Creating Water

While in days gone by, miniatures, rear projection and optical matting would provide a flood of biblical proportions on the silver screen, it was no longer feasible to bring movie audiences images that they could see through in an instant. To meet the specifications of the director and producers, Evan Almighty would need to break new ground (erm, water) in how it would render torrential waters onto an unsuspecting city.

In charge of the visual effects for the production was VFX supervisor Douglas Smith. Smith, the veteran filmmaker who cut his teeth on such seminal epics as Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture has recently brought his talents as VFX head on pictures from Independence Day and Dr. Doolittle 2 to Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat and The Longest Yard. It would require every trick in the book to bring Evan Almighty to life. Smith offers, “Evan was an ambitious task…and a huge technical challenge. Getting the audience to believe that this flood and the computer-generated animals were real required enormous effort and care on visual effects team’s part. I loved the fact that I got to help in re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark.”

The San Francisco-based visual effects giant, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), was charged with working with Shadyac and Smith to create the flood that provides the breathtaking climax to the comedy. It would take an ILM crew of 80 people more than a year to develop just the water shots for the film.

All the elements of the production were carefully storyboarded, then roughly animated on computers through the process of previsualization (“pre-vis”). Once “prevised” scenes

were agreed upon, the production team—including the director, production designer, director of photography, special effects coordinator and visual effects supervisor—analyzed the shots to decide what could be done practically and what had to be represented through visual effects.

For example, if Shadyac wanted to show a giant wave crashing against the side of the ark as it flowed down a body of water, a decision was made whether it was best (or even possible) to photograph the scene on location, or on set, with a partial section of the ark in front of a giant blue screen. In every case, the pre-vis process helped guide the choice of process, location and the CG wave sequences that followed.

According to ILM’s visual effects supervisor, Bill George, there were three stages mandatory to make Evan and his clan, their neighbors and the animals’ journey on the ark as seamless as possible. “Creating the water is a very long process that requires a lot of artistry and a high degree of technical skill,” George provides. “Once a background plate was shot, we did a match move—which is to re-create the movement of the camera in the computer—and that gave us a scene that we can work on.”

He continues, “Next was the fluid simulation: the computer takes component pieces, such as the ark and the trees, and you send virtual fluid through there. Then, the computer figures out how the fluid would flow around these objects in nature.” That would be a trial and error process for the filmmakers, because of the number of parameters to set for water, such as velocity, wind and gravity.

Once fluid simulation occurred, it was on to step three, the rendering stage, which would make the flat surface of the water on screen not so flat after all. As water has reflections, refractions, mist and waves, those component pieces all needed to be built in to make the images realistic. And they were built in separately. George says, “Our compositors had to control how bright the reflections on the water were, as that changes from scene to scene. So many pieces had to come together correctly for the flood to look like it was really happening.” Indeed, one shot alone could take 15-20 weeks to make it through all three stages. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

In the style of old-school filmmaking, miniatures would also play an integral role. The randomness of nature couldn’t be denied; while digital technology allowed for the control of every drop of water in a painstaking process, the unpredictability of practical shots would add unexpected excitement to Evan’s journey in the flood.

The team shot for approximately three months alone with miniatures of the ark, trees, cars, etc…For example, in one particular scene, where a bulldozer is hit by a monstrous wave, a third-scale miniature was used in place of a CG dozer. Digital and practical shots would be mixed in to make it truly look like the construction apparatus was flipping through space and millions of gallons of water were splashing it during its journey.

Redefining Feathers and Fur

Billions of drops of water would not be the only items the special-effects teams would re-create for Evan Almighty. While the animal actors were relatively well behaved on set, many CG creatures needed to be created to give the film the breadth and scope required of a biblical comedy tale. And visual effects shop Rhythm & Hues Studios was responsible for multiplying them in the digital world, two by two by two by…

The effects studio created 300 pairs of the large-scale CG animals to help fill Evan’s ark, as well as 15 pairs of “hero” CG animals for close-up, brilliantly detailed shots. Though Noah had two of every species on his ship, it was necessary to duplicate some of Evan’s zoo to give the effect that every pair on Earth was represented in the background. This would result in creating more individual CG animals than any production had ever before for a film.

