Lighting was a major issue, as most of the shots of people on the ark were shot on a greenscreen stage and had to match an outdoor setting full of water that reflected light around the environment.

A Tricky Boat
The ark's simple design made it difficult to give it the proper mass and weight. "That was one of the tricky thing about the CG ark was selling that sense of scale because in most of the shots you're really far away, it's a little tiny ark on the water. And because the design is really simple, there's not that many cues for the scale of it. So big weighty, heavy and large was another thing that took a lot of work and a lot of consideration," De Quattro offers.

Keeping the camera angle low and moving the ark slowly and deliberately gave the ark size and mass. "Wherever we can, just to sort of cheat additional detail, we had a certain amount of detail painted into the boards when it was far away and we'd tone it down when it was closer to camera. Anything we could do to just give it detail and scale," she says.

The type of wood used for the ark also created problems. "The wood that they used would turn very yellow when it was in sunlight and looked very red when it was in shadow," she adds. "So you could have these situations where you're on one side of the ark and it looks yellow, and you flip over to the other side and it looks red and you suddenly feel like you're looking at a different ark in a different movie. It was quite a bit of work just to get the continuity of the ark to work throughout the sequence."

Screenings and Workflow
On top of all this, Evan Almighty is a comedy. Shadyac was a big proponent of frequent screenings of the film as a key tool for figuring out what makes audiences laugh. That required ILM to alter its usual work procedure of taking shots to completion one at a time. Instead, they created temps for every shot in the film and worked on each shot concurrently, improving the quality between screenings, De Quattro admits.

Each screening, of course, brought changes to the edit and changes to the vfx shots, requiring sometimes-significant changes on the fly.

The film climaxes with the flood carrying the ark into Washington, D.C., and coming to a halt on the steps of the Capitol. De Quattro says the images of the capital city had to be created with CG due to heavy restrictions on shooting at the Capitol and the National Mall. The crew made extensive use of reference photography and digital matte paintings. The digital mattes are what De Quattro calls 2 1/2D work, as the process projects the image onto rough geometry to give it more depth than a static 2D image would on its own.

ILM had a relatively small crew on the film. De Quattro estimates 30 core crewmembers, with support staff and R&D bringing the number to around 50 or 60. The crew produced around 200 shots on a yearlong schedule that began in April 2006 and ran through May.

"(A year) used to be standard, but compared to what's happening in the industry, it felt long. But I can't imagine getting this show done to the level we were able to do in anything less than that because there was so much to develop; it would have been tough to do it any shorter," concludes De Quattro.

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comicbook blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.