The Island was non-stop action for Eric Brevig and his crew. They created 400 vfx shots and delivered two weeks earlier than planned. All images ™ & © DreamWorks Llc and Warner Bros. Ent. Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of ILM.

Veteran visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig has worked with first-tier film directors for years — with Steven Spielberg on Hook, which earned Brevig an Oscar nomination; with James Cameron on The Abyss; with Barry Sonnenfeld on Men In Black and with Paul Verhoeven on Total Recall, which won Brevig a special achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy. This summer, The Island reunites Eric with director Michael Bay. Their last pairing, on Pearl Harbor, earned Brevig an Oscar nomination, and he understands Bay’s dynamic shooting style well.

The Island (from DreamWorks/Warner Bros.) is Bay’s look into the repercussions of human cloning in a futuristic society. We see the consequences from the point of view of two clones — played by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson — who are running for their lives. Although the movie was slated for U.S. release on July 22, Brevig was working on the visual effects at Industrial Light & Magic well into the first week of July.

“They moved up the delivery date two weeks before we were done. It was one of those things where we said, “OK, nobody’s going to sleep.” We worked literally day and night through the Fourth of July weekend, and then we were done.

Ellen Wolff: Because you can deliver so many last minute changes, do people think anything is possible?

Eric Brevig: Yes. I keep saying that I wish someone would fail, although I was worried it was going to be me! We had a giant network meltdown over the Fourth of July weekend. Getting people to retrieve data when everybody’s on holiday made me think “Ohhhh this could be the one!”

EW: How many visual effects shots did you create for this film?

EB: Around 400. It was supposed to be 250. And we didn’t finish principal photography until mid-March.

EW: A key location in The Island is a “clone factory.” What was ILM’s role in revealing what goes on in that factory?

EB: There’s a great continuous shot where we’ve just seen one of these agnates — which is what the clones are called — pulled out of a plastic bag. These bags are slit in a sort of “birthing.” They pull out these adult embryos and put them on a gurney. Then the camera starts floating towards this big open window where we see where the clones came from. When we look through the window we’re about 100 feet up, looking at this giant cylindrical room filled with these little pods. Then the camera dives down towards them. We see that inside each of them, in various states of completion, are these embryos.

A key location in The Island is a “clone factory” where viewers are introduced to rows of embryos. ILM combined live action, animation and 3D models to achieve the shot.

As the shot continues, the camera follows one pod’s nutrient tubes through a hole in the wall to another room, where you see clones are being injected with all kinds of vitamins. To do that all in one shot required combining and enhancing pieces of live action that we shot on three different sets. When we shot the birth of the agnates there were dummies all over the ground. But these dummies didn’t quite move enough, so in post-production we digitally animated some of their extremities so that when the camera is pushing in on them, they’re wriggling. Then at the end of that shot, we transition into a simple 3D model of one of the walls and we fly into that and then come out on the third set where the agnates are receiving their injections.

EW: Did you use CG animation to create the tiny CG robots that had to crawl around Ewan McGregor’s face?

EB: Yes, and thank goodness they were CG, because otherwise Ewan would have been in worse shape than he was. The story point is that Ewan’s brain is exhibiting unusual REM cycles so he is locked into this futuristic kind of dental chair to have a brain scan. A syringe is touched to his cheek and a dozen or two of these pea-sized nano-bots crawl across his face and under his eyelids. It was horrific, and I had to shoot the plates!

But Ewan was a trouper. We did this over and over. We used a computer-controlled rig like a snorkel rig to fly the camera right up to his eyes. Then we had lot of very good animation by Scott Benza, our animation director, at ILM. We even put in the burrowing — like a little mole in the ground — when the nano-bots crawled in under Ewan’s eyelids. You could see his skin being stretched out. I’m real sensitive about that stuff, and we had to watch those dailies for weeks.