War of the Worlds was the tightest job in ILM’s history. All images ™ & © 2005 Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. All rights reserved. Images courtesy of ILM. 

When Steven Spielberg decided to remake War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise playing a working class everyman from New Jersey, his plan was to metaphorically evoke an apocalyptic post 9/11 sense of panic and paranoia, utilizing H.G. Wells’ literary classic more than George Pal’s movie legend. The gritty look was inspired by amateur 9/11 footage, with dust and debris falling from the sky, and hand-held shots of pandemonium.

The entire production lasted about 10 months; the shoot, spanning both coasts (predominantly the Eastern Seaboard), lasted only 72 days; and post-production lasted only 12 weeks. Not a lot of time for Industrial Light & Magic to create 400 invisible vfx shots, a situation complicated by the introduction of a new pipeline in anticipation of the company’s restructuring and relocation to San Francisco’s Presidio.

In fact, War of the Worlds was the tightest job in ILM’s history. The crew ramped up from 50 to 179 digital artists aided by a support staff of 60. And half of the vfx shots were actually completed in the final month.

Thus, it was imperative that Spielberg make full use of realtime previs to give ILM an eight-month head start during pre-production, when it was also designing the alien creatures. The director enlisted previs supervisor Dan Gregoire, who worked on the recent Star Wars films. Armed with PCs equipped with AMD 64-bit Opteron microprocessors, Gregoire traveled up and down the east coast with Spielberg and crew as they scouted locations. For the first time, Spielberg had a hand in the previs, doing his own animatics.

“In the old days, Steven would do storyboards and would toss them out when he got to the set and was inspired,” recounts senior visual effects supervisor and longtime Spielberg collaborator Dennis Muren. “No time to regroup on this. He had Dan on the set with him. And Dan had exact replicas of the sets and the creatures, and the CG lenses matched the camera lenses in the computer. So when Steven designed a shot, we could take the data from that since the geometry and the camera lenses in the computer matched the real world; and that can only happen if you know the sets well enough in advance.

“Dan was great because there was one instance when we were trying to shoot in a location and couldn’t get it at the last minute, and they found another one, so he ran out and chartered a helicopter for a few hours and shot some still photos and photo modeled that into the system. So even on a short schedule he had something within a day for Steven to previs.”

In keeping with Spielberg’s reliance on realism, CG shots were kept to a minimum and had to seamlessly blend in with the live-action footage, which included lots of sets and models but no motion control work. The vfx shots of dust and broken glass occur behind smoke, ambience and camerawork. Taking their cues from Saving Private Ryan and Spielberg’s directive that the entire movie be told from Cruise’s POV, the vfx crew was also limited in its reliance on blue or greenscreen work.

“This meant the camera setups and the feel were much more organic than the futuristic trappings associated with the genre.” Muren continues. “This was a combat situation and we were trying to give it a feeling of dirt and chaos and to keep it intimately tied to Tom’s character. It was tempting to look over his shoulder and see what was going on over the hill, so to speak, but Steven was adamant that we keep real and mysterious, which was much harder than the usual effects movie.”

To help keep the production on schedule, Muren decided to test ILM’s new pipeline — a revamping of the company’s Zeno software package in an attempt to move away from specialization, increase the creativity of the artist and speed up the pipeline.