ILM was up to its stellar standards bringing an icy chill to the Statue of Liberty. Image by ILM.

During production many new ideas were added. Approximately 250 shots were initially planned, but ultimately the shot count reached 416. Chambers points out that ultimately more than a dozen vendors were hired -- including Digital Domain, Hydraulx, Industrial Light & Magic, The Orphanage, Tweek films, Uneco, Zoic and Ring of Fire. Chambers admits that more than 800 shots were created, with many cut or determined unusable. “I think it worked out great, I think it’s one of Roland’s best films.”

Hydraulx
Despite a time crunch, Hydraulx, owned and operated by brothers Colin and Greg Strause, created the greatest percentage of shots, according to Goulekas.

“The main sequences that we did were the first five minutes of the movie, which included the longest photo-real CG fly-over that’s ever been done,” Colin Strause proudly recalls. “We did a 4,000 frame long shot flying over an entirely CG Antarctica. That’s actually the opening credits of the movie — it’s this really beautiful sweeping helicopter move that is entirely digital. And then we did a bluescreen of a base station on a glacier where the guys are drilling. What happens is a huge ice chunk the size of Texas breaks off because of global warming, so the South Pole is actually breaking apart, and the base happens to be on one of the cracks, so the whole thing rips open.” Strause says he used Maya and mental ray to create the 40-odd shots needed for the sequence.

Hang in there, Dennis Quaid. According to vfx sup Goulekas, you’re in good hands with small f/x studio, Hydraulx. Image by Hydraulx.

Some of the most terrifying scenes show the main characters running toward the center of a building to escape the advancing five inch-thick frost collecting on the walls and floor. To create the effect, Lidar scanning of the interiors was employed. Chambers describes Lidar as “a laser scan that creates a point-cloud model of whatever it’s shooting — geography, terrain, buildings, with really wonderful detail.”

“Basically we did 3D texture growing,” Colin Strause says about the frost effect, “And made it look like this super-crystallizing ice was chasing them. We developed a new type of sub-surface scattering that worked on Lennox with our mental ray that we were using.” With this technology, Strause was able to create translucency in the ice and frost. “Normal 3D programs can’t do that — light hits but doesn’t penetrate through the object, or bounce off onto surrounding objects. If you don’t have that translucency, the ice looks like plaster. That was one of the most important things, using Global Illumination, a feature within mental ray, to calculate the true bounce light of everything, which was very important for the realism.”