``Dante's Peak'' How was the powerful disaster scene created in an era when CG was underdeveloped? (Part 2)

Special effects on set

When this movie was made in 1997, CG technology was underdeveloped. In 1995, Toy Story , the first fully CG animated feature, was released, but the textures that could be handled were limited, especially the destruction of buildings, explosions, flames, etc., which are important in disaster movies. Elements such as smoke and floods were completely untouched. For this reason, similar to the first disaster movie boom in the 1930s and the second disaster movie boom in the 1970s, practical effects (*1), in which physical devices are applied and the film is completely filmed on-site, are mainly used. Ta.

Roy Arbogast, who worked on Star Wars: Revenge of the Jedi (1983), was chosen as the SFX coordinator. In order to make buildings collapse realistically, he uses large ram-type hydraulic jacks and air cylinders to actually shake them and cause them to collapse. But in the scene where the church steeple collapses, the full-size set is destroyed with explosives. However, due to the wrong amount of gunpowder and wrong location, the wooden bell tower was blown to pieces. This would have ruined the atmosphere of the tower collapsing under its own weight, so we used digital paint to erase the debris and composite the 3DCG bell tower. This work was carried out by Digital Domain, which will be mentioned later.

"Dante's Peak" (c)Photofest / Getty Images

Arbogast had the most trouble expressing the volcanic ash. One of the volcano advisors, Norman MacLeod of the U.S. Geological Survey, recommended using real volcanic ash, but that would be dangerous because the staff and cast members would inhale it, and it would also cause great damage to the townspeople who live here. So Arbogast prepared several tons of crushed paper into powder and used seven pumps to spread it around the town. It seems that the volcano advisors were very satisfied with this result.

*1 Also called special effects or physical effects.

Special effects are handled by Digital Domain

Special effects such as miniatures and compositing are handled by Digital Domain. Hertzberg used the company for some shots in `` Waterworld '' (1995) and liked it so much that he highly recommended it to director Roger Donaldson. Originally, Digital Domain was chaired by James Cameron, director of `` Terminator 2: Judgment Day '' (1991), vice-chairman Stan Winston, who was the special makeup producer for the film, and Scott from ILM, who also worked on the CG for the film.・It was a company founded in Los Angeles in 1993 with Ross as president. (*2)

From the beginning, they were actively developing 3D and 2D CG tools (*3) in-house, but they were also good at miniature work. I was reporting on the company during this period, and the company was busy working on `` True Lies '' (1994) and `` Apollo 13 '' (1995), as well as `` Titanic '' (1997) and `` The Fifth Element,' ' which had just finished filming. ” (97) and other miniatures were placed everywhere.

*2 Cameron and Winston resigned as directors in 1998 after conflicting with Ross over management policy.

*3 In 2DCG, Bill Spitzak has been developing the composite tool Nuke since 1993, and it is currently commercially available from The Foundry.