March 28, 2024

How 8 Extreme Weather Scenes Were Made for Movies | Movies Insider



Published May 24, 2023, 3:20 a.m. by Jerald Waisoki


movies are often lauded for their ability to transport viewers to different worlds, but sometimes, those worlds are a little too close to home.

That was the case for some of hollywood's biggest films, which had to contend with extreme weather conditions during production.

Here's a look at eight times the weather was a major factor in the making of a movie:

1. The Revenant

The Revenant was one of the most difficult films to make in recent memory, thanks in part to the extreme weather conditions in which it was shot.

The film, which was shot in Canada and Argentina, had to deal with sub-zero temperatures and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to contend with a deadly virus that swept through the set, causing several people to become ill.

2. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was another film that had to deal with extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in New Zealand, was plagued by heavy rains and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to deal with a number of injuries, including one that resulted in the death of a stuntman.

3. The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises was another film that was plagued by extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in the United Kingdom and the United States, had to deal with heavy rains and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to deal with a number of injuries, including one that resulted in the death of a stuntman.

4. Interstellar

Interstellar was another film that had to deal with extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in the United Kingdom and the United States, had to deal with heavy rains and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to deal with a number of injuries, including one that resulted in the death of a stuntman.

5. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was another film that had to deal with extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in the United States and Canada, had to deal with heavy rains and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to deal with a number of injuries, including one that resulted in the death of a stuntman.

6. Gravity

Gravity was another film that had to deal with extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in the United Kingdom and the United States, had to deal with heavy rains and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to deal with a number of injuries, including one that resulted in the death of a stuntman.

7. The Martian

The Martian was another film that had to deal with extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in the United Kingdom and the United States, had to deal with heavy rains and high winds.

To make matters worse, the cast and crew had to deal with a number of injuries, including one that resulted in the death of a stuntman.

8. The Revenant

The Revenant was another film that had to deal with extreme weather conditions.

The film, which was shot in Canada and Argentina, had to deal with sub-zero temperatures and high winds.

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Narrator: This is a shot from the biblical deluge

in "Noah."

It may not look like it,

but this was filmed entirely at night

under special balloon lights.

And it took a massive custom rain machine

to dump up to 200,000 gallons of water on set each night.

All that, just so you can clearly see the raindrops

in the final shot.

Hollywood goes to extreme measures

to portray the force of natural disasters

as close to real life as possible,

from creating seven different types

of CG dust for a sandstorm

to obsessively building accurate replicas of an ancient city

just to destroy it in a single act.

Here's what eight apocalyptic movies

looked like behind the scenes.

Director: Go!

Narrator: To make an earthquake feel visceral,

it isn't enough to just shake the camera.

All the characters, buildings, and objects in a scene

need to be affected by the same force.

The effects team took this literally for "2012,"

advertised as "the mother of all disaster movies."

To show the world being shaken to its core,

the filmmakers built sprawling sets

on top of hydraulic lifts

so they could shake everything in a scene,

from individual actors to entire houses.

The crew went through 500,000 tons of steel

building the shaky decks,

some of which measured several thousand square feet.

And massive mover rigs underneath made it possible

to put cars, trucks, planes, building facades,

and palm trees on the same set,

so everything could react to an earthquake-like force

in a consistent way.

The team did have to use CGI for this scene,

where a 10.5-magnitude earthquake chases John Cusack

through the crumbling streets of LA.

Getting the destruction

and the ocean-wave-rippling movement the director wanted

required building Wilshire Boulevard

from scratch in the computer

and writing a new volume-breaking system called Drop.

The artists could enter a whole CG building into Drop,

and the program would cut it into

as many as 90,000 little shapes.

But even for this almost entirely digital sequence,

the team shot what they could practically.

Here, the actors were filmed inside the limousine,

attached to a gimbal that simulated

the effects of the quake.

In "The Impossible," filmmakers had to recreate

the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

These climactic scenes where the tsunami slams the coast

over the course of 10 terrifying minutes

required millions of gallons of actual seawater,

darkened with food coloring and tints

to make the water look dirty.

