Crew member: Water!
Narrator: Look behind the scenes of this massive tsunami
in 2012's "The Impossible."
You'll see that the filmmakers shot it
on a recreated set at one-third the scale.
A smaller set meant less water to control.
Even for shots that weren't filmed with miniatures,
the challenge was controlling
the unpredictable elements of a storm
while making scenes look as wild and random as possible.
These tricks in "The Impossible" were replicated
and built upon 10 years later by the same director and DP
to engineer the perfectly chaotic storm
in "The Rings of Power."
Older movies with limited equipment
had to avoid putting actors and crews
in real water environments.
Instead, films like "Ulysses" and "Swiss Family Robinson"
shot ocean storms with model ships in miniature tanks.
And when you're destroying a miniature model
that took significant time and labor to build,
you often only get one take.
Today, films like "The Impossible"
still use scaled-down models to create ocean storms,
but they've found new creative ways
around those past hurdles.
To recreate this 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
hitting this resort in Thailand,
"The Impossible" built a model of the site
at one-third the scale,
the smallest set that would interact with the wave
in a convincing way.
Since they'd have to capture the shot in one take,
the director of photography, Óscar Faura,
set up a 10-camera apparatus to catch every angle.
And to make sure they got the wide, ugly impact
that they wanted on the very first try,
the team ran extensive wave-generating tests ...
Crew member: Agua!
Narrator: Ultimately achieving the right level of messiness
by rushing 1,000 tons of water over the model set
with the power of eight F1 racing cars behind it.
But the key to getting convincing results
was combining miniatures with other methods,
including the most popular tool for filming ocean storms,
giant water tanks.
Naomi Watts and Tom Holland filmed most of their scenes
at Spain's Ciudad de la Luz studios,
home to a nearly 400-foot-long seaside tank
capable of rolling out hundreds of thousands
of gallons of water.
That kind of control over water is why Hollywood
most often films its ocean storms in tanks like this one
or Pinewood Studios' tank in the Dominican Republic,
the site for aquatic scenes in "The Lost City" and "Old."
The water tank will give you
all of the control that you need.
The waves will look the same every single day.
The visibility will be the same every single day.
Everything out in the ocean,
it's just a moving, floating set.
Everything in the water tank can be serviced
from the parking lot and from the trucks.
Narrator: Even on a windless day,
the ocean never looks still.
So a tank needs waves and wind to break up
its mirrorlike surface, which often means wave machines.
These machines plunge into the water and just send swells
into our set, so it doesn't look like a pool.
Narrator: For "The Impossible,"
the team modified the design of the giant tank
so that it had 33 submergible pumps,
which would be hidden on camera
and help move over 35,000 gallons of water
through the tank each day.
All of these techniques came to the fore
when building the ultimate storm for "The Rings of Power"
with a team of expert storm makers helmed
by the director-cinematographer duo from "The Impossible."
We went back, and we tore apart the sequences they shot.
We took the film, and we went through it beat by beat.
But for the tsunami, the water came up slowly.
It was more of a rise as a giant wave,
whereas we were in the midst of the sea,
in an overwhelming sea.
Narrator: So the team drew on real-world references too.
Ron: We go to storm-chaser material
and look and see what it actually looks like.
What does the waves look like at sea
in a giant kind of storm like this?
Narrator: After extensive previsualization,
the team tested the plausibility of the shoot
with a miniature water tank.
Then they shot the episode in two real water tanks,
the underwater portion in a smaller dive tank
and the rest in a 10-foot-deep outdoor tank
capable of holding 2 ½ million liters of water.
Over the tank, the team installed a retractable roof,
which allowed more control over the lighting conditions,
making it easier to extend the set in postproduction.
But water doesn't just absorb light; it reflects it.
So "Rings of Power" swapped out the color of the backgrounds
depending on the time of day they were depicting.
We had the ability to switch it to black for night scenes,
to white for the fog scenes.
Narrator: And for day scenes, they used a blue screen
that was slightly less blue,
a technique used on "The Impossible."
The VFX team could still extract actors from it,
as with a normal blue or green screen.
But when it was reflected in the water, it didn't look
like somebody was having a digital blue party.
You know, it looked like kind of sky.
Narrator: For the actors inside the tank,
the team built a raft.
Ron: We went out into the tank with the raft
and started figuring out, safety-wise,
how can we keep the raft tethered to one spot
so it doesn't get pushed around in the waves,
but yet still looks real?
Narrator: The solution was a hydraulic base,
like what Dean used on 2018's "Adrift."
