- Alpha, we have what looks like unidentified rovers
approaching our position.
Possible pirate activity.
[explosion] [low frequency chatter]
- My name's Jed Smith, I am a visual effects supervisor
at Method Studios Montreal.
[explosions] [haunting violin]
We had Ad Astra directed by James Gray,
Roy McBride played by Brad Pitt.
He is sent on a mission to discover the source
of this power surge on Neptune.
- Now, we're talking about a potentially
unstoppable chain reaction here.
The uncontrolled release of anti-matter could ultimately
threaten the stability of our entire solar system.
- A main sequence that we worked on in the film
was the lunar rover battle.
In this future, the moon is kind of this lawless
no man's land and to get to the spaceship,
they have to travel by rover
from Moon Base 1 to Moon Base 2.
Initially, the sequence is kind of this peaceful moment,
they see earth rise from the moon and they pass through
this cloud of lunar dust that's hanging in the air
and then they get attacked by these crazy space pirates.
One of the biggest challenges on this sequence
I think was actually layout.
The whole sequence is driving, right?
Every shot is a different background.
To create all of this environment,
we had to basically create an environment
and then place our CG assets into that
and create a believable world that would exist
through the shots in continuity.
James Gray was really interested in making the, say,
physically plausible, scientifically accurate representation
of what it would be like to be on the moon.
We spent a huge amount of time looking
at all of the reference that we could find of the moon.
The NASA Apollo Archives were vastly helpful.
We spent hours and hours just sort of looking
at those photographs and trying to figure out
why do things look this way?
Why does the lighting work like this?
Why is there no bounce light?
What makes this look the way that it does?
The photographs from the Apollo Archives
were shot with a Hasselblad camera,
a film camera that they actually took on the moon
and had in this sort of infrared-proof housing.
They had this sort of washed out quality.
A lot of lens flares and lot of flash blacks
and a lot of sort of high contrast.
We discovered a few things like on the earth,
there's atmosphere, there's clouds,
there's things that scatter light through the air
and if you look at a mountain that's really far away,
you're gonna see sort of a lifting and a blending
of all the colors and that indicates that it's far away.
On the moon, that doesn't make sense 'cause there's no air,
there's no atmosphere, there's no sky,
it's just black, direct sunlight.
So, the cinematographer on the film had a great idea
to shoot in an infrared film sort of dual camera setup,
so they modified an Arri Alexa XT to shoot in infrared.
They took that idea and brought it out into the Dumont Dunes
in southern California and shot a bunch of really great
plates in the desert.
They actually built these fully functional
pirate rovers and lunar rovers and were actually driving
them around with stunt performers in spacesuits
in the middle of the summer heat out there.
It's pretty awesome.
Basically, the process was to take the luminance information
from the infrared camera and the color information
from the film camera and sort of align those two plates
and stitch them together to create footage
that looked kind of reminiscent of the moon.
A plate is footage that was shot on-set
of the performances of the actors,
the set that was built, stunts that might've been filmed,
all of those things that were physically captured.
This shot is a good example to demonstrate
combining the infrared and the film footage from color.
If we look at only the infrared portion,
we see sort of a black and white image,
which has dark sky and bright ground.
If we look at the film portion,
we see a color image and what we do is we align
the film footage to the infrared footage
and we take luminance from one and color from the other
and sort of stitch them together into one seamless result.
The importance of the infrared is that it sort of captures
the essence of what the moon looks like,
so the sky gets really dark and dim
and the dunes got sort of really bright
and luminescent and ethereal looking.
Many of the plates have plants.
Mind the rovers that were moving and you could see
just by looking at the terrain that it was on earth.
We knew early on that we had to create a fully believable
photo-realistic moon in CG in order to sort of extend
the backgrounds and to create a believable environment
for our heroes to be traveling through.
We scavenged all of the sources we could find
of the actual rovers driving on the moon surface
from the Apollo missions and we found this one clip
of a very excited astronaut spinning a donut
on the moon surface and and it was kicking up
these sort of C-shapes of moon dust from the back tires
and they looked really interesting and sort of bizarre.
The dust would sort of be kicked up and fly much higher
than you would expect and then would sort of trickle down
and dissipate and since we had to add dust trails
to the rovers in quite a few shots,
we built an effect simulation in Houdini
to try to recreate this effect.
You can take gravity and you can change how intense it is
and then you can take things like air resistance
and turbulence and sort of control them as you wish.
Some of the wider shots were shot
in sort of a slower frame rate to help communicate
the idea of it being lower gravity.
It's been used as a cheat since 2001 in Space Odyssey.
If you shoot slow-mo, it feels sort of slow and low gravity
and as a audience member, we're kind of used to seeing that
and I think we believe it.
We had to extend the world that they're in.
So, to do this, we rotoscoped all of the astronaut suits,
all of the pieces of the rover that we saw,
we had to create mattes for 'cause they didn't shoot
with green-screen or blue-screen,
which actually makes sense.
The lighting that they were able
to come up with on the stage worked really well
to convincingly sell the idea of it being the moon.
They had sort of one distant light source
on the stage and no fill light
so it was really harsh directional lighting.
Lighting direction was something
that we played with a lot to get pretty looking lighting
because if you look at the lighting setup here,
we have diffusion on the light that's making it soft, right?
The shadows are diffused
and that's what looks pleasing to our eye.
If you take away the atmosphere, it's just direct sunlight,
which is not the most pleasant thing to look at.
So, we really played with the lighting direction
in a lot of the shots to try to shape the surface
and bring out textural detail on the moon.
- [Movie Character] Look at this.
- The visors are basically these reflective surfaces
that see the whole world, so we had to basically create
that world in CG and add the reflections onto their visors.
