Dateline
State of the Art
Recently,
the television show DATELINE featured a segment
on part of the making of the movie M2M. This
segment, which was only a few minutes long,
featured images from the movie and some content
about the work that went into the movie.
Sorry
about the poor quality of the images, but
these are the best that I could get a hold
of. 3.18.00
From
MSNBC.com
A manned space mission to Mars could carry
a price tag of $50 billion if it can get off
the ground. But you can be transported to
the Red Planet right now for
the price of a movie ticket. In the hot new
movie Mission to Mars, filmmakers
created a Martian landscape using information
from NASA probes. Then they stretched science
into fiction by creating an out of the world
tornado with a real bad attitude. Howd
they do it? Len Cannon reports in a Dateline
State of the Art.
ITS
THE YEAR 2020 and NASA astronauts in the new
movie Mission to Mars are about
to have a close encounter with the deadliest
and scariest life form the galaxy.
Think
of it as an animated character, says
Tom Jacobson, producer of the movie. Think
of it just like youd think of a dinosaur
in Jurassic Park or Goofy in
the Goofy movie.
So
how do you go about creating a lethal tornado
capable of creating catastrophic disaster
on a distant planet no one has ever set foot
on? We didnt know how we were
going to do it, says Jacobson.
First,
the production team scoured this world
looking for just the right site to recreate
the surface of Mars. It was important
to us that, you know, Mars is an arid, dry,
and we saw the Pathfinder images, says
Jacobson. Well, it looks like, you
know, Arizona.
Filmmakers
shot part of the scene in Jordan and shot
the rest on a 55-acre Mars set built in Canada.
Based on NASAs Mars research, the crew
sculpted sand dunes and painted the terrain
with Mars red latex paint. Even
the sky was painted red using computers. But
thats the way NASA sees Mars, not Hollywood.
We
wanted the science to feel like it was real,
says Jacobson. But when we needed to
stretch it to make the story work, we did.
Enter
the voracious vortex. To create the sand twister,
filmmakers turned to digital effects supervisor
Darin Hollings and his team of animators at
Dreamquest.
They
wanted the twister to be a natural phenomenon,
says Hollings, but then move in an
unnatural, character-driven kind of way.
The
animators found inspiration in naturally moving
real tornados. They even rented the film Twister.
The twister on Mars, though, had to be more
than a random act of nature. It had to have
a mind of its own.
They
kind of went toward the dark side and making
it more of an evil character, says
Hollings.
After
researching tornados and sand and wind for
three months, the animators created test shots
on the computer, fine-tuning every detail,
right down to the tiniest pebble. Then they
added the finished vortex to the previously
filmed footage from the Canadian set.
And
to simulate an astronaut getting sucked up
into this sand creature, filmmakers suspended
a stuntman from a crane, then digitally inserted
him into the mouth of the twister.
Even
though the scene lasts only about three minutes
on the screen, it took more than one and a
half years from concept to completion. But
this is one tornado thats doing the
kind of box office damage that producers dont
mind cleaning up.
Mission
to Mars soared to number one at the
box office on its first weekend out.
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