Naomi Watts and Tom Holland

filmed most of their scenes in Spain

in an almost 400-foot-long seaside tank,

the largest water tank in Europe

and second largest in the world.

Inside the tank, the actors sat in baskets

that moved on rails pulled with steel cables.

This system allowed the crew to control the speed

at which the actors moved in the water,

keeping them at the same speed as the current.

The film also had to show the water

slamming the entire resort area,

pools, palm trees, and all.

[water crashing]

Since the real site in Thailand

didn't look the way it did in 2004,

the production designers built a model of the former resort

at one-third the scale.

That was the smallest model

that would interact with the wave in a realistic way.

When it was time to film the water destroying it all,

the crew had to get it right in one shot.

To ensure the wave impact looked right,

the team did test runs at Edinburgh Designs,

a company specializing in wave generators.

The company usually tries to create a precise, perfect wave,

but the filmmakers on "The Impossible"

wanted a wide, ugly, and chaotic one.

They achieved that messiness

by rushing 1,000 gallons of water over the model set

with the power of eight F1 racing cars behind it.

The cinematographer set up an apparatus of 10 cameras

to make sure he captured every angle.

[wave crashing]

For the dystopian world of "Mad Max,"

director George Miller wanted a disaster sequence

that would feel apocalyptic --

a toxic sandstorm with twisters

sucking cars up into the sky and spitting them out.

And it was the biggest VFX sequence in a movie

known for its practical stunts.

The crew started by filming the actual cars

racing through the desert in Namibia.

They used this footage to perfect the layout,

movement, and scale of the storm effects.

The practical shots were then relit

to fit the unique lighting of the storm

and combined with digital effects,

swapping in CG cars and drivers as needed.

They relit these shots of Tom Hardy

with more firelight to reflect the fuel

that was leaking from the car and catching fire.

To make the cars look like they were driving faster

through the storm,

the VFX team went with a conceal-and-reveal approach.

They replaced the ground in many shots

and added massive digital dust clouds,

so viewers could only get occasional glimpses of cars

as they raced down the desert.

Any given shot has up to seven types of CG dust

coming up from the ground,

from the lower levels of fine dust

blowing around the surface

to lumpy dust that went up to about mid-car height

to massive eddies of dust billowing around.

For the historical disaster movie "Pompeii,"

the filmmakers had to accurately recreate this ancient city

and destroy it with just as much accuracy.

But what we know about Pompeii is mostly based

on scientific hypotheses, written records,

and what remains of the ruins.

So director Paul W.S. Anderson and his team

spent six years researching and imaging the city,

including taking a laser scan of the ruins.

They used that to build a life-size set

based on the real dimensions of Pompeii,

with streets sized precisely down to the last millimeter.

The visual effects team also had to replicate

the whole set digitally for the disaster sequences,

creating over 100 CG buildings and over 200 CG props.

All this work, though, had to be destroyed

when Mount Vesuvius erupts, collapses buildings,

triggers a tsunami, and ultimately wipes out the city.

For this scene in the crumbling arena,

the crew filmed 500 extras inside the actual set,

then had VFX artists digitally extend the set

and double the extras.

To animate the digital crowd realistically,

the artists used mo-cap footage of stuntpeople

pretending to escape the wreckage.

Next there was the tsunami,

which capsizes a boat in this scene.

The crew filmed part of that practically,

using a gimbal as the boat deck.

Then the city streets.

For this chariot chase,

the crew filmed the horses and stunt doubles

on a dirt track in front of 400 feet of green screen,

then used face replacements to swap the actors

into the close-up riding shots.

But the hardest part was replacing

all the backgrounds with CG sets,

all of which were getting pelted with lava bombs.

Not everything was digital, though.

The Canadian studio Dynamic Effects

filmed actual footage of fireballs and explosions

along with some practical shots

of stunt actors being set on fire

and ash raining down on the city.

When earthquakes strike in "San Andreas,"

the earth splits open in ways

that haven't been seen in real life,

at least not yet.

So the filmmakers had to depict these giant chasms

with a terrifying realism.

