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this is a shot from the biblical deluge
in noaa it may not look like it but this
was filmed entirely at night under
special balloon lights and it took a
massive custom rain machine to dump up
to 200 000 gallons of water on set each
night all that just so you can clearly
see the raindrops in the final shot
hollywood goes to extreme measures to
portray the force of natural disasters
as close to real life as possible
from creating seven different types of
cg dust for a sandstorm to obsessively
building accurate replicas of an ancient
city just to destroy it in a single act
here's what eight apocalyptic movies
looked like behind the scenes
to make an earthquake feel visceral it
isn't enough to just shake the camera
all the characters buildings and objects
in a scene need to be affected by the
same force the effects team took this
literally for 2012 advertised as the
mother of all disaster movies to show
the world being shaken to its core the
filmmakers built sprawling sets on top
of hydraulic lifts so they could shake
everything in a scene from individual
actors to entire houses the crew went
through 500 000 tons of steel building
the shaky decks some of which measured
several thousand square feet and massive
mover rigs underneath made it possible
to put cars trucks planes building
facades and palm trees on the same set
so everything could react to an
earthquake-like force in a consistent
way
the team did have to use cgi for this
scene where a 10.5 magnitude earthquake
chases john cusack through the crumbling
streets of la
getting the destruction and the ocean
wave rippling movement the director
wanted required building wilshire
boulevard from scratch in the computer
and writing a new volume breaking system
called drop the artists could enter a
whole cg building into drop and the
program would cut it into as many as 90
000 little shapes but even for this
almost entirely digital sequence the
team shot what they could practically
here the actors were filmed inside the
limousine attached to a gimbal that
simulated the effects of the quake
in the impossible filmmakers had to
recreate the 2004 indian ocean tsunami
these climactic scenes where the tsunami
slams the coast over the course of 10
terrifying minutes required millions of
gallons of actual seawater darkened with
food coloring and tints to make the
water look dirty naomi watts and tom
holland filmed most of their scenes in
spain in an almost 400 foot long seaside
tank the largest water tank in europe
and second largest in the world
inside the tank the actors sat in
baskets that moved on rails pulled with
steel cables this system allowed the
crew to control the speed at which the
actors moved in the water keeping them
at the same speed as the current the
film also had to show the water slamming
the entire resort area pools palm trees
and all
since the real site in thailand didn't
look the way it did in 2004 the
production designers built a model of
the former resort at one third the scale
that was the smallest model that would
interact with the wave in a realistic
way when it was time to film the water
destroying it all the crew had to get it
right in one shot to ensure the wave
impact looked right the team did test
runs at edinboro designs a company
specializing in wave generators the
company usually tries to create a
precise perfect wave but the filmmakers
on the impossible wanted a wide ugly and
chaotic one they achieved that messiness
by rushing 1 000 gallons of water over
the model set with the power of 8 f1
racing cars behind it cinematographer
set up an apparatus of 10 cameras to
make sure he captured every angle
for the dystopian world of mad max
director george miller wanted a disaster
sequence that would feel apocalyptic a
toxic sandstorm with twisters sucking
cars up into the sky and spitting them
out and it was the biggest vfx sequence
in a movie known for its practical
stunts
the crew started by filming the actual
cars racing through the desert in
namibia they used this footage to
perfect the layout movement and scale of
the storm effects
the practical shots were then re-lit to
fit the unique lighting of the storm and
combined with digital effects swapping
in cg cars and drivers as needed they
relit these shots of tom hardy with more
fire light to reflect the fuel that was
leaking from the car and catching fire
to make the cars look like they were
driving faster through the storm the vfx
team went with a conceal and reveal
approach they replaced the ground in
many shots and added massive digital
dust clouds so viewers could only get
occasional glimpses of cars as they race
down the desert
any given shot has up to seven types of
cg dust coming up from the ground from
the lower levels of fine dust blowing
around the surface to lumpy dust that
went up to about mid car height to
massive eddies of dust billowing around
for the historical disaster movie
pompeii the filmmakers had to accurately
recreate this ancient city and destroy
it with just as much accuracy but what
we know about pompeii is mostly based on
scientific hypotheses written records
and what remains of the ruins so
director paul w s anderson and his team
spent six years researching and imaging
the city including taking a laser scan
of the ruins they used that to build a
life-size set based on the real
dimensions of pompeii with streets sized
precisely down to the last millimeter
the visual effects team also had to
replicate the whole set digitally for
the disaster sequences creating over 100
cg buildings and over 200 cg props all
this work though had to be destroyed
when mount vesuvius erupts collapses
buildings triggers a tsunami and
ultimately wipes out the city for this
scene in the crumbling arena the crew
filmed 500 extras inside the actual set
then had vfx artists digitally extend
