Bay Effects executed a series of Apollo 13-style shots at NASA's shuttle launchpad, matching their miniatures to full-scale, live-action footage involving the space agency's specialized equipment and facilities. In creating the illusion that the redesigned model shuttle was hanging in the vehicle assembly building, the building was captured with a Panavision pan-tilt head which recorded the move; McClung's motion-control team then applied that location data to the model and locked it in. Similarly, NASA rolled out a crawler (the enormous tracked vehicle that takes the shuttle from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad) at night, and Bay Effects added in the miniature shuttle.
However, the most spectacular shots were reserved for the launch itself, wherein Bay Effects match-moved their sleek 5' miniature shuttles (which were totally redesigned except for the main booster engines) to real footage of actual space-shuttle boosters firing on the launch pad. Director of photography John Schwartzman mounted cameras in the pad's large fireproof housings and shot 35mm anamorphic footage of NASA's shuttle blasting off. Bay Effects then digitally doubled everything to produce the illusion of twin shuttles taking off from side-by-side launch pads. Of course, getting the miniature elements to line up with the moving production cameras and the escape-velocity shuttles was quite a job, in and of itself, on these 10 extremely complex and critical shots. Explains McClung, "We could get the gross match-move very quickly, but then we had to look back at the film and tweak everything to make sure the perspective was correct. We had a video playback and compositing system on stage. Our motion-control camera had a videotap so that we could see what we were doing in terms of lining things up with the background plate, and then we would go look at the film and do another test. Once we worked out our motion-control match-move, Philipp would shoot several passes on the shuttlecraft models: one pass for the miniature lights representing the big klieg spotlights on the ground in the background plate; a really hot pass that was burnt-out from where the source of the engines would be; and a separate pass to create a very bright glow over the entire shuttle as it lifted off."
"I did the beauty pass with the backlight and fill all in one," Timme adds. "I only split that up when Pat thought he would have to deal with them later in post, because shooting VistaVision gave us a very shallow depth of field, and therefore very long exposures. Fortunately, I had a very good first A.C. who was able to let me shoot at around an f16, so we were able to keep the passes down to a reasonable length. We didn't have a pass that was longer than 40 minutes. On top of greenscreen, practical light and beauty passes, I did what I called a reference pass basically a front-lit matte against black in order to let postproduction see if any part of the model had too much greenscreen wrap around it. The front-lit pass not only told us where the problems were occurring, it could also be used as a high-contrast matte.
"In these background plates, we slipped the timing between the passes to get it exactly the way we wanted when we were compositing our match-moved motion-control shuttle over the real shuttle. So when you see the shuttles lift off, it's our slicker and more streamlined miniatures stuck to the real boosters. We created some amazing launch footage. There's a shot like the one in Apollo 13 we're looking at the motion-control shuttles coming up, and the whole ground plane below is a 3-D matte painting with 3-D gases for the big plume that's left on the ground. The engine plumes trailing from the shuttles are also 3-D."
Once Armageddon's setting shifted to outer space, director Bay wanted to bring the shuttles, and the various stellar objects they encounter including the Hubble space telescope and a Mir-like Russian space station to cruise within inches of the audience and the motion-control cameras, which necessitated the rather unconventional use of a snorkel lens. Snorkels are invariably deployed when the camera cannot come close enough to an intricate model to fly through the really tight spaces. According to Timme, however, the snorkel was used "so we could basically skim down the side of the shuttle. We didn't think of that in the beginning, but it became clear that we would need something to get close to the models because Michael Bay likes to have things in your face. It was a big challenge to shoot with a snorkel lens, because there aren't a lot of them built for VistaVision cameras. It was a fun to figure that out and get it done with a VistaVision camera and a big motion-control rig, even when we were trying to fly by within a quarter of an inch [of the models]. I know that Chris Dawson, the mo-co operator, had a lot of moments when he was sweating blood because the camera was so close."
After the explosion of the anonymous Russian space station, Dream Quest Images handled the rollercoaster "fly moon sequence," in which the Independence and the Freedom shuttles slingshot around the moon to gain momentum and match pace with the deadly asteroid. "It's a 9-minute sequence with 35 really difficult shots, many of which are 10 seconds long," says DQ visual effects supervisor Richard Hoover. "The camera is always moving; we had not one lockoff, which made our job harder but made every shot much more dynamic. We did very intense fully-digital animatics to work out the choreography of the entire sequence with Michael. We explored every angle and every cool idea. Then we could apply the motion from the animatics to our miniature shuttles, double-expose them over the backgrounds, and just send tapes down to Michael while he was shooting first unit. Michael would make subtle changes based on having the real shuttles in the shot, especially in terms of how close they were to camera. We always ended up incredibly close to the shuttles."
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