(man yelling)
- It was just an absolute whirlwind.
(dramatic music)
- This is Behind The FX
(dramatic music)
- Here we go.
Ready and action.
- It was really important to Jude and the whole team
that we have a fun and sort of light atmosphere
about the filmmaking itself.
Have a good energy and sort of celebrate Hawaii.
(snap and clap sounds)
- This was my first movie.
I'm by no means like an experienced seasoned actor
and even more so I'm not an experienced visual effects
or special effects ambassador.
- What the...?
(dramatic music)
- Is the floor literally a lava?
- So at this point in the movie, we've pretty much
gone through a bunch of hardships.
There's no turning back and we find a bridge
and we're finally like, "Okay, cool.
Finally, like a nice little break.
Great, awesome."
(screaming)
Boom. Everything explodes, bridge collapses.
There goes our out.
- There was a real bridge
and there's a real rope component that breaks.
We're always looking for opportunities where
we can add a little something to sort of sell the drama
or sell the danger
or tell the story in a more impactful way.
We added more of ledge.
We added more lava.
We added some smoke billowing up.
- It definitely was not in working condition.
It was a tattered old bridge
and they had actually set it with explosives
so that the bridge could actually collapse in real time.
And we filmed that sequence
with the explosives first and then without the explosives
multiple times
- As a visual effects artist
I think I've added dust and debris and breaking stuff
to 5,000 shots over the course of my career.
It's a staple of the visual effects
artists toolbox to add breaking dust
and little bits of debris.
(screaming)
- You're feeling like whoa
he just dodged a bullet or a piece of wood.
- We did not throw any,
we did not throw a pieces of wood at Alex.
- Yeah, not a big deal.
- When you think about it its really.
(Screaming)
- Okay no no no I can't do this.
- What? you can, you just got to keep.
- Don't tell me what I can and can't do,
I mean you almost fell
- At this point
We're in a real cave in Thailand and the ground
was still pretty high and we're talking probably 15
20 feet in the air, you know, in your mind
if I fall over this, I'm dead for sure.
- But this cave did not have the ledge component
and it didn't go down to lava.
And so what we did was we used the best
of what was available.
We dressed the surrounding real environment
and we draped fabric on the floor.
Green-screen fabric.
- [Man] What do you think about, it's real.
(screaming)
- That's a shot that I sold the director on.
We want to tell the story of how far up the kids were
and we want to increase this for the jeopardy.
So one of the things that you can always do is have
the camera sort of go on for a ride and pull back
to see how far the drop is.
And then we added a couple of Easter eggs.
If you're really careful, you can see there's a skeleton
that's sort of punctured onto one of the rock outcroppings.
We're always looking to, to get as much in camera as we can.
- They had a big air cannon
that shot out that helped create.
I think the effect of bats flying through.
(screaming)
Named shoot it without telling us.
So you actually do get scared.
And so a lot
of the times those reactions were actually real reactions
- What?
- There like a bioluminescent algae.
- Hey, I don't want to be that guy but
- Does anybody see way out cause I don't?
(soft music)
- Even early on, we were looking
at footage of what bioluminescence looks like,
and so what we did was we did it in parts.
We had all this great lighting from the guys on set.
All these pinpoint dots
in the ceiling were created by LEDs
- My imagination.
It helps the room breathe a little bit
- [Man] But when the kids move into the water
you'll see that the water also activates.
We actually created doubles of the children.
And then what we're doing is we're using our
computer graphic lights to aluminate the kids
but sort of the computer equivalent.
And then we combine that all
on the composite to make it look
like they're being lit by their undersigned, by the algae.
- On the count of three, one two three.
(screaming)
- The Banyon route jumps scene is definitely the most
intricate of the shots.
We step out onto that ledge and we look over
and we see this, there was maybe two feet
underneath that ledge.
There was a pad.
We were in a studio.
We had to look down and pretend we're up 150 feet.
And they kind of put us in a tiny little speckle
on the screen and make this whole universe
that we had never seen.
It was a drone shot.
And that look kind of shows how big and how high
up we actually are in the movie.
- One of the great things about this movie was
recreating this jungle waterfall ledge.
- We went to THI LO SU falls, which is on the border
of Thailand and Myanmar.
And we shot for the first time ever this fantastic
waterfalls. We combined our work on stage
with the drone shots on this waterfall.
And we put our kids into that environment.
In the context of the movie, Alex has to jump off
of this ledge.
It was probably like 40 or 50 feet high.
So there's safety constraints.
- They let me do the actual jump into the water
with no harness and no wire
I'm jumping off this fourth cliff.
Am, It was probably only like 20 or 30 feet.
I'm going to say it was like 60, 70 feet.
And every year that I get older, it's going to get more.
I, by the end
of it, by the time I die, it's a thousand foot drop.
(screaming)
- Hi
- From A to Z there you go that's the Banyan scene.
(dramatic sound)
- That is not a cute wolf spider.
- That is not a wolf spider.
- Why does it have so may eyes.
- Sadly for Alex, he didn't have a real spider to act again.
- They would draw certain dots
in areas and they didn't make sense.
Sometimes. Like sometimes I thought they were just throwing
like closing their eyes and like throwing dots and places.
But every single one
of those dots apparently held importance
to creating those spiders.
- We've acting with the dots on his hand.
Then we have a paint artist back
in industrial light and magic that removes the little dots.
And then we do, what's called a match, move up.
His hands are spider animation loops
on top of the proxy hand.
And then we replaced that
and we laid it in the, we composite it into the shot
- I am getting shivers up my spine, talking about it.
(screaming)
- I give so much
Credit to ILM for creating incredible, like the spider
on my hand made me think, wait a second
did we do a couple of shots where they just
dropped a little spider on my like, it's so real.
- It's always wonderful,
when Alex or any of the other cast members can't
remember what was fake, what was real or we're always
endeavoring to make it look seamless and a great compliment.
- You can check
out the whole film, finding 'Ohana now streaming
On Netflix.
(upbeat music)