While all films traverse a long and laborious road from inception to release, Supernova endured a particularly bumpy ride, plagued with changes in studio regime, a succession of directors, and a state-of-limbo postproduction that left the movie stranded and on the shelf for nearly a full year -- much to the frustration of its makers.
Scripted by David Campbell Wilson, Supernova is a 'paramedics in space' story about an emergency rescue ship that picks up a lone survivor from a mining outpost on a remote moon. The survivor -- a young and handsome charmer named Troy Larson (Peter Facinelli) -- brings with him aboard the ship an alien object that transforms those it touches, altering the mind and body, and creating a dependency as powerful as that induced by the most potent narcotic. Unbeknownst to the crew, the object is also a bomb, engineered by an alien species as a means of wiping out all other advanced civilizations in the universe. Learning that Troy intends to take the priceless alien object to earth and sell it for a fortune, captain and pilot Nick Vanzant (James Spader), Dr. Kaela Evers (Angela Bassett), and other members of the medical ship crew fight for their lives against the machinations of the ruthless treasure hunter. In the film's climax, the alien object is expelled from the ship and into a giant blue star, thereby setting off a cataclysmic supernova. Supernova's treacherous journey from story to screen began as far back as 1991, when a script called Dead Star -- a 'vampires in space' tale written by Bill Malone -- was commissioned by Screenland Pictures' executive producer Ash Shah. Five years later, and still unable to get the project off the ground, Shah joined with Hammerhead Productions and partner Daniel Chuba who would rewrite the original screenplay. While Chuba -- who would ultimately share a 'story by' credit with Malone -- wrestled with story issues, Hammerhead generated some computer-aided designs in preparation for a full-on pitch to United Artists, the film's backer and distributor. A provision of the initial deal with UA was that the film would be directed by Hammerhead cofounder Jamie Dixon -- assuming the production came in at a certain budget. "If we exceeded that budget," recalled Chuba, "Jamie would move into the role of producer -- which is eventually what happened when, due to casting needs on the studio's part, we weren't able to come in at that original budget."
day of shooting -- April 13, 1998. "Even then," Dixon admitted, "we were really nervous about whether this thing was going to go or not. There were so many bumps in the road and so many potentially killing events, we were still unsure as to where we stood. Ten minutes before Walter Hill called 'action' on the first day of photography, I had the worst attitude in the world. It was like, 'Oh, yeah, fine, now we're shooting -- but it's taken three years to get to this point.' Then he called 'action,' and ten minutes after that, it was like a miracle. 'It's only been three years!' It finally felt like we were making this movie."
Preproduction came to an abrupt halt when United Artists went through a major personnel upheaval at the executive level. Dixon and Chuba, assuming their pet project was dead, were astonished when, months later, UA renewed its interest in Supernova and began an aggressive campaign to find a new director. The studio hired Geoffrey Wright, who had directed an edgy, controversial independent film in Australia, entitled Romper Stomper. After some months, however, Wright's eccentric point of view proved too eccentric for the studio, and he too left the project. The search for a new director became more frenzied as the start date for principal photography -- a hard and fast date due to an impending Screen Actors Guild strike -- approached. Finally, with just five weeks of preproduction time remaining, veteran Walter Hill agreed to take the helm.
Though stage and production space had already been procured at Raleigh Studios and a set was being erected within a hangar at Los Angeles International Airport, Supernova did not receive an official greenlight until the first
They were not making a big-budget movie, however. A concession to the film's modest $60 million budget was a sixty-day shooting schedule that forced the filmmakers to work at a greatly accelerated pace, with first-unit and multiple second-unit crews shooting simultaneously. "One of the things we'd sold to the studio was our ability to bring this kind of movie in for a third or a half of what a typical visual-effectsdriven movie would be," explained Chuba. "So that was part of the deal. We had to shoot it in less time, and we had to make certain compromises." Among those compromises was keeping the story contained to three basic locations. "We used Crimson Tide as a model," noted Dixon. "In that movie, most of the scenes are within the submarine -- then you pop outside for the occasional visual effects shot. We did the same thing here. We had the main spaceship interiors -- which were shot on various stages at Raleigh Studios -- and we had the Titan mining facility interiors, which were shot in the hangar at LAX. Everything else -- the space shots and exteriors -- would be either miniatures or digital effects."
