SUBMITTED BY Kit-Kat

April 18, 2006 —

Cutting-Edge Technology and Effects Join

Tried-and-True Filmmaking and Practical Sets

"Shooting on a real ship was more problematic than one might think," says producer Duncan Henderson. Considering their options early on, it soon became clear that no existing ship could compare to "Wolfgang's vision of the newest, the best, the most grand and luxurious," as depicted in production designer William Sandell's preliminary drawings, which, Henderson says, were more appealing to the director than any of their other choices. "Wolfgang decided he didn't want to be held back by anything."

By employing computer graphics to create the ocean, all exteriors and the ship in its entirety, the filmmakers did not need to compromise in scale, ultimately pitting a more-than 150-foot wall of water against a 20-story grand ocean liner more than 1100 feet long and carrying 4,000 crew and guests. Industry leader ILM, which previously contributed the groundbreaking aquatic effects for Petersen's The Perfect Storm, raised the bar again with new image-rendering techniques that bring the wave and the ship to life.

Meanwhile, extensive interiors were built on Warner Bros. Studios soundstages the old-fashioned way to accommodate practical effects. Most sets were duplicated in original and upside-down versions to depict, first, the ship's grandeur and then, post-impact, its utter destruction - all balanced on platforms that could pitch and roll the action on its side. Combining practical sets with CGI, Petersen achieved the size and scope unlikely to be found in the real world yet scrupulously realistic: a ship not only ultra-modern but timelessly elegant in every way, from its sleek exterior construction to every detail of dicor and atmosphere right down to the handcrafted initial "P" reproduced in the buttons of the staff uniforms.

The ship itself becomes a character in the story - constantly shifting, lurching and emitting deep metallic groans as supports give way and the increasing load of water slowly drags it down. "We all felt the physical power of this huge ship dying, which is how Wolfgang looked at it," remarks Josh Lucas. "It was like we were inside some giant living beast that is mortally wounded. First it loses its heart, then vital organs start to shut down. All the while we're trying to get through it, everything is imploding, burning, sinking."

Petersen brought to the project many key artisans with whom he has worked before, among them renowned cinematographer John Seale, an Oscar and BAFTA Award winner for The English Patient and recipient of three additional Academy nominations; editor Peter Honess, whose work on L.A. Confidential earned a BAFTA Award and an Oscar nomination; costume designer Erica Edell Phillips, whose designs for Total Recall earned a Saturn Award; special effects supervisor John Frazier, a 2005 Oscar winner for Spiderman 2 and five-time additional Oscar nominee whose work on The Perfect Storm merited a BAFTA Award as well as an Oscar nomination; and production designer William Sandell, an Art Directors Guild Award nominee for The Perfect Storm who brought home a BAFTA Award and an Oscar nomination in 2004 for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Visual effects supervisor Boyd Shermis (a BAFTA nominee for Speed) oversaw the implementation of more than 600 VFX shots. "In terms of scope it's one of the most complex VFX pictures ever created," he says, and offers Poseidon's innovative opening shot as an example of the level of expertise brought to bear on the film.

"It starts under the water from the camera's point of view, then rises to reveal the ship, rotates around the bow and down the side of the ship, then spots a figure running along the deck," Shermis outlines. "The camera comes in tight on him, dollying 180 degrees around him. We lead him up a flight of stairs, then pull back to take in the beauty and grandeur of the ship, the upper decks, people having fun by the pool, then climb high up to the smokestacks and beyond that to a beautiful sunset on the ocean."

"It's two and a half minutes," Petersen says of the remarkable sequence. "The only real element in the whole shot is the jogger, Josh Lucas" - who was filmed against a green screen at the San Fernando Valley's Sepulveda Dam, one of the film's only two off-lot locations, then integrated into the virtual landscape. "It's the boldest, most insane shot ever done in the history of CG, yet completely photorealistic. I don't expect people will think, what a great CG shot,' instead, they might think, what a great ship; where did they find it?'"

