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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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