Originally, the movie was slated for completion by February 1999, less than a year from the start of principal photography. The scheduling left just six months for the production of 250 large-scale visual effects shots. Those
shots broke down to approximately seventy-five shots of the Nightingale medical spaceship, a handful of digital deep-space environments -- including the blue giant sun, the rogue moon and the surrounding galaxy -- the exterior of the mining facility, a series of 'dimension jump' shots, and the alien object effects.
matter of days." Also instrumental was Digital Domain coordinator Rochelle Gross, who would eventually move into the role of visual effects producer, acting as liaison between production and all of the effects units.
Geographical proximity to the production art department aided the visual effects art directors as they collaborated with production designer Marek Dobrowolski on the design of the main Nightingale ship, smaller support ships, and the Titan mine facility. Also to be conceptualized were the look of the giant blue sun, the supernova explosion that would end the film, and other space-related effects. "Overall," noted Stetson, "we were playing catch-up and coming up to speed with the design philosophy of the film, which had been established prior to our involvement. The production art department had done some pre-design illustrations of the main medical ship, for example, and had constructed a mockup before we came on."
Responsible for those original 250 shots was Digital Domain. Visual effects supervisor Mark Stetson, executive producer Nancy Bernstein and visual effects producer Julian Levi immediately launched into effects preproduction, creating a breakdown, initiating storyboarding and establishing a visual effects presence at Raleigh Studios. "We very quickly put together a production staff and got some key creative heads in place," Stetson recalled, "including art director Ron Gress, director of photography Bill Neil and digital effects supervisor Jonathan Egstad -- basically the same core team I'd had on Fifth Element. I also engaged George Trimmer as an art director for miniature effects, and my long-time associate Scott Schneider as miniature effects supervisor. We were in a real hurry, so we did all of this in a
Some of those already established designs -- such as that for the Nightingale -- would undergo late revisions to better reflect Walter Hill's aesthetic. "Walter didn't want this ship to look like the big, sleek Enterprise," said Ron Gress, "but he also didn't want it to look like the ship in Alien. He wanted a compromise between the two, but without a lot of flash. In fact, he wanted everything in the movie to have a look that was retro and muted in color. The stars and nebulas were muted, for example, even though, when you see them in Hubble photographs, they are incredibly colorful. Walter wanted everything to look subtle, as if it was no big deal -and that was especially true of the ships."
Practical considerations, as well as aesthetics, led to a latein-the-game redesign of the Nightingale. "When Walter came
on," explained Gress, "he walked the sets and realized that he needed more set space than what was provided for in the design of the ship. The original design had two rotating modules, and Walter decided that he needed three -storywise he needed to be able to go to another area of the ship. So we had to justify that additional module, and that meant we had to change the ship design."
Another issue that affected the ship design was Hill's intention to shoot the film hand-held and with long lenses. "Walter felt the hand-held motion would lend suspense to the movie," explained Stetson, "and that long lenses used in closeup with the actors would heighten the tension. I got to thinking about the implications of that in our miniature photography. Long lenses can get you into trouble very quickly in miniature photography, because of depth-of-field problems. So as we were designing the ship with our CG tools, instead of just looking at it with a 20mm lens, we'd look at it with a 150mm lens -- and that really drove the design decisions."
George Trimmer was assigned the task of redesigning the ship, incorporating an architectural look favored by Dobrowolski. "Marek wasn't going for the standard 'this is a big, blocky spaceship with big blocky detail,'" recalled Scott Schneider, who also contributed to the redesign. "He wanted a very architectural look to it. So the final design had a lot of curves and architectural lines. There were also a lot of flying buttress shapes like those you see in Notre Dame, as well as intricate structural detail."