Acknowledging how computer technology has evolved, he adds, "There is so much more we can do now versus five years ago, especially in the way we can show the natural weight and flow of water," the most difficult of all elements to realistically replicate.

With R & D input from Stanford University's computer graphics department, ILM special effects supervisor Kim Libreri led a 100-member team of software developers, engineers and artists for a year to create the proprietary software used on Poseidon. Called computational fluid dynamics, a new technology that simulates how water interacts with objects, it's a system so advanced it required the simultaneous development of new hardware just to run it. Says Libreri, "Existing machines weren't fast enough."

What that means on screen is that, "You're really going to see the wave react with the ship in ways traditionally not seen in computer graphics," he says. "It's not just rendering a wave to stand 150 feet high with a particular curvature, it's the full interaction of explosive events as that wave hits the ship, runs over the decks, destroys parts of the structure and turns it around. For the first time we can simulate particles of water striking objects, rolling over them, colliding with the back-spray and recombining in a naturally fluid way - and all of this in keeping with Wolfgang's aesthetic. He and Boyd Shermis wanted all the shots to appear as physically achievable, however difficult, rather than defying the laws of physics."

Other innovations are in reflected light. Says Libreri, "The computer needs to understand that when a light source strikes an object, some of that light bounces off and hits another object and so on." Poseidon raised the challenge of simulating sunlight and moonlight on the water and the ship's interior illumination at night, plus myriad details in combination, such as "how light scatters through water or spray and how bubbles form."

CG worked hand-in-hand with the practical effects team throughout, reuniting Shermis with special effects supervisor John Frazier, with whom he shared a 1994 BAFTA nomination for Speed. Frazier thought of it in terms of "elements," such as a virtual set into which he would add a live stunt or the various extensions the visual effects team made to double the distance of a physical hallway.

In a key scene in which one of the survivors is slammed by a plummeting piece of machinery while crossing a makeshift bridge, Frazier's crew worked with the actor to show his supports giving way. "We made the steel substructure bounce as if from the impact and the visual effects team then created the air conditioner unit that falls on top of it."

"Remarkable as the CG work is," observes producer Henderson, "we used it in combination with as much live action footage, sets and stunts as possible. We want audiences to feel that these are real rooms with real walls and real water. Whenever we could achieve a shot practically, we would."

Steel, Concrete and Lots of Water

With the exception of the opening shot captured at the Sepulveda Dam, the ship's (upright) disco filmed at L.A. Staples Center, and the Warner Bros. commissary kitchen standing in for Poseidon's galley, all sets for the film were built on five studio soundstages, including the famous Stage 16, where Petersen had helmed a different vessel five years earlier.

The site of such classics as The Old Man and the Sea and P.T. 109, Stage 16's water tank was previously enlarged for The Perfect Storm from 8 feet to a depth of 22 feet, making it, at 95' x 100' x 22,' the world's largest soundstage pool with a 1.3 million-gallon capacity. Stage 16 now housed Poseidon's most ambitious set, the upside-down ballroom which ultimately takes the violent impact of a 90,000-gallon rush of water, while neighboring Stage 19 held an identical but right-side-up replica of the ballroom, for scenes shot prior to the deadly wave's impact.

Additional stages were renovated to replace wood flooring with concrete, and new plumbing was installed to recycle the huge volume of water back and forth among them.

Building sets upside down, or sets that would be tilted drastically, meant using a lot more steel reinforcement than is commonly used as normal structural supports and furnishings can no longer rely on gravity. The upside-down lobby, for example, was a five-story, 72-foot high interior featuring a collapsed elevator shaft that stretched across a three-story drop to the stage floor, all of it requiring a rock-solid support system. Its construction took a 100-person crew five months, using 750,000 pounds of I-beam steel and 10,000 sheets of plywood. Rust-resistant auto body paint protected portions that would be submerged for long periods.

