VIFX visual effects supervisor John Wash and his team then matched the high-speed camera shooting the miniature to the original background plate. "Mat and Hunter/Gratzner came up with this great idea to get the shot economically. Instead of collapsing the whole building, they decided it could play just fine by showing a section of the building collapsing," Wash recalls. "We set up our VistaVision camera looking down on the 1/8-scale miniature building, and used its cubic structure and straight lines to help line everything up with the original background plate shot hanging right over the edge of the full-sized building. Because we were shooting with a wide lens, when we mounted a miniature facade about eight floors long and 1/4 the width of the total explosion right up close to camera at the top of the model building, it filled our field of view. Then, with the camera running at 72 fps, our pyro guy, Ian O'Connor, did a terrific job dropping the facade just at the right moment so you could see it break apart and then get engulfed by the fireball rising from the base of our miniature building. The timing of everything was the trickiest part."
As in the series, evil extraterrestrials weave their wormlike tendrils under human skin to transform ordinary Americans into willing pawns, an effect Bowman insisted on pushing to the limit in the film. This approach was something he learned from his first effects mentor, Oscar-winning Titanic effects supervisor Rob Legato, when both were starting out on Star Trek. "Rob introduced me to visual effects and encouraged me to push the envelope," Bowman says. "He also always insisted that we storyboard everything ahead of time. On this movie, I was free to do what I wanted with the camera as long as I kept to the boards. When we storyboarded a shot, we tested it, and did everything we could think of to 'throw rocks' at it if it still held up, then that was the shot."
When planning shots involving the malevolent subcutaneous worms, Bowman and Beck realized that the creatures would have to be more complex than their TV counterparts in order to appear more convincing on a 70' screen. Even so, Light Matters/Pixel Envy managed to recycle some elements from the series. "When the goop gets in the eyes, it's very similar to the TV show," Beck says. "We shot a bunch of new elements, but we also used some of the old stuff that we had done for the TV show, because it was shot on 35mm film and looked good."
Although this bit of recycling helped, Beck did employ one general overriding principle that became a production mantra: create several tiers of detail so that when the audience sees something, they are not certain that everything has been seen. "It's almost like a fractal figure however much detail you can see, we put another layer of detail beyond it that you can't quite see," Beck explains. "Because you see more [on the big screen], we had to work harder to obscure things."
This was certainly true of the cinematic subcutaneous worms; audiences are afforded some intense, close-up inspections of their victims' skin and fine hairs. "It was a CG challenge to both track the worms to the actors' bodies and deform the skin in such a way that it didn't look like a CG deformation," Beck says. "We did a lot of testing to determine how bruised the skin should look, how many worms there would be, and exactly how they should move whether they would accordion and inchworm along, or squiggle. Each time, [the effect became] better and creepier."
During the film's climax, Mulder penetrates a bizarre, gargantuan structure ultimately revealed to be the interior of an alien spacecraft. Bowman shot his actors in a huge interior spaceship set that filled 20th Century Fox's distinctive Stage 16 (a massive space with a large pit at its core), and then had Light Matters/Pixel Envy significantly augment the live environment via computer-generated set extensions. Even given the actual set's massive breadth, the incredible, otherworldly environment revealed during Mulder's search for the missing Scully is almost completely synthetic. "The set itself was extremely elaborate, and served as two different levels, but it represented only about 1/32 of the total spaceship interior," Beck estimates. "The set portion was shot first as one level featuring green glowing cryopods with frozen people inside, then redressed and shot as another level. Except for the set, the interior of the spaceship was completely computer-generated by Colin Strause, Greg Strause and Edson Williams. There were two big 12'-diameter pipes on the set, so we translated that motif to create the sense that the walls themselves were made up of pipes running at an angle. Beyond that was a shell the size of the Forum [the L.A. sports arena], and behind that was a bigger Forum with a bigger Forum behind that. Ultimately, it appears that there's a huge open space where Mulder can see 800 feet across with backlit corridors going off. It's an attempt to combine an enormous amount of scale with an enormous amount of detail and complexity via computer graphics."
That attempt was both enhanced and thwarted by what Bowman has dubbed "subtractive lighting," the series' patented sci-fi noir photographic style, emulated for the feature by cinematographer Ward Russell. "You light it up, walk around it, then subtract some of it, and you're left with just what you need," theorizes Bowman. This conceptual approach seemed to work well with Bowman's definition of the spaceship interior, described by the director as dark and funereal. "My word for it is sepulchral. It's not bright at all inside the ship. It's a gloomy place, and when we come upon the ship, it's asleep like a computer with its screensaver on. My feeling about spaceships is that we should give audiences just enough to pique their imaginations, but not enough to define the craft. I wanted to convey a sense of a fabulous superstructure but not reveal that it's a spaceship yet. All I wanted to see were some cool shapes. If we're too literal with the images, then viewers might say to themselves, 'Hey, it's a spaceship I get it.' If that happens, then we've gone too far."
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