As the film opens, the camera moves from the Nightingale interior to a view of the ship in deep space, achieved with a practical twenty-fourth-scale, nineteen-foot-long model -- as big a model as Stetson felt could be maneuvered on the motion control stage. "Stage requirements were a consideration," noted Schneider, "as were shot requirements. A bigger model wouldn't have allowed us to get some of the intended shots; but a smaller model wouldn't have held up on film. We got damn close to this model -- a lot closer than Mark or I had expected -- but it held up really well." The main spine of the ship was a five-inch steel tube, surrounded by tail and engine areas featuring lacy aluminum trusswork. "We designed a lot of the components of the Nightingale in AutoCAD, then cut components and test-fit everything. The model pieces were either water-cut -- a process that uses highpressure water to cut through metal -- or laser-cut, which we used for plastics and wood. Specific patterns were laser-cut out of plex, then finished out with modelplank, a dense urethane foam made by VJB. It is beautiful stuff to work with. We could mill it, turn it on a lathe, carve it and sand it -- just like wood, but better." From those templates, model pieces were laid up in epoxy, fiberglass or urethane. "The solar panels were etched brass, and the front head was a combination of laser-cut plastic, vacuform and other lightweight materials. The ship had to be as lightweight as possible, for maneuverability. It still weighed about 650 pounds, which was a lot of weight to be mounted on an armature."
In its completed form, the ship model was made up of three distinct, removable sections, affording the model photography crew some flexibility in capturing specific camera angles. "If we needed a shot looking down the length of the crew modules towards the front," explained Schneider, "we could take the tail off and get the camera right in there. Instead of everything being bolted together, these sections were cam-locked together -- there were pins that slid in and
locked -- which made turnaround times much quicker." For shooting, the ship was mounted to a motion control armature by two-inch pipes that extended four feet out. "We built the tail, the solar panel and the head sections so they could rotate, which allowed us to turn the ship completely upsidedown and still continue shooting. We never took the model down to change mounts -- we just rotated it. It would have been a nightmare without that capability." Rather than equip the model with motors, certain sections requiring articulation -- such as the d-jump shields and solar panels -- were modeled digitally, then animated and tracked to the model photography.
When it became clear that the production schedule was not going to allow enough time to get all the requisite shots of the Nightingale on stage, Stetson began playing with the idea of computer generating an entire ship for distant shots, or for those requiring complicated camera moves. "There was a lot of work to do in a short period of time," Stetson explained, "so we committed to both a full photorealistic CG Nightingale and a miniature Nightingale as a means of dividing the work between parallel crews."
The computer model of the Nightingale was built by CG supervisor Eric Barba and model lead Vernon Wilbert -- with signifigant input from team members David Lo and Mark Wilson -- who used as a basis the AutoCAD data the modelshop crew had generated for the construction of the practical version. "They had used Alias to model," explained CG supervisor Kelly Port, "taking that data and putting it into a laser-cutter to manufacture various parts of the model. So by the time the miniature was completed, we already had a huge amount of data to work from to create the digital model." Texture maps taken from the miniature were also applied to
the CG ship to ensure an exact match between practical and computer versions.
Although the digital ship had been intended originally only for distant shots, the final computer model was so densely detailed and photorealistic, it was ultimately designated for use in relative closeups, as well. "As we moved forward, we began using it more and more," Stetson explained. "It matched the model exactly, and it held up extremely well, even when the camera got in close, and even in back-to-back cuts with the shooting model. One of the things I'm most proud of in this show is the undetectable interaction between miniatures and CG models." In the end, all but eleven of the sixty-some Nightingale shots were achieved with the digital version of the ship.
move worked, and then that previz data could be used to drive the Kuper motion control rig."
The close collaboration between model and CG crews extended to the creation of digital previsualizations for all the model shots. Virtual re-creations of the Digital Domain motion control stage, the ship models and even the motion control rig itself were used to work out all the camera moves and model positions prior to shooting on stage. Once those moves were approved, the data from the previz was inputted directly into the stage motion control rig, which would reenact the virtual moves as precisely as possible. "This approach allowed us to shoot the models faster," explained Kelly Port, "which was a primary consideration on this show because our stage schedule was so short. Programming all of those moves would have taken an extra two or three days, per shot. So doing this previz work and translating that to the stage saved us a lot of time." Matthew Lamb modeled the various on-stage elements, working in Houdini. "Matthew would translate all this previz data into a motion control move and see if it worked right there on a model of the stage. He could see if a certain move was going to smash the motion control camera into a wall, for example. All of that could be tweaked until the
"We went beyond just modeling the stage and the motion control rig," elaborated Jonathan Egstad. "We modeled the modelmovers, the track on the floor, the stage, the greenscreen, where the key light was -- everything. All of those factors were taken into account so we could figure out if a previz shot was actually shootable on stage. A shot could look great in the computer; but we'd realize that, on stage, the camera would have to go through the roof to do the same move. There were also limitations to the movement of the Nightingale model. It could yaw and it could rock back and forth, but that was it. It couldn't pitch or roll -- all of that had to be done with the camera. Those restrictions were taken into account in the previz."
