A bevy of visual effects companies join forces to lend extra urgency and atmosphere to ARMAGEDDON
After foiling an all-out terrorist attack in The Rock, director Michael Bay and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Gale Anne Hurd are treating audiences to a close encounter with a different class of mineral mass in the action thriller Armageddon. Fifteen visual effects houses (including Dream Quest Images, Computer Film Company, Digital Magic, Pacific Ocean Post, Cinesite, Rainmaker, Voodoo, Editel, 525 Postproduction, Computer Caf, Pacific Title Mirage, VIFX, Tippett Studios and Digital Domain) labored under overall visual effects supervisor Pat McClung to construct more than 270 complex images.
A premier effects modelmaker, McClung got his start working alongside James Cameron at Roger Corman's New World Pictures, building spaceships on the low-budget camp classic Battle Beyond the Stars, followed by The Empire Strikes Back. He's been a major domo of miniature work on a number of Cameron epics since, including Aliens. McClung joined Cameron's Digital Domain at its inception, serving as model department head and overseeing the miniatures for everything from True Lies to Apollo 13. Then, two years ago, McClung decided to strike out on his own as a visual effects supervisor. "The first film I did was Sergeant Bilko, which I never even saw," he admits. "Then I came back to Digital Domain and supervised both Chain Reaction and Dante's Peak. We did Dante's Peak in the shortest period of time anyone has ever done a big effects film. We were trying to beat Volcano to the theaters, so we wrapped principal [photography] at the end of October, finished the visual effects on January 17, and opened on February 7! The footage came out pretty good for that period of time, but it was insanity. I'll never do that again it just about killed me."
Fortunately, McClung didn't have to rush his work on Armageddon, since the schedule allowed more than a year for completion of the epic saga's effects. Early on, producer Gale Anne Hurd, an old friend from the early Cameron days, brought McClung in as overall effects supervisor and let him call the shots. "She asked me to set up our own stage and basically do it outside of the big companies," McClung relates.
He quickly set up Bay Effects (named after the film's director) to handle most of Armageddon's elaborate motion-control and high-speed miniature work in-house, while Dream Quest Images came aboard to create Armageddon's extraterrestrial villain, a Texas-sized asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Since the asteroid part of the show would require heavy use of 3-D CG, and because of Bruckheimer's longstanding relationship with Dream Quest (veterans of Crimson Tide, The Rock and Con Air), those shots went to DQ. "Their CG department had been radically expanded over the past couple years," says McClung, "I had no idea they had such firepower. There was a big chunk of about 70 asteroid shots that were very intensive in terms of 3-D, miniatures and compositing, and Hoyt Yeatman [DQ's founder and senior visual effects supervisor] came up with Rich Hoover. I didn't know Rich, but he worked out tremendously and helped me out a lot. I got overloaded and he took on some of the work, including some high-speed crashes, which was really a godsend."
Dream Quest's art department set to work conceptualizing and designing the asteroid, but adding malevolence and purpose to a misshapen boulder careening through space was an exacting task. "We worked very hard to bring out the character of that stone," says Hoover, a star of the company's commercial division who had previously supervised the visual effects work on Freejack. "We wanted to make it look as if it was moving even when it was still, and it had to look like a nasty place to go to. It looks very forbidding with huge, long gnarly spikes very gothic, dark, moody and alive. It's spewing forth this effervescent gas, so there's an aspect of uncertainty about it. It's hot and volatile, and is supposed to be traveling toward Earth at an incredible velocity."
DQ's model shop constructed the gnarled rock as a huge miniature, almost 30' long and roughly 15' in diameter, and then mounted it on a gigantic rotator within their motion-control stage. Hoover offers, "It's not just a dead rock tumbling and rolling end over end it's actually spiraling. It looks very aerodynamic, as if it's flying with a purpose."
DQ software programmer Jim Callahan wrote a proprietary program, nicknamed "Hookah," to render the millions of tiny phosphorescent particles which make up the asteroid's erupting gases. Later, DQ's animators (working under 3-D supervisor Darin Hollings and 2-D supervisor Marlo Pabon) augmented the miniature with the CG gas, which helped sell the asteroid's vast scale as it hurtles through the heavens. "Since it's spewing so much, it actually has an atmosphere," Hoover reveals. "So when you look across the landscape, it gets milky in the distance, which is not common for a space movie. The problem with outer-space effects is creating depth, but in this case, because the asteroid has its own atmosphere, that diffusion helps make it look just awesome."
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