The grand finale (left) features helicopters attacking a freighter. In this all-CG shot (right), a jet fighter is composited with a set of mountains.

Be Prepared!
Both men are adamant about thorough planning. “All this stuff would not work if we didn’t have enough pre-production time and a director who is willing to draw up to 1,500 storyboards,” Engel says. “And we did 45 minutes of computer-animated previsualization. If you check how many $100 million movies have that much previs, you’ll find that zip, none of them do.” Also key to the production were many conceptual story illustrations. Detailed paintings of the bridge sequence, various chases and the freighter finale were key to the production design, and were also used to raise finances in the earliest stages of pre-production. In terms of exciting investors, Engel offers, “The key shot of the movie became these Osprey helicopters coming out of a cave behind a giant waterfall.”

New Projects?
Engel still takes the time to help out old friends. “Roland Emmerich had some deadlines, so he and his visual effects supervisor came and asked if I could take on some shots. His film is called The Day After Tomorrow, and it’s a gigantic, climate catastrophe movie — I call it Independence Day with snow.”

Conceptual story illustrations were essential to making big production moments like this freighter sequence work.

But Engel’s emphasis is on his own productions. The Ring, based on the ancient German folktales about Zeigfried the dragon slayer in the Song of the Nibelungs, (also the basis for the famous opera cycle by Richard Wagner and a main inspiration for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), takes place in central Europe and in Iceland. Slated to be filmed in a South Africa studio, location still photo shoots around the world have already taken place to get the necessary digital imagery. Weigert says, “I just came back from South America, France, Germany, England and Norway. We scanned entire castles churches, buildings and landscapes, and these will used for the virtual backdrops.”

Engel looks forward to productions of increasingly larger theme and scope. “The Ring is already a big step up, and we have other projects for next year that will be even bigger, but still cost-effective. Basically, a movie that any studio would pay $80-100 million to make, we can do for $20 million.”

Henry Turner is a writer and award-winning filmmaker, whose Lovecraft-inspired horror feature, Wilbur Whateley, won top awards at the Chicago International Film Festival. His writing on film has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L’ecran Fantastique, Variety and many other publications. A longtime film festival executive, he has programmed for the Slamdance Film Festival, and currently heads FilmTraffick L.A.