Though the translation of previz data to stage cameras had been attempted previously, it had rarely been done as successfully as it was for Supernova. Much of that success can be attributed to the exhaustive measuring done by the motion control stage crew. "The reason this system hadn't worked before was because we hadn't taken into account the thousands of variables that reality tosses at you," said Egstad, "such as lens distortion and the untrueness of the motion control system, or slight variances in the track. Even the temperature on stage will present some variables that we just can't account for. This time, we measured and measured and measured. But, even with all that measuring, we still had to do some tweaking after the fact. In the end, we had to resign ourselves to the fact that it was never going to be perfect."
The biggest culprit in the previz and stage shots not lining up exactly was the motion control track, made less than perfectly straight when an earthquake shook the area midway through the stage shoot. "We had a hundred feet of metal track affected by the earthquake," explained 3D tracking and data integration supervisor Tim Conway, "and that track not being perfectly straight was one of the biggest causes of misalignment. That's the difference between the CG world and the real world. The CG world is perfect; but the real world has tracks that aren't straight and crane arms with shifting weights or an extension arm that bends a bit at the end. There's no way around all those physical imperfections; and, as a result, our system wasn't perfect -- but it was really close."
On a routine patrol, the Nightingale receives a distress signal from another galaxy -- information that is delivered in holographic form. In its original version, the story had relied heavily on holograms as expositional and informational tools - and, as a result, the interior sets had been built devoid of display monitors. But to contain costs and simplify the way in which information was relayed, Hill decided to dispense with all but a few of the holographic images, filling in with audible information relayed by 'Sweetie' (voiced by Vanessa Marshall), the ship's on-board computer, and floating 3D monitors displaying graphics. All of the holograms in the film were first generated in drawings at Digital Domain, then in Photoshop renderings that were turned over to the holographic effects team, under the leadership of Ron Herbst. "We had a team of people concentrating only on the holograms," said Kelly Port, "and they got quite good at making fake displays and fake monitors with fake information and data coming on. We did virtual light gags to make the holograms look as if they were being projected and not just floating in space. We made it look as if there was a source point for the light, which helped a lot in making it look more realistic. We were on set through the whole production and, prior to shooting, we would stick in a locked-off panel in a scene as reference for the holograms."
Another hologram that survived the cuts was a medical bodyscan performed on Troy upon his arrival on the Nightingale. "A beam moves over Troy and builds his whole
skeletal structure and inner system as a hologram," said Ron Gress. "We zoom in on his ribs and we see some strange stuff there. We zoom in closer and end up on something that looks like an electron micrograph. There was a practical scan beam on the set to give us something to track to, then we created a 3D body, based on a scan of a corpse that we got from the Visible Human Project, a database first used in Fifth Element.
Responding to the distress signal, the Nightingale crew prepares for a 'dimensional jump' that will transport them from their current position to the source of the SOS. Due to its narrative similarity to Star Trek's and other films' warpdrive, the d-jump was particularly challenging from a design point of view. "Trying to make that sequence look unique was a big challenge," noted Jonathan Egstad. "It wasn't that the djump effect would be so difficult to create, it was that audiences had seen that kind of thing regurgitated a hundred times -- how could we make it interesting and different?" Ron Gress eventually conceived an effect that would have arcs of electricity wrapping around the ship during the d-jump. As a jumping-off point for the creation of the effect, Digital Domain rented a large, eight-foot-tall Tesla tube from neon effects specialist Larry Albright and shot practical electrical elements. Those elements were later enhanced digitally by a team led by Nikos Kalaitzidis.
