Breathtaking action scenes such as this, where people are stranded on a bridge and attacked by a jet plane, are featured in Coronado, made on a surprisingly small budget. Here bluescreen plate is composited with a gorge background. All photos: Bruno Arnold; © Coronado Motion Picture LLC and ARM GmbH.

Coronado is an adventure film depicting a woman’s search for her fiancée in a South American country torn between a brutal dictatorship and a secret revolutionary faction. It features incredible vfx scenes, such as jet planes attacking characters stranded on a rickety bridge spanning a gorge, a secret cavern behind a waterfall where revolutionaries have a hoard of military equipment and breakneck chases, in which jeeps are demolished by rampaging trains. In a grand finale, helicopters attack a freighter. But perhaps the biggest surprise of the film is that it was made on a shoestring budget, as the first production of Uncharted Territory, a new visual effects-driven company. And though Coronado offers great entertainment and thrills for its own sake, it is in many ways a demo film, proving the radical ideas that brought Los Angeles-based Uncharted Territory (www.uncharted-territory.com) into being.

Mapping Uncharted Territory
The story of Uncharted Territory begins in late 1999 when Academy Award winning visual effects supervisor Volker Engel and his partner Marc Weigert conceived the bold idea to break away from merely working on other producers’ films, and become producers themselves. Friends from film school in Germany, they had already worked together on a number of smaller projects, before Engel got called in 1995 to be visual effects supervisor on Independence Day, for which he invited Weigert to do project management.

After Independence Day, Engel supervised the effects on Godzilla. Weigert, a multi-talented entrepreneur, had created a management/scheduling database system for Independence Day. “Another supervisor saw it and said, oh, I want that for my next production. Later I sold it to Disney, Twentieth Century Fox — a lot of different movies used it.”

Throughout their time together and apart, both men amassed enormous knowledge not only about visual effects, but all aspects of production. Weigert says, “After Godzilla, we decided to stop just being the visual effects guys, and actually do our own films. I had a lot of knowledge on the low budget side, while Volker had gained experience working with Roland Emmerich. We knew we could avoid all the production pitfalls where money was being wasted.” Their concept was to produce or co-produce their own features, carefully planning the effects sequences as early as script development, to ensure manageable, low costs. “We’d be in there with the writers making sure the story goes in the right direction,” Engel adds. “A lot of times there are things about visual effects that writers can’t know, that even producers can’t know.” Filmmaking legend is rife with stories about daydreaming writers creating scenes that are impossible or excessively costly to shoot. “So we said, let’s do the opposite — let’s find effects that are easy to do, but have an enormous impact on the screen.”

The brain trust behind Coronado are (l to r) director Claudio Faeh with Uncharted Territory partners and the film’s producers, Volker Engel and Marc Weigert. They looked to Tin Tin for inspiration.

Coronado
“The idea was to make an adventure movie,” Engel explains. “Claudio Faeh, the director, came to us with an idea that had a very dark, Kafkaesque, Eastern blockish feel. We wanted to work with him, but we also wanted to make films that people will actually see.” At a Santa Monica coffee shop, the trio brainstormed, often using the European Tin Tin comics for inspiration. “It is so rare that a true adventure movie comes out, made in exotic countries, like Indiana Jones or Romancing the Stone, and we were really longing for that. So we decided to do one of those.”