"Working in these sets was like being in a toy shop," says Petersen, who particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of the pre-wave ballroom set, "with all its glamour and everyone dressed for a fine evening, with the version next door, the same room upside down with everything smashed to pieces. Let's say it tapped into that little bit of anarchy and boyish fun we have inside, of making everything kaput."

Construction was a continuous, often 24-hour proposition, with sets being built and struck in succession as the nearly 100-day shoot progressed almost completely in sequence, with first and second units in sync - a process made possible largely because of Petersen's work ethic. "One of the great things about working with Wolfgang is his confidence in what's been shot," says Henderson. "When he says I've got it,' there's no need to revisit that set. When we finish, there's a second unit right behind us. Then we clear that set, build another, and go through the cycle again. It takes a lot of discipline." Adds Sandell with a touch of nostalgia, "They haven't built sets like this in Hollywood for years, since the 1930s or 40s. This is old-time filmmaking on a grand scale."

Cinematographer John Seale (The English Patient) helped facilitate this timetable with a system of multiple cameras, regularly employing four and adding more as various scenes warranted.

Shooting near or very often under water posed its own creative, logistical and safety challenges. Cameras were sealed in watertight soft housings and buttressed against the flow. Corrective ports (a domed glass piece fitted over the lens) helped adjust distortions in focal length caused by the way light refracts through water. Steadicam operators wrapped equipment in waterproof bags and carried on as usual, says Seale, "with water pouring on top of their cameras, they'd just walk straight through it. We got the shot every time. In fact, we only drowned one camera, which is pretty good for a movie with this much water and action."

Additionally, cameras attached to jib arms were tracked and operated by remote control, to avoid having operators and dollies alongside the actors in the confined spaces.

Reloading film was like a NASCAR pit stop with crews hauling hundred-pound housings out of the water, moving them to a dry area, doing their work, re-sealing and getting them back into position as fast as possible.

Seale opted for "reality lighting over cosmetic lighting," positioning light sources as though they were part of the ship. After Poseidon capsizes, most of this natural lighting emanates from the floor, lending an eerie luminescence he could supplement with lights hidden in the debris, mostly in the form of durable Hydroflex waterproof fluorescent tubes.

Enhancing the metaphor that the ship itself is dying, Seale used light to present the ship first as, "an opulent, ultra-modern floating hotel where everything is warm and welcoming. Then, after the wave hits, all hell breaks lose and the lighting is turned upside down. As our heroes make their way to the top, the ship is dying and lights are going out so we slowly bleed the color out of the scenes. As they move toward the bowels of the ship the atmosphere becomes industrial and cold."

Professional safety divers were always on alert. The potentially fatal mix of water with electricity was constantly monitored - and proved, fortunately, not to be a problem.

Turning it Upside Down

Creating and working in the inverted world of post-wave Poseidon presented unique challenges across all disciplines, from production design to stunts and effects, construction, cinematography, lighting, set decoration and props.

Sets were designed simultaneously in both right-side-up and upside-down versions to maintain continuity and to ensure that, as Sandell says, "nothing could exist in the normal version if it could not be subsequently executed upside down." What would realistically be nailed down on an ocean liner (heavy equipment, piano, refrigerators) and how long would that hold? Where are the basic supports and safety issues? What is climb-able? Everything was considered, right down to airborne poker chips and cutlery when rooms get tossed.

In some ways, the production team had to think like Poseidon survivors. As Henderson recalls the process, "You would imagine how things might work, then put yourself through the paces mentally or with the model only to discover that it couldn't work that way because the stairs are backwards now, that first step is much higher or that door won't open inward. So you think how are we going to deal with this,' and you search for an alternative."

What began with brainstorming, sketches and storyboards finally required physical models. "Although Wolfgang is one of the few directors I've worked with who can read a blueprint," says Sandell, "ultimately you need to see it in three dimensions."

Details were further refined when the final sets were tested with tilt angles and water.