Inside the ship, the crew is seen preparing for the d-jump, stripping down to nakedness and entering individual 'dimensional stabilization units' -- a type of pod that serves to protect its inhabitant during the jump. The film's PG-13 rating was protected with some digital penis removal, executed for a shot of a nude James Spader entering his pod. Animated electricity applied to the appropriate areas served to disguise the offending member. The scene also required the digital removal of sweat pants worn by the more modest Robert Forster in his role as the doomed Captain Marley.
Marley's DSU malfunctions during the jump, resulting in a fusion of the captain's mutilated body with the glass of the pod. The horror was suggested by carefully framing Forster surrounded by fleshy, vascular-looking pieces provided by creature designer Patrick Tatopoulos. Heeding the captain's pleas to be put out of his misery, Kaela shoots Marley in the head with a laser. "They wanted the effect of the glass cracking as the laser passed through it," said Gress, "so we shot some breaking glass elements against black velvet. We also shot blood spraying onto the glass as Marley's vessels pop." The laser beam itself was also a digital enhancement.
With the completion of the d-jump, the Aldiss Galaxy is seen through the windows of the ship. The representation of the galaxy was a primary CG concern. "Though the Nightingale was going to be, most often, a model," said Jonathan Egstad, "everything around it would be CG -- the rogue moon, the stars and the blue giant." To facilitate views of space from inside the ship, greenscreen was hung in the appropriate portals and windows of interior ship sets built at Raleigh Studios. It was then up to Digital Domain to fill those green areas with a well-defined, believable solar system. "We knew what kind of star system we needed to have," said Gress, "based on parameters given to us by Jackie Green from Jet Propulsion Laboratory -- such as how big the star would be compared to our sun, and how the neutron star and the blue giant star would react with each other in a physical relationship. So we began by defining the star system, actually using paintings that were being generated by our visual effects art department, which was made up of myself, my assistant Jason Greenblum, Sylvan Dispre, who is an illustrator, Scott Schneider and George Trimmer. We also had three storyboard artists working on it." The artwork was subsequently composited in Photoshop, along with illustrations of the spaceship. "We used Photoshop to come up with composited scenes that we could put in front of Walter, because, like us, he had come on late to this show and he needed to be brought up to speed."
Most prominent among the heavenly bodies viewed from within the ship is the blue giant sun, first conceptualized in illustrations by Sylvan Dispre. Ron Gress scanned in those renderings, then digitally adjusted saturation and added camera flares. "We went from there right into CG," explained Stetson, "with Francisco De Jesus developing the actual elements for the blue giant." Ultimately, the star was made up of many CG elements blended together procedurally. "The sun system was almost entirely procedural. There were neutron stars and pulsars and volcanoes and planets spinning. We also had to see the sun in a couple of distinctly different lighting conditions -- there was the in-your-face, clean glass look, and then a filtered, stopped-down, saturated look, which was more beautiful and interesting, but less natural looking."
A tug ship carrying Troy docks onto the Nightingale. A 1/24- scale tug model was built, but was used only for shots of the tug attached to the larger ship. All other views of the tug in space were achieved with a computer model -- although that had not been the original intention. "Eric Barba surprised us with a render of an animated tug drifting through a test shot of the Nightingale," recalled Stetson. "It wasn't perfect, but it was so close for a first try, we were all really excited. That jacked everyone's confidence way up, in terms of what we could do with the CG ships."
An investigation of the tug interior by crew member Yerzy (Lou Diamond Phillips) yields the discovery of a mysterious alien object. For live-action purposes, the alien object was represented by a tall, sleek, cigar-shaped sculpture, produced by sculptor Fred Arbogast. But, as interesting as the prop was from an aesthetic standpoint, it lacked the necessary mystery and power. "It wasn't magical enough by itself," Jamie Dixon commented. "It just looked like a photographed sculpture. So we came up with the idea of adding atmospheric distortion to the imagery to make it look more fantastic and magical. That idea expanded until, in the end, there was a lot of digital enhancement on the alien object." In fact, every shot of the alien object in the final film became an effects shot. "The alien object was a serious piece of work that had to be dealt with every single time it was on-screen," said Stetson. "The idea was that there was a force around it that would behave like a magnetic field. Since the sculpture itself was an aerodynamic shape with a hole in it, I imagined that the poles of the magnetic field corresponded to the hole on either side."
