What's Hollywood's biggest fear? A disaster in the city or at the box office? Photo by Kerry Hayes. All Day After Tomorrow images © 2004 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

The Day After Tomorrow is today’s Disaster movie, similar in premise but completely outdistancing in scope anything that has been attempted in the past. Of course, it is CGI that has allowed the sheer size of the spectacle to be created.

“The idea of it is that super-cell storms form over the northern hemisphere,” explains Karen Goulekas, vfx supervisor of director Roland Emmerich’s in-house production facility. “And they are essentially gigantic hurricanes, with an eye that is calm and gigantic storm clouds around it.” The terror of the film is caused by super-cool air, 150 below zero, sucked down to ground level through the eye of the storm, freezing everything, even the insides of buildings, killing everything in its path — in short, bringing on the next Ice Age. In conjunction with the hurricanes are super-floods engulfing New York, hailstorms smashing Tokyo, and tornadoes laying waste to Los Angeles. Amid all this disaster, Dennis Quaid must rescue his family in a freezing New York, and learn how to survive.

Karen Goulekas (left) and her partner Mike Chambers served as the masters of disaster for this epic undertaking. Courtesy of Karen Goulekas.

Preparing for a Storm
Initial preparation started in May 2002, when Emmerich called Goulekas and her partner Mike Chambers, both freelance effects artists.

“It’s a great film for us,” says Chambers, visual effects producer.

“There were a lot of different natural weather phenomena we had to create — twisters, giant hail, flooding, freezing, snowing, everything you can imagine, and Roland wanted to do it as photorealistic as possible.” Extensive research materials were collected as references. “The real challenge is that people know how waves and twisters look and work, and it’s not a fantasy thing, where you have a little more leeway, if you are trying to make something look photoreal.”

Extensive previs was completed on New York City and Los Angeles data bases bought from Urban Data Solutions. “It was extensively planned, though we had a relatively short pre-production period, just four or five months. We got into story boarding and we set up an internal previsualization unit. We had about 10 guys with Karen and I in the office with Roland, and he was an active participant in it and really got the ball rolling. We really had to push the envelope to take things farther than before in creating a super storm that is capable of bringing on the next ice age.”