To mechanically roll sets from one side to the other, they were built atop hydraulically operated two-axel platform gimbals that tilt at various degrees. Says Frazier, "We can move them fore and aft, side to side, or you can do a pitch and yaw' like a ship on the open sea."

With sets, water, furnishings and cast, weight is an issue. Frazier's team needed accurate totals upfront so as "not to have surprises later. One of our gimbals itself is 3,000 pounds of I-beam steel and 150 feet long. You don't want to hear at the last minute that the set is going to weigh 50,000 more pounds than you expected." The massive machinery required equally massive support, in one case a brand new concrete floor 20 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

The set representing the ship's bridge was so large it could not be rotated 180 degrees in one piece inside a soundstage without scraping the ceiling so it was built and filmed in two sections, each atop its own gimbal.

Frazier found the best way to hold large amounts of water over sets to be flooded on cue was to fill and stack seagoing cargo containers, each holding about 15,000 gallons.

Poseidon's action re-classified a large variety of objects from being set decoration (immobile, while the ship is upright) to becoming props when propelled into the air as the ship turns over. Potential projectiles from furniture to tableware and cell phones were genuine in close-ups and then switched for duplicate versions in rubber, balsa wood and breakaway glass.

A sentiment shared by many of the cast and crew was the general disorientation of working in an upside-down environment for extended periods. Sandell likened it to "stepping inside an Escher drawing, constantly having to get your bearings. It could be very unnerving."

Two Very Different Scenes Highlight Extremes of the Survivors' Experience:

The Ballroom Implosion and Traversing the AC Duct

One of Poseidon's powerful set pieces is the implosion of the grand ballroom.

Suspended upside-down below the waterline but still airtight after the wave's initial impact, the ballroom serves as a haven for those who remain behind with the captain when Dylan and his group start their climb. But eventually the water pressure proves too much and water bursts in through the windows, flooding the room in seconds.

It was not a scene that anyone wanted to shoot twice.

For Frazier, stacking cargo containers loaded with water wasn't going to be enough. With 15 feet of clearance behind the set, he says, "We used 10 eight-foot diameter culvert pipes, the kind you see in highway construction. We stood them up, built special chutes for them with trap doors that locked right into the windows. The windows were quarter-inch tempered glass, which enabled them to bow out a little bit with some of the water behind them. Then on command we dumped the whole thing, about 90,000 gallons. The weight of it broke the glass and kept on coming and it ended up being a great look on camera because it's the real thing."

To fully capture the action, 2nd Unit director of photography Mark Vargo followed John Seale's example and set up "five cameras on each axis, some wide, some tight, so that when you cut from one to the other it gives the illusion of both sides of the ship coming in." After experimenting with Seale on frame speeds for the two-second sequence, they went with 40-speed for the main cameras and set additional cameras at speeds from 60 to 90 and 120, ensuring a range of editing options.

Regardless of all the planning, there were no guarantees. "No one knew what that mass of water would look like, let alone do," declares Vargo. "I had cameras tied off. My key grip built a cage that could have sustained a car running into it. We had a tracking shot from above, two inside panning and one behind a glass window so that at full force it's actually submerged." Camera operators worked in wet suits and goggles, with stunt people ready to pull them to safety. "We even had an ambulance standing by. It was like a NASA launch."

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ship a different kind of drama plays out as the survivors face a near-vertical climb through a narrow air conditioning duct, their only passage to the next level.

"Within the structure of this larger disaster they have to crawl through this eight-minute sequence of almost pure claustrophobic tension," says Wolfgang Petersen. "It's hard to navigate or even move and they don't know what they will find at the other end."

It is here that Mia Maestro's character, Elena, reveals her extreme claustrophobia - a fear so intense it would force her to turn back if not for the tough-love persuasion of Nelson and Dylan who remain with her at the end of the single-file line. Together they talk her through it, inch by agonizing inch, while unbeknownst to them a new problem develops up ahead: the duct's exit is blocked by a grate. Their only chance for survival is for young Jimmy to fit his small fingers through the slots in the grate to turn the four screws, as water rises rapidly from below.