To show the yacht in that movie going through a hurricane,
Dean's team mounted it on a gimbal
paired with a robotic 200-ton digger.
On "Rings of Power," the underwater gimbal
attached to the steel base of the raft.
Dean: It then gets soft, either balsa or timber
that goes on top, which has a soft covering,
so it's not going to hurt the actors at all
when they're rolling and flopping around on it
and getting washed on and off.
Narrator: Safety was paramount here
because of what the actors had to stand up to.
Crew member: Three, two, one, go!
Narrator: Creating all those waves
required a two-pronged approach.
The team took cues from earlier work in "Adrift,"
which involved two dump-tank chutes mounted on trucks,
each holding 4,000 liters of water,
along with a big eight-cannon air mortar for spray effects.
That was all way too big for the scenario, for the raft,
'cause the raft was 2.4 meters,
and the boat that we did was 17 meters long.
Narrator: So on "Rings of Power,"
the 4,000-liter dump tanks became 750-liter ones,
and at the bottom of the chutes,
the team cut little fingers in the kicker plates
to disperse the water,
which helped make the waves manageable for the smaller raft
and helped to get the look they wanted.
Dean: So it really more envelopes them in a spray
than one solid mass of water.
Narrator: The dump tanks provided
the specifically timed waves, but for the continuous chop,
the team hauled in five 14-ton construction diggers
with big steel plates mounted on them,
manually operated from different spots around the tank.
There's that much resistance on the big steel plates
so that the waves that they generate would come in
and they'd pick up and put a big broken lip
on the top of them that then catches the wind
and whisks across.
The waves end up coming back and rebounding,
and so it makes it really nicely messy and horrible
once the waves have reached the optimum sort of size,
and then the dump tank comes in on top.
Narrator: The result was convincing,
at least in the close-up.
In a wide shot, we knew that we were going to have to
extend and create CG water
and really make foreground waves
that made it even bigger and scarier.
Narrator: But water is famously difficult
to render realistically with CGI, especially ocean water,
which is constantly transitioning between different shapes.
So for "Rings of Power," the studio ILM created
a digital ocean machine that programmed the look of CG water
given a range of variables.
So it was getting a system together that would allow us
to say, you know, how choppy should this ocean be?
How windy is it? What time of day is it?
Narrator: Artists could even include little details
like digital streaks of froth,
which better ground the waves in reality.
It also helped that the waves only became CG
around 6 feet outside the actors.
The water that actually is touching them,
splashing around the raft itself, is mostly real.
Narrator: Practical flourishes
pulled the whole storm together.
Ron: Anything that touches the actor,
anything that makes hair move or anything like that,
is always best done practically.
So all the rain and the wind
and everything that was hitting them is practical,
and it needs to be.
Narrator: It also needed to be powerful. For wind ...
Dean: We have V-8 car engines mounted on purpose-built fans,
8- to 10-foot-wide blades
that push a large volume of wind on cue,
and there was three of those being used at any one time.
Narrator: To make torrential pours of rain,
the team could have used massive sprinklers
or rain-bar structures
but instead opted for a firefighting method,
pumping water through the arm of a crane
into spinning cellar nozzles.
This allowed for 360-degree coverage
and more variable movement.
Dean: It's pushed out over the filming set,
usually a little bit towards the wind,
so that by the time it hits the actors
it's caught with the wind and goes over the raft.
Narrator: All that rain was clearly caught on camera
thanks to the controlled lighting
that backlit the water droplets
and also helped the flashes of lightning
translate powerfully on-screen.
Those were pyro effects
set off through a remote firing system,
which provided a second reason for the retractable roof.
Ron: When you do lightning strikes, they illuminate
so broadly that you want to make sure
the light's contained and pushed down into the set.
This way, we got maximal strength from our lightning.
Narrator: With so much done practically on "Rings of Power,"
the VFX team could focus on the details,
like adding these sharp lightning bolts,
painting out cameras and equipment
reflected in the water's surface,
and then seamlessly weaving together the real and CG water.
The fact that storms are chaotic by nature
goes a long way to tying all the effects together,
from waves to wind to rain.
Ron: The great thing about a storm at sea
is the sea becomes very choppy and the wind is blowing
and there's lots of stuff going on in multi directions.
Made it a little bit easier.
Narrator: Of course, creating these storms
only looks like chaos.
So it's all a very choreographed sort of thing
to bring together.
It's like a song.
You always have to hit the same beats over and over.