Older movies might've created a background like this

with a matte painting,

but these environments had to stand up

at so many different distances and camera positions

that creating a matte painting for every angle

wasn't practical.

So they built many detailed environments digitally,

including this expanse of rural California,

with an 85-foot-wide, 300-foot-deep chasm.

The VFX artists referenced a smaller earth crack

in Sonora, Mexico, to see how the ground crumbles

as soil pulls apart.

They used that to place the boulders, small rocks,

and dust crumbling from the edges of the cliff

and the layers of plants, leaf litter, rocks, sticks,

and tire tracks in the surrounding area.

But grounding the CG in reality

also meant going the extra mile

to place actors in the digital space,

like in this scene, where falling rocks

cause a driver to veer off the road and over a cliff.

For the most dramatic shots,

like showing the car flying through the air,

the VFX artists swapped in a partly or entirely CG car,

along with a digital double for the driver.

And for the dramatic rescue that follows,

the filmmakers built a special set in Australia

with a car hanging from a hydraulic rig

and a helicopter without rotor blades

hanging above from a crane.

They then filmed the actors strapped in place,

with The Rock doing his own stunts on set.

Ray: I'm gonna get you out of here, OK?

Narrator: Everything came together with the VFX team,

swapping out the helicopter for a CG one in some shots

or adding digital rotors and exhaust fumes in others.

For the big rain-soaked battle in "Noah,"

the team had to create an apocalyptic deluge

on a literally biblical scale.

But it's surprisingly hard

to make rain show up well on camera.

Plus, the crew would be filming on an outdoor ark set

about the size of two football fields.

To cover all this ground,

they came up with a giant custom rain machine

made up of a vast system of rain bars.

Over 3,000 feet of pipes carried water

from 100,000-gallon tanks

into an array of rain sprinklers.

One type of sprinkler released smaller sprays of mist,

while another produced larger droplets;

they called those sprinklers "goose drowners."

So, massive amounts of rain?

[rain pouring] Check.

Noah: Speak to me!

Narrator: The complex system made it possible

for the team to dump 5,000 gallons of rain a minute

on about 500 extras.

Over two weeks of shooting,

that added up to over a million gallons of water,

roughly as much as two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Still, the filmmakers had to make all that water

translate well on screen,

which had everything to do with lighting.

Special effects artists have a general rule:

"Front-light snow, backlight rain."

The deluge sequence was supposed to be set

during the daytime,

but if they filmed during the day

the sun would constantly be moving,

making it impossible to consistently backlight the rain.

So the team shot exclusively at night,

using huge balloon space lights on the rain-bar structure

to light the area without shadows.

They might've filmed in the pitch-black night,

but in the final scene,

you can make out every drop of rain.

To create the tornadoes in "Into the Storm,"

filmmakers did as much as they could practically,

with giant wind blowers, real tree parts,

and massive rain machines.

They even dropped real cars out of the sky,

"Fast and Furious" style.

But an effect they couldn't do practically

was the fire tornado.

Believe it or not,

firenados do actually happen in real life,

but it's a phenomenon

that could easily look fake in a movie.

So the crew lit an actual fire on set

when filming the original photography for the scene.

This provided a reference for how the firenado

would realistically light up the actors

and surrounding structures.

The digital artists then applied appropriate lighting

to CG structures, like this church.

That glow on the sidewalk and on the church's facade?

A digital add-on that seamlessly matched the footage.

What wasn't a digital add-on was the moment

where a character gets sucked into the firenado and killed.

The team actually filmed that moment

with a stuntman attached to a harness.

[stuntman screaming]

"The Day After Tomorrow" had to depict a superstorm

that looked like it could bring on the next ice age,

but ice and frost are notoriously difficult

to depict realistically.

And many of the sequences set

in an extreme arctic environment

were impossible to pull off practically,

like this scene, when Dennis Quaid's character

walks with his colleagues

across the snow-covered roof of a shopping mall.

To safely depict the roof cracking

under the characters' weight,

the crew built miniature models of the mall.

They composited blue-screen shots of the actors

with shots of the model,

then added a mix of practical snow elements

and CG particle snow

to make the whole scene look frozen over.

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