Unlike Bay Effects, which strictly used miniature shuttles, DQ employed miniature and CG shuttles which were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Hoover explains, "That's because Mark Siegel texture-mapped all of the shuttles using photographs of the actual miniatures shot with the same emulsion we used to shoot our motion-control models. Mark made the surfaces dimensional so that when the CG shuttles were illuminated, they cast shadows and highlights, as they would in reality. We can fly right up to them and they look just like the miniature, and we've got shots that start with the whole bottom of a CG shuttle almost filling the frame before we pull away."
Finding the appropriate tone for the "fly moon sequence" was an exercise in dramatic balance. "Early on, I worked with Michael Bay on the emotional ups-and-downs of the sequence," Hoover says. "The astronauts have only an hour to catch the asteroid, so the clock's ticking, but there's a little quiet time before they reach the asteroid, and Michael wanted to see some beautiful scenes with the moon, the stars and the shuttles."
Toward that end, DQ's Sean Jenkins wrote original software to render stars and fashion the universe from the Earth's point of view. "Stars are always a challenge on any movie," Hoover opines. "They're difficult to render because they don't motion-blur the right way, or they flicker or turn weird colors because they're just really tiny pixels on the film. This program actually works from the existing galaxy and models stars to look the way they really are, so wherever you look 360 degrees up, down or sideways you see what you would really see."
The moon was also a digital creation (based on NASA photos) with fully dimensional topography. When the shuttles slingshot around Earth's nearest neighbor, the twin ships skim some 500' over the lunar surface, leaving lots of landscape texture whipping by beneath them.
As the camera comes around the edge of the moon, the asteroid makes its first appearance from the shuttles' POV. "It's flying away from the shuttles and heading straight for the Earth, which was also a CG-manipulated object based on NASA photographs," Hoover says. "The shuttles then enter the frame and gain very slowly on the asteroid, which is pulling away from camera. The asteroid is about 1/4 or 1/3 the size of the moon, which is approximately 3,000 miles in diameter, so the shuttles are just dots against it."
In overtaking the asteroid, the shuttles penetrate its tail, which is covered with hundred-mile-long, gnarled, coral-like spikes comprising nearly 50 percent of its length. Searching for their predetermined landing spot, the shuttles maneuver through the spikes themselves a literal minefield of ice and rock fragments. "It's a nasty place once you get into it," Hoover promises. "The journey inside is a definite ride. People will be rocking in their seats."
DQ used their 30' asteroid miniature for the shuttles' initial approach to the tail, then segued to a close-up section of a half-dozen spikes (measuring 35' to 40' long) augmented with various motion-control passes to add atmosphere and shafts of "God-light." Later, multitudes of rocks and gas elements hurtling through space were added digitally. "It would have been very time-consuming to program all of the rocks one at a time via motion-control, and difficult to maneuver our shuttles out of the way using random high-speed techniques," Hoover explains. "We used CG rocks instead because we wanted them to hit each other and change direction. We could also attach gas to them so that these big rocks would be venting from where they broke off, and create some spectacular choreography very quickly.
"When the shuttles had to do some maneuvering, we were careful not to let them get too crazy," Hoover adds. "They still use little thrusters that help them bank, but if we strictly followed reality, they'd just be sailing along, which would look boring. Instead, we stretched and made them fly a bit like airplanes. As they maneuver through this minefield, their wings pitch and tilt, which made the shots more interesting."
Once the twin shuttles clear the largest spikes, they begin their descent to a landing area. As the ships veer towards the asteroid, its detail and intricacy increases, culminating in a huge 80' long by 25' wide tabletop miniature of the moving mineral mass. The tubular landscape, which supposedly measures some 20 miles across, is covered with fissures, deep chasms, spires and spikes. Says Hoover, "It's something like looking across the L.A. basin on a clear day, with that kind of spatial volume a bit more on a human level, but still pretty vast."
The model was mounted on risers about 4' off the floor and shot on DQ's famed gantry motion-control stage, originally constructed for the company's Oscar-winning effects work on The Abyss. The camera was mounted on a rig that ran on a track in the ceiling, enabling DQ's director of miniature photography, Scott Beattie, to create shots that flew through the bizarre landscape. "Sometimes we had to cut away some of the overhead spikes so the camera could continue on the shot," Hoover recalls. "It looked great when we watched the model onscreen in dailies. But when we put the shuttles and the gases in, the scale suddenly changed tenfold, and it looked so much vaster. It gets rather violent and the gas is moving very fast, creating currents that blow the shuttles around."
[ continued on page 5 ]