While DQ was envisioning the deadly asteroid barreling through space, Bay Effects began churning out signature shots of out-of-this-world annihilation that occur back on Earth: cars sailing through the air, and various landmarks crumbling via high-speed miniature effects. McClung and Philipp Timme (visual effects director of photography on Dante's Peak and a veteran of Independence Day and The Postman) unleashed some initial high-speed havoc caused by falling meteorites which herald the giant asteroid's approach. "Philipp shot some cars blowing down streets, exploding, and flipping end over end," McClung recalls. "Those models were just launched out of air cannons and then digitally composited against a background. We also did a shot where a meteor goes through three buildings and hits the top of the Grand Central Station terminal. This involved a background plate shot in New York and some high-speed miniature buildings exploding, plus a CG streak and a lot of explosion elements, which were all put together at Digital Magic."
Timme not only shot the high-speed elements, but also the original background plate on location in New York prior to principal photography, working alongside director Bay and director of photography John Schwartzman, ASC; this replicated Timme's experience on ID4, when he began shooting before the first unit and finished long after they had wrapped. As he had on The Postman, Timme shot VistaVision plates because "the first unit was planning to shoot in anamorphic, but we didn't want to use anamorphic for comps if we could help it. It was better to have the large VistaVision negative, which gave us more room to push in, pan-and-scan and move elements around a little bit. I think there's a tendency to go anamorphic again as opposed to Super 35, especially with the Primo lenses from Panavision, so VistaVision will actually be more popular in the years to come."
Timme thus shot VistaVision plates of an intact Manhattan landscape, attempting to anticipate what kind of destruction Bay would ultimately want to see months later. "I did pans and tilts across the sky, trying to follow a meteor that wasn't there as it destroyed the Chrysler Building, another building and, eventually, Grand Central Station," he recalls. "Later, we had to match the model elements that showed the destruction to what we had shot in New York."
But Timme's original pan from the Chrysler Building to the front of Grand Central Station was not encoded; the move had to be hand-tracked so it could be re-created on an exterior greenscreen stage (to match the plate's exterior light), again using a VistaVision camera to ensure that the miniatures would be properly positioned against the background plate. While they had hoped to shoot each building's destruction separately with a locked-off camera some elements demanded the use of real-time motion control to lend a proper sense of immediacy to the high-speed devastation. This meant that the VistaVision camera had to run between 100 and 200 frames per second, or four times faster than normal speed a pace dangerously close not only to the limits of the motion-control head, but to that of the VistaVision equipment as well. "Basically, we got into a realm where there were only one or two VistaVision cameras available worldwide that could hit those speeds, and Clairmont Cameras had them," Timme says. "The Wilcam 9 goes up to 100 frames per second, and the Wilcam 7 runs up to 200 frames. In terms of actual film speed travel, that's like shooting 400 frames per second of regular 35mm film. Fortunately, we were able to shoot those high-speed shots outside in daylight on 5248, which is how we had shot the background plates in New York."
VistaVision was just one of the countless formats McClung and Timme had to deal with. The others included 35mm spherical, Super 35 and 35mm anamorphic. "We used about 40 different kinds of cameras on Armageddon, which is usually not a good thing for visual effects," Timme says. "But in this case, we basically needed a different camera for every job because we had so many different formats and specialized fields it basically covered the whole range. For motion control, we used the Paramount-Fries VistaVision camera; for high-speed VistaVision, we used the Wilcams; for anamorphic shots, we employed the Fries Mitchells; and spherical work was done with an Arriflex 435. My first A.C., A.J. Raitano, started numbering the cameras A camera, B camera and we eventually ended up with a ZZ camera!"
Of course, each format dictated its own stock, adding yet another complication to every decision. "We had three general stocks: Kodak 5248, which we used exclusively for motion-control and all of our VistaVision shots; 5279 for all of the high-speed shots; and 5293 for wherever we needed an ASA of 200," Timme says. "[For greenscreen or bluescreen,] we used the older 5293 stock, which is a really good emulsion. I'd had a bit of trouble with the 5277 Vision 320T stock while doing process work on Dante's Peak."
Having laid waste to New York City, McClung and company dealt with several differently-sized miniatures of the two "next generation" space shuttles which are sent to rendezvous with the asteroid and obliterate the object before it reaches Earth. The Independence and the Freedom shuttles represent NASA's "duality" concept send up two of everything in case one fails taken to a new extreme. The military shuttles have the same configuration as current NASA ships, but their more detailed design is sleeker and more streamlined; the movie shuttles also feature additional booster engines and expanded cargo bays capable of carrying large vehicles. The miniatures were supervised by master model builder Alan Faucher, who served as McClung's crew chief at Digital Domain on True Lies, Apollo 13 and Dante's Peak. "Alan built four 5'-long space shuttles two for us and two for Dream Quest, which did the same kinds of shots," McClung recalls. "He also built a 1/12-scale, 10'-long version for our high-speed shots of one of the shuttles crash-landing on the asteroid."
[ continued on page 3 ]