While "Mission To Mars" involves more visual effects than De Palma's previous films, it was not an overly daunting challenge for the director. Because computers remain one of his hobbies, and he started building and designing them as a young man, he is very familiar with the technology and understood the process. "It's just incredibly exacting and tedious and you have to be extremely well organized. I understand what you can do and how you can push the envelope — all the time — which we tried to do in this movie by creating worlds that avoid the cliches of space travel and space movies seen in the past."
Every exterior shot on Mars was digitally treated, as Jacobson says, "Because the Martian sky doesn't look like an Earth sky."
Other visual effects include traditional model work with the spaceship miniatures, shot on stage in Los Angeles, and putting in star fields or the planet Mars in the deep space sequences. The production also relied on matte painting, as well as computer graphics, which are used extensively to create the cataclysmic vortex scenes.
Sam Mercer elaborates on the process of creating the look of Mars: "Ultimately, we divided everything into three parts. One was the practical set we built, which we gave the texture and color of Mars. We digitally enhanced the color of the sky. Then the second unit got big images in Jordan, and took reference photos and texture maps in the Canary Islands, which we digitally manipulated and then added in some 3D-matte-painting work."
Led by Academy Awards-winning ("The Abyss") visual effects supervisor Hoyt Yeatman, Dream Quest Images' visual effects team of 53 digital artists, a 14-person production team, 11 stage crew and seven conceptual artists were responsible for the vortex attack and meteor shower sequences, in addition to shots of the Mars II Recovery in flight. In all, Dream Quest Images worked on over 100 shots.
Yeatman contacted JPL and consulted with Matt Golombek, chief scientist on the Pathfinder mission, who provided the visual effects team with technical data on planetary atmospherics.
The Mars II Recovery model, designed by Ed Verreaux, was built in Dream Quest Images' model shop by a team of 25 modelmakers. Construction of the elaborate 22-foot-long space vehicle took a total of 10 weeks, with an additional four weeks spent on the creation of the space vehicle's exploded sections, as well as a large tabletop Mars landscape.
Recovery's NASA-like design required custom fabrication of spherical fuel tanks, solar panels, antennae and lower deck. The Recovery's mechanized support armature had a second rotation axis which allowed the lower deck (the "wheel of cheese") to revolve independently of the ship.
Yeatman says the most challenging aspect of the film was "the creation of the vortex — creating a character from natural and supernatural elements. Our challenge was to animate this particle system in a way that is menacing and creature-like, but totally believable as a phenomenon of dust and wind. The sheer magnitude of the image made this a process computationally intensive. Also demanding were the virtual programming and many digital-matte paintings that underlie the Mars and outer space environments."
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