Are you afraid of Snakes on a Plane? All images Photo: James Dittiger © 2005/New Line Prods. 

Unless you live under a rock, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard about the brilliantly titled, B-movie flick, Snakes on a Plane. Starring Samuel L. Jackson as an FBI agent escorting a mob-execution witness to trial via a plane from Hawaii bound for L.A., the media and fans have been nearly giddy with anticipation for the release of such an unabashed throwback to the ridiculous disaster films of the past. The premise says it all: snakes + a plane = havoc. But aside from the epic Internet and viral marketing campaigns for Snakes, the movie also boasts something new that those old-timer films didn’t have — the latest and greatest in visual effects. Twenty years ago, the snakes on a plane would have been puppets or cheesy composites that never interacted with their intended victims. But you make Snakes on a Plane today and you get cutting-edge animatronics, CG technology and some of the most talented animators and modelers in the business making the villainous snakes not only realistic, but also as immersed in the action as the flesh and blood actors around them.

Bringing the serpents to life fell to Erik Henry (Dracula 2000, Gothika), visual effects supervisor on Snakes and producer Janet Maxwell-Hamilton, who enlisted the talents of visual effects houses CaféFX in Santa Maria, California, and Hybride in Montreal, Quebec. Reflecting back more than a year ago, Henry explains how he signed onto the project, “Lauren Ritchie at New Line called me and I had not done any features for her before, but I had been talking to her about the possibility. She called about this movie Snakes on a Plane with lots of CG snakes, but it got put on hold because the original director left and then David Ellis took over. I met him shortly after he came on and then we started to get into what he wanted to see. He wanted to have fun with it, but he wanted it to be real. One of the things he said was that he didn’t want Anaconda, and I was relieved to hear that because it had been done already. The opportunity to do snakes realistically; I jumped at the chance because I haven’t done it in my career.”

Initially green-lit as a lower budget action-horror film, Henry says that scale dictated how he approached commissioning his vfx houses. “The challenge was to bring it to life under a budget that we could get it done at companies other than ILM or Rhythm & Hues. I have friends over [at Rhythm & Hues] and that’s who I wanted to bring on but we couldn’t make it work. So I had worked with CaféFX a lot and Hybride a couple times and both companies were set up to do this. I talked to them both and said, ‘Hey, I have an idea and it’s a little unorthodox. My idea is to give you both some of the snake shots. You won’t have the same snakes but I think it will work. Scenes where there is general mayhem, I’ll have Hybride do and the ‘hero’ snakes will be done by Café.’” I felt splitting the work gave us a competitive and creative advantage. I knew there were certain problems in that one company would not be able to hand off to another company. Hybride works exclusively with Softimage and finished everything on Inferno and Café is a Maya house and use Fusion. I knew that, but the competitive advantage would be that they would strive to one up the other and that would be very useful to both of them. They had both worked together on Sin City, so they knew each other well so this was a friendly competition.”

Once on production, Henry says they were able to add to their ambitions due to the director’s streamlined shooting. “Because David works so quickly, we were able to get extra money during the shoot from savings out of the production budget and we kept saying we were going to put right into the snakes. We really had a lot of confidence from the early models that we saw from Hybride and CaféFX, that we had done it and the budget would not hamper us so that we would be dissatisfied or even partially dissatisfied [with the snakes]. I remember the first rattlesnake render we got back from Hybride was so real that when I showed it to Jules Sylvester, the snake wrangler, he just said, ‘There is nothing I can say that is wrong with this. It’s perfect!’ When we had that sort of reaction, the money kept coming to Janet and I to add snakes. It wasn’t that we had specific shots we wanted to add, but the live-action snakes were not giving us what we wanted in general mayhem. They would be dropped and they would fall on people and they didn’t look menacing enough or big enough, so we wanted to punch that up a bit.