Under the supervision of alien object lead Markus Kurtz, digital distortion and lighting effects were tracked to the sculpture in the live-action plates, creating the desired magnetic field look. The tracking of the object was one of the show's major challenges. "The object was out of focus a great deal," stated Stetson, "because of the long lenses it had been shot with -- so it was difficult to track. We had to come up with a CG model of the alien object so that in shots where we were in tight closeup, we could use the alien object itself as a tracking object. That worked well. It also gave us automatic mattes for the object, which was a side benefit."
Hill's preference for shooting with long lenses created problematic tracking issues for all the visual effects shots being integrated into live-action plates. "These plates had a very short depth-of-field," explained Jonathan Egstad, "with just a sliver of background. Typically we use the background features for tracking, to figure out where the camera is in 3D space. But in these plates, we couldn't see those objects clearly. The edges were blurry and out of focus. So we had a problem, and we had to come up with a new way of dealing with tracking." The ultimate solution was dubbed 'monkey cam.' "We figured out that by strapping a very small,
lightweight video camera to the 35mm camera while they were shooting, and subsequently recording on Betacam using the fixed lens on the video camera, we could see the same scene that the production camera was shooting -- except we would be seeing it from the very wide-angle lens of the video camera." The video footage was digitized, then converted to a 1:1 aspect ratio. The resulting images were extremely sharp, allowing the digital team to clearly see the background objects and markers that would aid in the tracking process. "It was the same image as that captured by the production camera, except that it was slightly offset, due to the position of the video camera. But the error was small enough that we could deal with it. By measuring we could get a pretty good idea of how much the image was offset, and then we could account for that when we actually got into the tracking system. The error-margin was minimal compared to what we would have had if we'd tried to track to a blurry background."
With the Nightingale having suffered damage during the djump, Nick pilots a shuttle to the surface of the rogue moon in search of fuel that will enable the ship to escape the gravitational pull of the blue giant star. The shuttle was built in twenty-fourth-scale for shots of it docked onto the likescaled Nightingale, and in sixth-scale for closer shots. "The twenty-fourth-scale shuttle was about fifteen inches long," explained Scott Schneider, "and it fit right up into the nose of
the Nightingale. It had an armature and was laid up in epoxy to make it lightweight." The five-foot-long, sixth-scale version was used for closeups in a landing sequence, for shots of the shuttle lifting out of the Nightingale head, and for a push-in revealing James Spader flying the craft. "Our model interior matched the production's shuttle interior set so closely, they shot our interior and put three little tracking markers on the seat so they could extract James Spader from the plate of the set and put him in there. It was easier to track him in the model than to try and track a whole interior set. So you actually see James Spader sitting in our model."
On the moon, Nick finds the abandoned Titan mining and processing plant, a setting that was realized through a combination of models, a greenscreen set built on stage, and matte paintings. The Titan mine interior was erected within the hangar at LAX, where first-unit, then second-unit crews would shoot for approximately five weeks. The exterior setup included a forty-foot-long bridge and two landing towers, with greenscreen hung in appropriate areas so that practical set pieces could be linked up to model photography and CG set extensions. Among the models was an elaborate tabletop miniature, built in 1/220-scale, which consisted of the mine exterior and the surrounding lunar surface. To facilitate the blending of digital matte paintings that would extend the backgrounds even further, the miniature was curved in the back -- making a seam line less noticeable -- and the surface
was broken up. "The miniature landscape was carved out of foam by Eric Alfred, the lead sculptor, and his crew," said Scott Schneider. "Nick Seldon was the lead on the mine structure itself, which was a combination of model kit parts and laser-cut black styrene. The whole mine set was built in about four weeks."
Within the mine, Nick finds nine bodies -- presumably Troy's victims -- frozen within the icy cavern walls. The ice figures were sculpted by Patrick Tatopolous and his crew. Tatopolous was also responsible for makeup effects suggesting bony growths on Troy's hands and face -manifestations of his contact with the alien object. Other makeup effects such as wounds and torn limbs -- suffered by Troy as he battles with the Nightingale crew -- were digitally enhanced. "There was a shot where Troy gets his arm chopped off," explained Jonathan Egstad. "We created a distortion alien effect around the cutoff point because the aura of this object is surrounding the wound. There are several points in the movie where Troy heals very quickly, and that story point is clarified by this aura effect around the wound in his arm."
