***This article was written for the April ’22 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 319)***
During the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the Moon was the center of space exploration for NASA. Yet in the past couple of decades, Earth’s closest celestial neighbor has been ignored for a variety of reasons. However, the Moon makes a big comeback in German filmmaker Roland Emmerich’s (Independence Day) latest $140 million epic thriller.
Lionsgate’s new release Moonfall stars Halle Berry, Paul Walker, John Bradley, Michael Peña and Donald Sutherland, and reunites Emmerich with his Midway team — in particular, production designer Kirk Petruccelli, visual effects supervisor Peter Travers and special effects supervisor Guillaume Murray.
It took Emmerich and his team four years to develop this tale of the Moon falling out of its orbit. “Moonfall is such a crazy story that we had to give it some reality, which is always tough,” admits Emmerich, who was inspired by the book Who Built the Moon? by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler. “Luckily, we had our visual effects supervisor, Peter Travers, whom we call ‘The Science Guy’.”
Emmerich says he doesn’t believe in repeating himself. “Creatively, I’m going to places that I’ve never been before, and that’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey aspect. Technically, it was incredibly difficult to shoot this in 61 days under COVID-19.”
He adds it was important to come up with realistic obstacles that the characters have to overcome. “My movies don’t care about being super realistic but need to have the feeling of believability. We have two or three dialogue scenes that are really good. It was a happy accident that I was allowed to cast John Bradley.”
Staging the Crash
Originally, principal photography was to consist of 74 shooting days, but the costs incurred by COVID altered that plan. “It’s incredible, when you think about it, that we shot this movie in 61 days. Mostly we built it onstage because it’s always easier and faster,” says the helmer. According to him, 35 sets were constructed on six stages at Grandé Studios as well as MELS Studios, both in Montreal, with four to five sets being shot per day.
Adding to the authenticity was an original space shuttle cockpit brought in from a museum in Florida. “We had to divide and take things out to make it usable for all of the weightless scenes,” states Emmerich. “That was the most complicated stuff we did in the whole movie.” The director says compared to previous projects, the majority of atmospherics such as snow flurries were done digitally rather than practically. It took four or five months to do previs for Moonfall and its 1,700 visual effects shots.
Around 600 artists from Pixomondo, Scanline VFX, Framestore and DNEG worked on the project with only assets, not shots, being shared among the main vendors. “Montreal is one of the major hubs for visual effects these days because they offer these amazing tax rebates,” adds the director. “I spent one to two hours each morning in Los Angeles doing visual effects reviews over Zoom and the internet.”
For VFX supervisor Peter Travers, the project was a big opportunity to learn more about Earth’s only natural satellite. As he tells us, “One of the fortunate things about my job is that for every movie, I get to dive into something and research it. This time around, I learned about every aspect of the Moon. I built an accurate version of the Moon orbiting the Earth by using the Newtonian fields in Maya. For the second step, I duplicated the Moon and started messing with the physics to see if I could get it to fall.”
In the movie, the lunar collision takes three weeks to happen. “Fusing with the mass of the Moon, I was able to get it to hit North America on exactly the right day.” The simulation informed certain things such as gravitational fluctuations and the scale of the Moon for different shots. Travers notes, “The simulation was like a decoder ring. It was fascinating discovering what the Moon could do under these conditions. For example: The orbit is elliptical, so the Moon would get a lot closer in some areas, shoot farther out and then get farther in. You don’t want to shy away from the physics because the story gains collateral when it comes to the fright or fear.”
The team used a certain level of restraint with the camerawork to retain a sense of believability. In addition, NASA data was utilized to create the highly detailed Moon asset that could sustain close-up shots with the same treatment being applied to the space shuttle Endeavour.
“The Endeavour was the biggest asset that we had to share across the vendors, because it’s the thing that gets us through the movie,” explains Travers, who had to produce destruction simulations that were off the charts. “Most of the heavy-duty Earth simulations were done by Scanline VFX, which is perfectly suited for this type of thing. Every once in a while when the Moon gets close to the Earth it supplies 2G gravity sideways. Even though the gravitational conditions are supernatural, the particles behave properly within that environment.”
The team used various techniques to recreate the zero gravity environment. “We used a seesaw platform — that was nice to get that feel. There is definitely some wire work. Sometimes we would do things in CG. There is no one definitive way. Depending on the shot and action, the method to get the zero-G effect could be totally different.”
What’s the Angle?
Travers points out that the extensive amount of time spent in creating previs was indispensable. “There is no one better than Roland in utilizing technology,” he states. “He wrote the book on how visual effects integrate with films. Roland wanted us to get going on the previs right away. We did so much work with angles, looked through the previs with stunts and special effects and went, ‘How do we do this shot?’ Some of the shots that don’t necessarily look like the hardest ones can be surprisingly difficult.”
LED panels were primarily used for lighting. “We had rigged on cranes LED panels and were constantly configuring them around our spacecraft out the windows. It got challenging because sometimes there would be dialogue over the course of a couple of minutes, while outside 10 significant changes or events are going on. We had to prep ahead of time content that we would do in Maya that would get fed into the LED panels. Then we would be cueing them almost editorially. In rare instances, you would directly see the panels in camera.”
Unquestionably, the biggest design challenge was the Moon, although … “I can’t reveal what aspect of the Moon!” chuckles Travers. “It’s the best part of the movie, and it’s so great for a visual effects supervisor. It’s really the wonder of it all.”
Travers points out that the number of visual effects shots is deceptive. “We have a ton of long shots because the scope and scale are so big. This movie isn’t about quick cuts or shots. Moonfall is about the scale of this concept. The Moon is 3,400 kilometers (2,112 miles) wide. If something like that was right up in the sky, it would take you so long to absorb looking at it. Sometimes less is more, but the shots ended up being a lot harder because there was nowhere to hide!”
Lionsgate’s Moonfall is currently playing in theaters around the world.
