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BAFTA Awards: “2012” Special Visual Effects Supporting Statement When director Roland Emmerich and producer Harald Kloser asked Volker Engel and Marc Weigert to come aboard as Visual Effects Supervisors and Co-Producers on what Emmerich described as a “disaster movie to end all disaster movies”, Engel and Weigert knew they were in for a challenge. Shot entirely in Vancouver and vicinity, virtual land- and cityscapes, including believable depictions of Los Angeles, Yellowstone National Park, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Rome’s St. Peter’s Square, Tibet and Hawaii had to be created and destroyed via earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. With a visual effects running time of 1:17 hours (about half the film’s length), following are selections from 2012’s overall 1315 visual effects shots: For one of the most challenging sequences, the 120-shot limousine ride during the Los Angeles earthquake, detailed previsualization was created. As it could not be filmed on location, it was almost entirely created digitally, with inserts of actors reacting to the mayhem. The 5-second crane shot shown is completely virtual. Every crumbling house, swaying palm tree, bush, post box, fence, sidewalk, garbage can, and car, including the limousine, was computer generated. For the airport scene introducing the Los Angeles escape, Special Effects Supervisor Mike Vezina built an 8,000 square foot “shaker rig”. When the actors ran towards the Cessna, the ground shook as in an earthquake. For the wide shots, all landscapes, rising shelves and deep fissures were created digitally. After Yellowstone’s initial nuclear-like super-volcano eruption, a dense pyroclastic cloud chases the camper. House-sized firebombs destroy the ground left and right. The background and camper were shot via helicopter in Canada. Close-ups of the camper backsliding into the fissure were shot on a bluescreen stage and combined with Canadian backgrounds. To create the wide vista of Las Vegas in ruins, a digital matte painting was projected onto simple geometry. When the protagonists flee in the (digital) Russian transport plane, the surrounding crumbling casinos were created in painstaking detail. Every hotel room had furniture and wallpaper. The scene in which the aircraft carrier “John F. Kennedy” rides on a tidal wave and crashes into the White House is probably the most complex CG water simulation ever created for a film. After the basic shape of the water was created and animated, the foam, white water and spray were added. In addition, each element had to interact with the landscape, buildings and aircraft carrier. For the establishing shot of St. Peter’s, the square was filmed via helicopter and thousands of digital extras were added. For the destruction shots, exact replicas of the church and colonnades were digitally constructed. For the Tibetan mountains sequence, gigantic arks, huge hangar interiors, Y-shaped support structures and surrounding landscapes were digitally created. Depicting the vessels’ size was particularly challenging. At 800 meters long, they had to be incredibly detailed and move very slowly. Tiny helicopters gave them appropriate scale during launch. For shots with actors, small, partial sets were constructed and extended via computer graphics and matte paintings. .

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