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. How’d they do it? Len Cannon reports in a ‘Dateline’ State of the Art.

IT’S 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 you’d 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 didn’t 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 NASA’s 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 that’s 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 that’s doing the kind of box office damage that producers don’t mind cleaning up.

 “Mission to Mars” soared to number one at the box office on its first weekend out.