One of these whipping astral gusts causes the Independence to be hit by a meteor that destroys an engine, causing the craft to plummet in a spiraling crash. This high-speed sequence was overseen by Hoover at Bay Effects' stage in Culver City. He notes, "Pat was really involved in the design of the crash, but it turned out that he had too many things going on, so I came in to help out on that. The landscape filled the stage, which was about 110' long by about 80' wide. There was a huge ceiling rig that flew the 1/12-scale shuttle model, which was suspended from wires. That model was about 10' long, very detailed, with working landing gear and cockpit lights, mannequins in the cockpit, wingtip lights, engine lights in the rear thrusters and real interactive smoke spewing from the engine. It was also rigged with a huge amount of timed pyro events for the crash itself. We might have had 50 charges going off, which was an astronomical undertaking for the pyro crew headed by Richard Stutzman and Dave Green. We had at least six cameras running anywhere from 48fps to 72fps, depending on the lens length I tended to go a little faster on the longer lenses. We did a lot of cool shots where the cameras were positioned in great places. I hid Eyemos inside of rock formations that the shuttle would crash into I hit at least three or four cameras, but we got a lot of great action."
McClung and Timme handled the dramatic landing of the Freedom using the same wire rig over a huge model landscape representing a field of strange icicles. "We flew the 10' shuttle model on an overhead track and crashed it into a huge terrain model," McClung says. "It does a hard landing in this field of icicles and just slides and slides, finally coming to a halt that was all done in-camera. Then Cinesite did some digital rig and ceiling removal, and actually handled a lot of paint-outs to remove the permanents from the stage."
After the Freedom lands, it releases one of the two Armadillos (six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles) that head for the site where warheads will be planted to decimate the asteroid. While a full-scale vehicle measuring some 20' long was shot by the first unit with the actors on location in South Dakota, model supervisor Alan Faucher built a 1/4-scale miniature which could be fully radio-controlled for use in high-speed effects, then rerigged for motion control; the radio-controlled version was actually filmed in the South Dakota location for wider shots of the Armadillos' journey.
Shooting the 1/4-scale radio-controlled Armadillo high-speed offered a number of obstacles for cinematographer Philipp Timme, who had to generate mood lighting and practical gas swirling over the miniature landscape while filming at faster-than-normal framerates. Timme explains, "The whole asteroid sequence was very dark, very backlit, with 'God-light' these fingers of light coming down. That was actually somewhat tricky. The stage was only 24' tall, and it was hard to create that look when the set reached three-quarters of the way up to the ceiling, because you need the distance to put the lights up. We were able to achieve most of the shots in-camera by splitting the God-lights up into a lot of sources, mostly Pars everything from 6Ks down to Arri Pocket Pars. We tried to make them all look like one big source that was very far away by letting every single Par create its own beam; we then broke that up with setpieces placed in front of them, which is very similar to what John Schwartzman did on the full-sized asteroid set on Disney's Stage 2."
Then there was the ambient atmosphere, which was created by smoking the set a strategy that became nearly impossible in this case since the smoke appeared to be swirling around too rapidly. "Fortunately, our stage effects crew was very good at creating a very static, general atmosphere," Timme says. "Since the asteroid was supposed to have this constantly windy look, we blew small puffs of smoke through the set with a lot of fans and air movers, which helped create the feeling of speed against the static backdrop of atmospheric haze. We also had little practical steam vents that were supposed to be geysers on the surface, which dissipated very fast. At high speed, the little puffs of smoke blowing through the asteroid looked like gale-force winds and made the environment more hostile it had a very cool look."
McClung pulled in some high-powered help to complete certain outstanding effects sequences for Armageddon's climax. Master animator Phil Tippett's company, Tippett Studios, handled 21 shots for a sequence involving a squall of boulders and rocks that blows in as the astronauts are drilling into the asteroid's surface. After DQ successfully dispatched the villainous asteroid via miniatures and CG, Digital Domain's Rob Legato, fresh off his Oscar-winning triumph on Titanic, agreed to supervise a very complicated shot of the meteor hitting Shanghai, which involved high-speed miniature work, photo cutouts and CG animation. Meanwhile, McClung led Bay Effects' effort to finish the shots of the Freedom's triumphant return to Earth.
