In this remake, Poseidon boasts a digital model ship and two state-of-the-art fluid simulation technologies. All Poseidon images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

When The Poseidon Adventure was released in 1972, it was a smash hit and its worldwide success launched the era of disaster movies. The movie went on to win the Academy Award for best visual effects. The key scene of the luxury liner Poseidon being overturned by a giant wave was realized with a 21-foot long (six meters) model shot in a tank. Thirty-four years later, director Wolfgang Petersen had a much more sophisticated bag of tricks at his disposal to shoot the remake, Poseidon (released by Warner Bros. on May 12). The handcrafted miniature of 1972 is now a digital model, while the good old water tank has been replaced by not one, but two state-of-the art fluid simulation technologies. Overall visual effects supervisor Boyd Shermis spread the effects workload among eight different vendors, including (in credits order) Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), The Moving Picture Co. (MPC), CIS Hollywood (which leveraged AI-driven Massive to populate the ship with digital passengers and crew), Giant Killer Robots, Pixel Playground, Hydraulx and Lola Visual Effects.

Kim Libreri and his team at ILM, in charge of all the exterior shots of the fictitious 1,200-foot long liner, created 140 shots for the film.

In charge of all the exterior shots of the fictitious 1,200-foot long liner, including in the capsize scene, ILM set up a team led by visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri and visual effects producer Jeff Olson. “We did about 140 shots,” Libreri says. “It may not seem a lot, but that includes the opening shot: a three-minute long, almost entirely computer-generated shot in which the camera flies around the ship in broad daylight. The only live-action element is actor Josh Lucas when his character is seen jogging around the ship. This shot alone was one of the main reasons why we opted to create the ship in CG. In the scene, we go all the way from a wide angle to the point where a passenger fills 50% of the frame. With a miniature, we would have had to shoot many different scale pieces, and then go through all the effort of trying to stitch them together to make one continuous shot. Also, we wanted to create the impact of billions of gallons of water hitting the full length of the ship. Since we now have a brand new fluid dynamics technology, we just thought: let’s have a go!”

A CG Puzzle of 6,500 Pieces
The ship model was built in Maya, and then set up and lit in Zeno, ILM’s proprietary 3D package. With such a complex object, the CG unit faced the challenge of creating a highly detailed model that would still be perfectly manageable. To this purpose, lead digital artist Vincent Toscano developed an asset management system that allowed the team to manage each individual component of the ship in an efficient way. “Altogether, we built more than 6,500 individual pieces, but they were replicated many times over the ship with little changes to the paint or to the material to create a sense of variation,” Libreri explains. “For example, only three different CG chairs were modeled, but the system instanced them and populated the decks with hundreds of them. It allowed us to have an amazing amount of detail, without having to deal with crazy amounts of components.”

The Poseidon model was lit with two basic lighting set-ups, both using the same technique. The daytime shots were mainly lit by ILM’s high dynamic range lighting system, while the more subtle lighting effects were created with Cinema Radiosity, a proprietary global illumination approach developed by CG supervisor Philippe Rebours in mental ray. For the nighttime shots, the global illumination integrated more than 1,000 individual lights illuminating the walls, the decks, the chairs, etc. Digital effects supervisor Patrick Conran oversaw the rendering pipeline.

The Poseidon model was lit with two basic lighting set-ups. The daytime shots were mainly lit by ILM’s high dynamic range lighting set-up, and global illumination integrated more than 1,000 individual lights for the nighttime shots.