the set and doubled the extras to
animate the digital crowd realistically
the artists used mocap footage of
stunned people pretending to escape the
wreckage next there was the tsunami
which capsizes a boat in this scene the
crew filmed part of that practically
using a gimbal as the boat deck then the
city streets for this chariot chase the
crew filmed the horses and stunt doubles
on a dirt track in front of 400 feet of
green screen then used face replacements
to swap the actors into the close-up
riding shots but the hardest part was
replacing all the backgrounds with cg
sets all of which were getting pelted
with lava bombs
not everything was digital though the
canadian studio dynamic effects filmed
actual footage of fireballs and
explosions along with some practical
shots of stunt actors being set on fire
and ash raining down on the city
when earthquakes strike in san andreas
the earth splits open in ways that
haven't been seen in real life at least
not yet so the filmmakers had to depict
these giant chasms with a terrifying
realism older movies might have created
a background like this with a matte
painting these environments had to stand
up at so many different distances and
camera positions that creating a map
painting for every angle wasn't
practical so they built many detailed
environments digitally including this
expanse of rural california with a
85-foot wide 300-foot deep chasm the vfx
artists referenced a smaller earth crack
in sonara mexico to see how the ground
crumbles as soil pulls apart they used
that to place the boulders small rocks
and dust crumbling from the edges of the
cliff and the layers of plants leaf
litter rocks sticks and tire tracks in
the surrounding area
but grounding the cg in reality also
meant going the extra mile to place
actors in the digital space like in this
scene where falling rocks cause a driver
to veer off the road and over a cliff
for the most dramatic shots like showing
the car flying through the air the vfx
artist swapped in a partly or entirely
cg car along with a digital double for
the driver and for the dramatic rescue
that follows the filmmakers built a
special set in australia with a car
hanging from a hydraulic rig and a
helicopter without rotor blades hanging
above from a crane they then film the
actors strapped in place with the rock
doing his own stunts on set i'm gonna
get you out of here okay everything came
together with the vfx team swapping up
the helicopter for a cg one in some
shots or adding digital rotors and
exhaust fumes in others
for the big rain-soaked battle in noaa
the team had to create an apocalyptic
deluge on a literally biblical scale but
it's surprisingly hard to make rain show
up well on camera plus the crew would be
filming on an outdoor ark set about the
size of two football fields to cover all
this ground they came up with a giant
custom rain machine made up of a vast
system of rain bars over 3 000 feet of
pipes carried water from a hundred
thousand gallon tanks into an array of
rain sprinklers one type of sprinkler
released smaller sprays of mist while
another produced larger droplets they
call those sprinklers goose drowners so
massive amounts of rain check
the complex system made it possible for
the team to dump 5 000 gallons of rain a
minute on about 500 extras over two
weeks of shooting that added up to over
a million gallons of water roughly as
much as two olympic-sized swimming pools
still the filmmakers had to make all
that water translate well on screen
which had everything to do with lighting
special effects artists have a general
rule front light snow backlight rain the
deluge sequence was supposed to be set
during the daytime but if they filmed
during the day the sun would constantly
be moving making it impossible to
consistently backlight the rain so the
team shot exclusively at night using
huge balloon space lights on the rain
bar structure to light the area without
shadows they might have filmed in the
pitch black knight but in the final
scene you can make out every drop of
rain
to create the tornadoes in into the
storm filmmakers did as much as they
could practically with giant wind
blowers real tree parts and massive rain
machines they even dropped real cars out
of the sky
fast and furious style but an effect
they couldn't do practically was the
fire tornado
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believe it or not fire nato's do
actually happen in real life but it's a
phenomenon that could easily look fake
in a movie so the crew lit an actual
fire on set when filming the original
photography for the scene this provided
a reference for how the fire nato would
realistically light up the actors and
surrounding structures the digital
artists then applied appropriate
lighting to cg structures like this
church that glow on the sidewalk and on
the church's facade a digital add-on
that seamlessly matched the footage what
wasn't a digital add-on was the moment
where a character gets sucked into the
fire nato and killed the team actually
filmed that moment with a stuntman
attached to a harness
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the day after tomorrow had to depict a
superstorm that looked like it could
bring on the next ice age but ice and
frost are notoriously difficult to
depict realistically and many of the
sequences set in an extreme arctic
environment were impossible to pull off
practically like this scene when dennis
quaid's character walks with his
colleagues across the snow-covered roof
of a shopping mall to safely depict the
roof cracking under the character's
weight the crew built miniature models
of them all they composited blue
screenshots of the actors with shots of
the model then added a mix of practical
snow elements and cg particle snow to
make the whole scene look frozen over
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you