So, it was a huge amount of work.
In addition to the camera track,
we created an object track for the visor surface,
so we had a representation of that in CG,
and then we were able to take that group
of our digi-double astronauts, the CG rover,
the match-moved visor, the camera,
and we would take all of that as a group
and put it into our CG moon world that we built
and we would basically have that group
driving along the moon surface
and then we would render the reflections of that movement.
Adjust compositing the visor reflections
was crazy challenging and that's really tricky
because those reflections were often times
over their faces as they were performing.
So, it was like recreating the faces underneath those visors
underneath the reflections on those visors
and then actually creating digital double versions
of the actors as they were performing on the rovers in CG.
It was a massively complex thing
but it came together really well in the end.
We tried all of the easy options
and none of them worked, so we really had to do it for real
and do it right to make it look good.
If one shot starts to look off,
it takes you out of the moment, right?
So, it's super, super important
for everything to be real and to look real.
[character breathing heavily]
In this part of the sequence,
they're wielding these guns called Stilettos.
Me and my team sort of imagined them
to be these sort of rail guns
that would be electromagnetically accelerating
these really heavy metal particles.
[explosions]
- [Movie Character] Alpha, we need backup ASAP,
we're being ambushed!
- For cinematic effect and to make the sequence
feel dangerous, we added these tracer elements
to the Stiletto bullets as they came through,
sort of like a really bright motion blurred streak
as they flew from the gun and impacted
the terrain around our heroes.
The effects is all about cheating.
If you cheat in the right way
at the right time for the right effect,
it's something that makes the movie better.
One of the things we cheated was the brightness
of the Stiletto fire.
In direct sunlight, there's no way those things
would be that bright but that's one example
of when cheated, it achieves a creative effect
and helps held the narrative.
[rover engine rumbles] [loud bang]
There's this one moment that sort of shows the aftermath
of the pirate rover's crash.
On set, they shot a stunt of that rover crashing for real.
They actually smash it into the power station
and there was this great shot of the camera
sort of sweeping past the rover as all of these
pieces are sort of exploding and we added the CG
power station in the background with all of the solar panels
and all of the pillars and added a bunch of different
layers of sort of dust and debris.
And then on top of it all,
we put our POV treatment of the visor
and it's a really cool dramatic moment.
[loud whirring] [haunting violin]
In the sequence, one of the pirate rovers
sort of collides with the hero rover and sets it into a spin
and since the moon gravity is quite low,
there is very little resistance to the spin
and very little traction.
So, there's all of these shots of the hero rover
sort of spinning and it spins out onto the crater
and then there's point-of-view shots of the spin.
The crater design was something
that we went back and forth on awhile.
We referenced several real moon craters
because there's all of these great digital elevation data
from NASA and the other open domain sources
but we ended up sort of cheating
certain things for creative effect,
like to create a really steep wall
that they could sort of spin off of.
After they spin off the crater,
they sort of escape because the pirates aren't brave enough
to follow them and they drive up the crater
onto the dark side of the moon,
so it's sort of like where the Terminator line
between day time and night time is on the moon.
At this point, they've managed to call in air support
and so there's this great shot of the missiles
that are launched from this other base
and they're sort of coming up over us
and the missiles come down.
And for the shot, Allen Maris, the client VFX supervisor,
had this really specific and great idea for the camera move.
And we are trying and trying and trying
and just couldn't get it right and ended up actually
putting tracking markers on his bedroom ceiling
and shooting it with his phone,
he shot this great reference of the camera coming down
exactly like he wanted it and we were able
to use that and sort of match it really closely.
We wanted to create something special
for the impact moment of the missiles
sort of impacting the moon surface
and sending up this debris cloud.
The effects artist who was working on this shot
found this really great reference of this science
experiment where they were trying to simulate
what a meteor impact would look like in a vacuum
and it had this really interesting behavior.
The meteor impacted and then this debris
sort of came up in this cone shape
with this core in the center and it looked really,
really interesting and fascinating
and we were able to sort of take that idea
and create a very large scale version of it.
So, we added dust and debris and rocks
and of course, this is a shot that happens
in the night time, right, so there's no light.
And so, we had this really cool idea
of sort of using the light from the explosion
to illuminate the terrain around the explosion
and sort of show the crater
and all of the tiny textures on the moon and stuff,
it's a really interesting moment in the film.
There's another scene in the film
that we worked on that occurs right after the moon battle.
So, in the sequence, no one wants to go along
on the spacewalk to the other spacecraft,
and so, Brad Pitt's character Roy McBride volunteers
to come along with the captain.
Those plates were shot on a stage using wire work,
so there were stunt performers in spacesuits.
So, for those shots, we painted out the wires.
We also built the Vesta in CG
because it was only filmed with a set piece
of the entry hatch, so that was filmed for real,
which was great because it was the set piece
that they were interacting with.
The idea in the film was that it was a scientific
research craft, we spent a lot of time looking at references
of the International Space Station,
sort of creating this modular design
of different space station pieces
that was sort of hooked together.
I think there's a common perception
about visual effects that it's glamorous
and you have tons of fun and you spend your time
creating these beautiful worlds and it's really easy.
It's not easy, it's a lot of really, really hard work.
There's so much love and care that are put into those shots.
A lot of people just don't know how much
attention to detail you have to add
in order to achieve that kind of realism.
It's a lot of very, very difficult work,
but it's fun, I like it.
I...
I think a lot of people in VFX really like what they do.
And there's so much sacrifice that you have to put
into that kind of work, you have to be a little crazy,
and you have to love it to stick with it.
I remember looking up at the sky
when I was a little kid and trying to imagine
what it would be like up there.
So, it was really fun spending a year trying to recreate
that and make it look as real as possible.