-15-09 by John Freeman Gill

So much of the apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 was computer-generated — 1,315 shots, created by 15 visual effects houses using thousands of computer processors — that it seems the only thing in the movie not done with CGI is John Cusack’s smirk. In Part 3 of our exclusive interview, Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, 2012‘s VFX supervisors and co-producers, tell John Freeman Gill how they bombarded Cusack with fireballs, clobbered the White House with an aircraft carrier borne by a tidal wave, and gave director Roland Emmerich a taste of his own medicine by simulating an earthquake on set.

Happy Deathday, Mr. President

30 NINJAS: Marc, what was the line in the script that, when you first read it, had you shaking your head and thinking, “That’s a great idea, but how on earth are we gonna pull that off?”

MW: For me it was the aircraft carrier hitting the White House. That was the moment where I thought, “Oh, that is so cool,” because you know, it is a little bit of an homage to Independence Day in a way. Because that’s a question that everyone asks: “How can you top what has been done before” — even what we have done before? And that was an image for me where it’s like, yes, that is actually topping it, but in a smart and funny way, where it’s just something different: an aircraft carrier flattening the White House. (laughs) That’s really something I wouldn’t have thought of.

VOLKER ENGEL: (laughs) As Roland dubbed it, “JFK Returns to the White House.” [The aircraft carrier is named U.S.S. John F. Kennedy.]

30 NINJAS: How were the details of that scene designed?

VOLKER: The most important step is previsualization. We also “previsualize” that, in a lower-quality computer animation, and showed those first tests to Roland to figure out how large [the wave] should be, and how it’s gonna roll, and what kind of camera angles Roland wanted. We’d discuss it and he’d say, “Hey, I want it kind of over-the-shoulder White House” or something like that. We “pre-viz” exactly what’s going to be in the movie later, starting with the over-the-shoulder shot of the president [played by Danny Glover], basically his POV of the aircraft carrier coming out of the mists and riding this huge wave. But at the same time we found out pretty quickly that it was very important for Scanline, the company that did the final shots of this sequence (and actually all the big water sequences in the movie), to start with their work early, because with previsualization of water you only get so far. You really want, very soon, to see the interaction of that ship with the water and what’s gonna happen when the White House is being hit.

30 NINJAS: How the water behaves when it hits these different objects and topography?

MW: Yes, exactly.

VE: The problem is that in previsualization, all the details are missing. You know, you just have this big water surface, and it has a few waves in it, but you don’t see any of the whitewater interaction and so on, and that’s what really gives the scale in the end, so you really need to see as much detail as you possibly can.

Scaring Roland Emmerich for a Change

30 NINJAS: We’ve talked a bit about that 8,000-square-foot “shaky floor” director Roland Emmerich had built, complete with trees and houses and driveways and cars, so that the actors could perform the scene with the ground actually shaking beneath them. And Roland said that the first time you turned on that big shaky floor, it was actually quite frightening. Can you describe what that looked like?

MARC WEIGERT: Yeah, we actually have some video footage we just showed at a seminar of the very, very first tests, where Roland himself was actually together with the first assistant director and the stunt coordinator, on the very first small platform, and they were trying to hold on, and there were cars shaking and so on. And afterwards you could see him, he turned around and said, “Uh-oh, if Amanda Peet is on this, and the kids … oh-oh-oh …” So he could really see that it was a scary thing. Now, what they eventually did was, it was adjustable in different steps. So you could start really slowly — they had about 100 pistons, like pneumatic pistons were under each section of the floor — so literally I think you could adjust two things: how many of those would be firing, and how fast and strong they are. So we would always start with slow versions so they get used to it a little bit, and go higher and higher until they could barely walk on that.

The Gigantic Earthworm, the Fireballs, and John Cusack

30 NINJAS: The creative process is unpredictable, and some of the best discoveries can actually be happy accidents. Tell me about some aspect of this film where a visual idea you were trying or the effects house was trying didn’t work out the way you wanted at first, and you had to send it back or take another crack at it yourself to get it to work better.

MW: One thing I’m think of is the Yellowstone sequence, which we called the earthworm. Sometimes there are accidents where you envision things a certain way, and you give it away either to an in-house artist or somebody else, and a lot of times it comes back and you think, Ah, it doesn’t really work that way. You try different things, you adjust the camera angle, for instance, different lenses maybe, different scale, you make it slower, faster. Slower, by the way, in this kind of scale, we had what we always jokingly referred to as the half-speed button. Literally there was actually a button in our playback system that would allow us to play it at half speed. We constantly used that…

VE: All the time!

MW: Because you look at something sometimes and say, “Wow, it’s not quite right, the scale doesn’t fit right,” so we would watch it at half-speed, and then suddenly it would be, Aha! That’s it. Now the wave looks bigger …

30 NINJAS: And you would leave it in the finished product at half-speed?

MW: Yes. What we’d have to do then, unfortunately, is redo it. You can’t just say, Well, we’ll do it at half-speed. It’s literally, if it’s water and so on, it has to be resimulated; it’s a big deal, but it happened a lot and we had to do that. And very rarely something happens like with this one shot in Yellowstone, where something comes back that looks so cool that we didn’t expect it that way.

30 NINJAS: Tell me about that Yellowstone shot.

MW: There was a shot actually that Double Negative in London did, and it was literally, at the very end of the scene, where the camper is chased by a huge ash cloud of the Yellowstone Park eruption, our heroes are in [the Woody Harrelson character’s] camper, and they’re chased by firebombs and so on, and they’re trying to get back to the little municipal airport there that has their plane, and there’s one shot where they’ve almost reached the plane, and right in front of them this huge crack in the earth opens up and forces them to jump the camper over it. And there was a high angle shot of that, and when we got the first draft back — and you know, the first version you see is very simple, there are no textures, there’s no nothing, just a bunch of computer-animated chunks — but the way it felt, it was almost organic. That’s why we called it the earthworm, because it felt there was like this huge, gigantic worm crawling through the earth that actually makes the earth lift up and buckle and then cave in. That’s just one example — there are dozens of examples like that — but that’s one of those things where you thought, Wow, that’s cooler even than we imagined.

Read Part 1 of our exclusive interview with 2012‘s VFX wizards to learn how they trashed the planet in 1,315 simple steps — and how far visual effects have come since 1996′s Independence Day Read It Now!

Read Part 2 of our exclusive interview with 2012‘s VFX geniuses to learn how they used thousands of computer processors to flood the Himalaya Mountains (and send that poor monk scurrying for his snorkel) Read It Now!

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