While Nick explores the rogue moon, Troy seduces crew member Danika (Robin Tunney) on board the Nightingale. A highly stylized, midair lovemaking scene required the actors to work on teeter-totters, wires and harnesses in front of a huge greenscreen on stage at Raleigh -- a simulated weightlessness setup rigged by special effects supervisor Tommy Fisher. "The scene was supposed to take place in the observation dome of the ship," said Stetson. "We had a huge green cove that spanned three-quarters of the stage at Raleigh, and the floor and ceiling were also in green -- so the
DP could shoot anywhere. Even though the actors hadn't had much of a chance to rehearse, they got in there and got it done in a day, which is all the time they had for this scene."
Nick is presumably stranded on the moon when Troy, now at the controls of the Nightingale, remotely pilots the shuttle to take off from the lunar surface. When Danika witnesses Troy's treason, her recent lover expels her from the ship's airlock. This and subsequent shots of Troy's victims being ejected into space required the creation of digital actors, a task to which a small character animation unit at Digital Domain devoted itself.
Nick returns to the Nightingale via the Rescue Return Unit, a small ship that was built both in sixth-scale for closeup work and twenty-fourth-scale to use in conjunction with the likescaled shuttle. In addition, the RRU was built as a CG model. "We built a CG version of the RRU," explained Mark Stetson, "because it was going to have to make so many tumbling type
moves. We couldn't have done those elaborate kinds of moves with a practical model."
The film climaxes with Nick and Kaela luring Troy to the observation dome by strapping the alien object onto Flyboy, a robot, who leads him there. Nick then remotely detonates an explosion that ejects both the alien object and Troy into space, toward the blue giant sun. The explosion of the observation dome was achieved with a sixth-scale, five-footdiameter dome that was set up in the Digital Domain parking lot and blown apart by Stirber Visual Network.
The cataclysmic explosion of the alien object within the blue sun and the supernova event it initiates are revealed in the movie's closing moments. "It is an amazingly long shot," noted Ron Gress. "The explosion itself was totally CG, a chain reaction starting with the blue giant and working its way throughout the star system. If a star really blew up, after the initial bright flash there would be remnants of gases expanding out into space -- and we wanted to show that, as
well, within this thirty-second shot." Gress and his art department based their supernova on data provided by JPL to make it as scientifically accurate as possible. "Our illustrations kept evolving and being refined. Then those concepts were taken into CGI and rendered as full-motion effects."
Even with the completion of principal photography and the delivery of Digital Domain's original 250 effects shots, Supernova's travails were not over. In the months prior to release, creative differences with the studio led to Walter Hill's leaving the project. With Hill's departure, the film went through a complete restructuring; and, as a result, ninety effects shots were added late in the game. These shots were farmed out to a variety of effects companies, with the entire effort overseen by veteran visual effects supervisor Tim McGovern. The movie was revised again when Francis Ford Coppola stepped in to reedit the film from scratch. And, in a final blow, Hill had his name removed from the troubled film, which ultimately carried a pseudonymous directing credit.
All in all, it was a bad end for a project that had been launched with the best of intentions, supported by many talented, committed artisans of the craft of filmmaking. Among those were Dan Chuba and Jamie Dixon, both of
whom had seen Supernova as an opportunity to bridge their effects careers with feature film directing and producing. "Effects people bring an incredible efficiency to the filmmaking process," Dixon commented. "So there is definitely a financial advantage to having visual effects people helm these movies. But, more than that, they bring the imagination and creativity and technical know-how required in every part of the filmmaking process. It all comes down to creating an illusion. Whether it is the illusion of some fantastic visual effects shot or the illusion of an emotional reality in a scene between two people, the demands are the same."
Supernova photographs copyright Š 1999 by Metro-GoldwynMayer. All rights reserved. Digital Domain photographs by Tony Friedkin. Special thanks to Bob Hoffman and Rebecca Brown-Dana.