Rhythm and Hues Studio was responsible for the CG animals and compositing of some of the blue screen animals. In addition, because of the vast amount of animal shots and animal elements, another visual effects company, C.I.S. Hollywood, also contributed a large number of composites, involving hundreds and hundreds of blue screen animal elements.

In a particular backyard scene—handled by C.I.S. Hollywood—in which Evan is backed up to the woodpile by numerous creatures, the only animals that actually existed in the shot with Freeman and Carell were the horses and cows. All of the rest of the creatures were photographed on a blue screen stage, then “composited” onto the scene. In many other shots, those that couldn’t be brought to set were supplemented with CG animals. R&H would take the CG animals necessary to complete the background and carefully place them around the “live creatures” (photographed on a blue screen)— complete with perfect shadowing and blades of grass placed carefully around respective paws and hoofs—to complete the look.

For every shot in which Evan and the Baxter family were surrounded by animals, it would take camera crews of up to 40 people an extra three to four days of photography to get all the creatures—who were to appear seamlessly next to him—shot on blue screen. Then, R&H and C.I.S. would have to put those animals back, one by one, into the same scene with the human actors and spend weeks or months blending the two.

Having the animals prepare to “walk” onto the ark for the climactic ride would prove one of the most difficult scenes of all for the crew. Initially, members of the production team thought they could have live creatures with their trainers walk around, in a carefully controlled fashion, the open Virginia field. The trainers would be removed via computer, CG creatures would fill in the blanks and it would provide a seamless look. However, that would prove impossible to accomplish with so many animals.

It was much more feasible to film empty plates of the open field, then separately photograph the creatures, one by one, in relationship to a layout that had been determined by pre-vis or a storyboard. Once the background and layout were determined, animals would be brought into a blue screen room and photographed. They were then repositioned, added back into the field and finally shadowed; the visual effects crew would then move on to the next creature. In the final, painstaking step, CG animals were blended into the scene.

Animation supervisor Andy Arnett, veteran of such films as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Scooby-Doo, was one of the scores of animators brought onto the production to flawlessly blend real and fictional creatures. Arnett relates, “The research was extensive. It took six or seven months to perfect the look and feel of the animals before we had the first shot out the door.”

The animals R&H created were the ones that would be difficult to work with on set, creatures that would never be available or ones which the filmmakers needed to get a specific performance from— things animals would never do so on set in front of a camera crew. With motion libraries, the production house could provide customized performances for their animals, every time.

It was vital to build these motion libraries for each of the CG animals. If the filmmakers wanted a musk ox to look to the left vs. right or to sit vs. stand, CG proved a fine compromise. “We built these libraries to see how the animals would look and the many types of movements they would make,” remarks Arnett. “Then, we could place them into a scene and multiply them out to fill in the background. Whether it was walking or showing a head turn, we created a set of actions for every animal we had that we could fold into a scene.”

Birds would prove to be some of the more difficult animals to create—especially a dove that needed to fly in a very specific path—as were the animals with a good deal of flowing fur (think polar bears and musk oxen). During the climactic ark ride, only a few of the real animals could actually be positioned on a moving platform in front of a blue screen to help show reactions to the swaying ark motion in the flood. Once again, CG stepped in to add the amount and variety of animals necessary within the ark interior. The animators allowed realistic reactions from animals in their pens as the ark bumps into gigantic waves of water, and CG made it possible to get accurate movements from the pandas or the wildebeests that would be jostled about at a specific instant.

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Ecological Almighty:
How the Production Went Green
Attempting to modernize elements of a legendary biblical tale like that of Noah’s Ark necessitated a compelling, wide-reaching theme that would not trivialize a story cherished by many. The filmmakers felt an environmental theme was especially appropriate and strengthened the heart of the screenplay (and added to the humor). As the story took shape, Shadyac and the other producers made their own commitment to be environmentally conscious as they proceeded.