Visual effects supervisor Boyd Shermis (a BAFTA nominee for Speed) oversaw the implementation of more than 600 VFX shots. “In terms of scope it’s one of the most complex VFX pictures ever created,” he says, and offers Poseidon’s innovative opening shot as an example of the level of expertise brought to bear on the film.
“It starts under the water from the camera’s point of view, then rises to reveal the ship, rotates around the bow and down the side of the ship, then spots a figure running along the deck,” Shermis outlines. “The camera comes in tight on him, dollying 180 degrees around him. We lead him up a flight of stairs, then pull back to take in the beauty and grandeur of the ship, the upper decks, people having fun by the pool, then climb high up to the smokestacks and beyond that to a beautiful sunset on the ocean.”
“It’s two and a half minutes,” Petersen says of the remarkable sequence. “The only real element in the whole shot is the jogger, Josh Lucas” – who was filmed against a green screen at the San Fernando Valley’s Sepulveda Dam, one of the film’s only two off-lot locations, then integrated into the virtual landscape. “It’s the boldest, most insane shot ever done in the history of CG, yet completely photorealistic. I don’t expect people will think, ‘what a great CG shot,’ instead, they might think, ‘what a great ship; where did they find it?’”
Acknowledging how computer technology has evolved, he adds, “There is so much more we can do now versus five years ago, especially in the way we can show the natural weight and flow of water,” the most difficult of all elements to realistically replicate.
With R & D input from Stanford University’s computer graphics department, ILM special effects supervisor Kim Libreri led a 100-member team of software developers, engineers and artists for a year to create the proprietary software used on Poseidon. Called computational fluid dynamics, a new technology that simulates how water interacts with objects, it’s a system so advanced it required the simultaneous development of new hardware just to run it. Says Libreri, “Existing machines weren’t fast enough.”
What that means on screen is that, “You’re really going to see the wave react with the ship in ways traditionally not seen in computer graphics,” he says. “It’s not just rendering a wave to stand 150 feet high with a particular curvature, it’s the full interaction of explosive events as that wave hits the ship, runs over the decks, destroys parts of the structure and turns it around. For the first time we can simulate particles of water striking objects, rolling over them, colliding with the back-spray and recombining in a naturally fluid way – and all of this in keeping with Wolfgang’s aesthetic. He and Boyd Shermis wanted all the shots to appear as physically achievable, however difficult, rather than defying the laws of physics.”
Other innovations are in reflected light. Says Libreri, “The computer needs to understand that when a light source strikes an object, some of that light bounces off and hits another object and so on.” Poseidon raised the challenge of simulating sunlight and moonlight on the water and the ship’s interior illumination at night, plus myriad details in combination, such as “how light scatters through water or spray and how bubbles form.”
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