Tara DiLullo speaks with Hydraulx co-owner Greg Strause about remaking John Carpenters The Fog as a series of sophisticated, organic CG effects.
Hydraulx got The Fog job as a result of its strong reputation for organic effects. All The Fog images courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Way back in 1980, horror legend John Carpenter created the creepy, horror classic The Fog using a natural occurrence as his villain rather than a human slasher on a killing bender. The movie revolved around a mysterious fog enveloping the denizens of a northern California fishing town, which in actuality covered up the arrival of some vengeful ghosts looking for revenge. Back then, Carpenter only had dry ice and wind machines on hand to make his menacing fog, but flash forward 25 years to the new remake (opening Oct. 14) of his classic by director Rupert Wainwright, and suddenly theres a whole new dimension to that wicked fog, thanks to the visual effects of Hydraulx, the Santa Monica-based visual effects house.
The Fog effects were developed and supervised by Chris Watts and the owners of Hydraulx, Greg Strause and Colin Strause, who share credit designer titles for the film. While Watts was on assignment for a new film, Greg Strause details how the company and vfx team handled the challenges of updating this next generation of fog. We heard about the project through Gloria Borders at Revolution, since shes in charge of visual effects over there, he details about their initial involvement. A bunch of companies were bidding for it and I think we got it because of our approach, and it also didnt hurt that the weather effects we did on The Day After Tomorrow lent themselves to the effects needed for The Fog.
After they won the bid, Strause says they took a surprising stance on using Carpenters version for reference. My brother and I played an interesting game with that. He watched the original and I didnt so I could have a set of clean eyes. My brother and I work so closely on this kind of stuff, so it was good that one of us was an independent observer. The original Fog was made back in 1980, back in the days of doing opticals and in-camera effects and whatnot. We had to bring value to the movie in terms of how to make the fog scarier. Audiences are more sophisticated so we had to step it up a few notches to make it true to the whole idea of doing a remake, which is taking it a few steps further.
Hydraulx Greg Strause (left) didnt watch the original film while brother Colin did. One of them kept a pair of clean eyes and remained an independent observer.
Strause says the fog in this version was a mix of practical fog and all-CG creations made by the Hydraulx team. For the contained shots, like the fog going down the hallway of the character Andys (Cole Heppell) house, there is a lot of in-camera fog shots as elements and the final composite would have a hero CG element with a bunch of atmospheric fog that was done in-camera. The practical team went through a whole R&D process of exploring all the different kinds of in-camera smoke generators and dry ice, just to see what we could come up with. So, there are shots where 90% of the fog was done in-camera and other shots that were 100% CG. It really just depended on the practical realities on set, because when its really windy you cant control the fog. It was done on location in Vancouver and it was spring weather, which means there is a lot of consideration there that further complicated the physical production. Anytime that happened, though, CG was able to step in and save the day.
Since Wainwright was looking to create a much more interactive fog for his film, Strause says they had to develop a very dynamic set of fogs to take on certain roles for specific scenes. Our initial discussions with Rupert Wainwright had us dividing the fog up into different types, because, in different parts of the movie, the fog is achieving things. We ended up with four different types, but in the design process we went through 15 to 20 different looks. We had funny little names for them in-house. The mother-ship fog very much resembled an approaching fog bank or storm. It was very big and imposing. We wanted a lot of scope to it and it was The Day After Tomorrow inspired size, where you go: Holy shit! That thing is coming at us is huge! Its not moving too fast but there is no way to stop it. It gives the horror movie sense of impending doom.
The angry fog, with its swirling and intense movement, is the vehicle that the ghost of Captain Blake hides within.
There is another fog called sneaky fog. This was more of a smaller, more contained fog that we needed to have control over. It literally sneaks around the boat or go up over the railing and does nefarious things. The use of CG these days brought a lot to the table because we were able to choreograph exact motion of the fog, like the speed. It also had a very carefully designed amount of intelligence without it seeming overly sentient. It stepped the level up on the horror side because you cant just close a door on it, because this stuff is able to sneak through cracks and vents and wreak revenge.
Another one was angry fog, which was more swirling and intense in its movement. It became the vehicle that the ghost of Captain Blake hides within. He represents the fourth level of the fog, The Blake fog, and [his ghost] is basically there for revenge. The Blake fog involved a whole range of all digital characters, with laser scans of the actors like Rade Serbedzija (Batman Begins). We had to make an all-CG version of him and turned him into a transparent ghost. All the ghosts emitted the fourth type of fog that was just sort of spooky that comes off of them and ties them in with the ghosts hiding in the fog.
Already proficient in weather-related effects, The Fog presented some very specific issues, especially in the development stage. Because of the different ways the fog needed to behave, it was a development challenge. We developed our in-house volumetric renderer to a whole other level of maturity. A lot of what was done was using a combination of MayaFluids, which is a feature inside of Maya and then we wrote a bunch of proprietary stuff for volumetric as well. A lot of shots used a combination of both. There was a lot of development work on how to animate the fog, because its not like a character with bones and skeleton. There were a lot of simulations and dynamics and building things into the control systems to smartly animate when there was a volume of fog. Every shot has about six or seven different techniques all controlling aspects, like the front-end of the fog and the background layers and an amalgamation put it all together.
The stuff we spent the most time on and the potential look was the fog over the water. We had pyro-plastic looking smoke banks that was potential, and we had a creamy, smooth static wave that came in very slowly and we had some that looked like big storm clouds before we have whats in the movie now, which is more imposing and stormy. When we did the initial research, Rupert had tons of great graphics to look at and you start realizing in nature there are infinite number of variations on fog. There is no right or wrong, so that was helpful.
There are four different types fog in the movie: mother-ship, sneaky, angry and Blake.
As usual, turnaround also presented a huge challenge and ended up boosting up the team numbers at Hydraulx. We grew to about 65 people for The Fog. There were about 220 vfx shots we put together. It was a lot to do in not a lot of time. We did everything from rig-removals, because a lot of times the special effects crew creating in-camera fog would have to be in the shot, so we had to remove them and that was challenging to get them out of the moving fog. The majority of the shots involve some sort of CG elements and a quarter involves digital characters. I would say half the shots include some CG.
Reflecting on what he considers the best sequence they created for the film, Strause offers, There is a sequence called the Sandy Cove and the mother shi of fog is approaching in the background. There is an old man called Machen (R. Nelson Brown) on the beach and during the movie, old artifacts from the beach washed up on the shore. In this case, the artifact kind of pulls on his greed, acting like a carrot to lead him out to the water. While hes distracted on the beach, the giant wave of fog is coming in from the distance and as it gets up on the beach, it gets around the corner and its a 150-foot tall wall of fog that is coming in at a good 20 miles per hour at this guy. It consumes this guy and chases Andy up the beach and hillside to his house. Its all Steadicam shots and moving cameras and its pretty big looking effects.
Strause says hes really proud of what they contributed to The Fog and how it bolstered up their digital character resume, as well as improving on their already strong organic effects reputation. We like weather, any of the organic effects like fire, water and smoke, they are typically the hardest things to get right in CG. It was fun on this one because we felt really good about our development in terms of the tools. Strause laughs, Now the next time we need to do fog it will be a lot easier!
Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI-FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.