Says Kurt Russell, "The people at the top are controlling the destiny of the people at the bottom, who are not even fully aware what the problem is or how bad it is, and everything comes down to this 9-year-old boy being able to keep his wits about him and try to open a grate. Everyone stops moving. It's an excruciating scene."

Russell likens the experience to spending "a week and a half inside a box," and with the duct's actual dimensions of 36-by-36 inches, it's a fair assessment. "We were climbing up some sections at 45 degree angles, some straight up. It was very confining."

Getting lights and cameras into the tight space posed its own problems. Says Seale, "We ended up using anything we could get our hands on, one of which was a little right-angle snorkel lens from Panavision. It took up maybe three inches diameter of room so the actors could scrunch past us or come towards us. Most of the lighting was available." Ultimately, Seale relied upon the actors' own hand-held torches, "because with the shiny metal walls we found the torchlight bounced everywhere and did exactly what we wanted."

Water and Fire

"Not just water but fire was a major deterrent," says Frazier in regard to the survivors' upward progress. "It blocks them, turns them back, forces them to try a different route."

When the story called for a fuel tank to burst, raining down a flaming waterfall along the escape route, Frazier's team used a mixture of water and Coleman fuel set ablaze, "for a cascading effect. Then Boyd Shermis just changed the color of the water mixture a bit, gave it a proper tint so it looked like pure fuel," he explains.

For fire burning atop the water, seen straight-on, they snaked 3/4-inch electrical conduit through the water, force-filled it with liquid propane and ignited it.

The trickiest of all was to create oil-slicked water on fire from Josh Lucas' perspective as he swims underneath and looks for a safe place to emerge. Since conduit would show, Frazier's team came up something they called cookie sheets - flat pieces of metal cut into kidney shapes, treated with propane and suspended two inches above the surface. "When ignited, the fire spread underneath the cookie sheet but it couldn't escape. When you're under the water looking up it gives the illusion that there's a big oil slick burning on the water."

The effects expert also sought to "keep the set alive" with random sparks, patches of flame and smoke throughout the backgrounds, and worked closely with Seale in shooting steam over dry ice to create a density of smoke over the ruined disco.

Costumes and Makeup for Principals, Stunt Performers and 400 Extras.

Times Six Or Twelve, or Maybe More

Respected costume designer and frequent Petersen collaborator Erica Edell Phillips (The Perfect Storm, Outbreak, Air Force One and In the Line of Fire), is most proud of "the level of detail on Poseidon and its millions of moving parts."

Leading a 45-member crew (her largest ever) with costume supervisor Bob Morgan (The Chronicles of Riddick), Phillips created wardrobe for the ship's staff and crew, plus hundreds of New Year's Eve party guests in formal attire, all coordinating with Petersen's theme of timeless elegance in the ship's design and dicor. As shooting the action progressed, the clothing for each background actor had to be replaced with realistically aged duplicates. For the principals, that number increased exponentially.

"The survivors go through hellfire to get out of the ship," Phillips explains. "They're climbing and swimming, getting torn up and dirty along the way. We needed dozens of everything to accommodate two units shooting simultaneously. That meant that all of the clothing needed to be exactly duplicated at various levels of distress. A cache of pristine costumes was always on hand in case we needed to shoot anything that was earlier in the continuity."

When the ballroom turns over everything goes flying, not just passengers but anything not nailed down - furniture, tableware and food. That meant the post-wave clothing would bear not only rips and bloodstains but marks from things like coffee, red wine and chocolate.

"We weren't sure how food stains would look on fabric," recalls Morgan. "So we took pots of coffee, gallons of wine and cherry sauce, everything from the ship's dinner menu, went down to the parking lot and threw it all at the clothes to see what would happen if you took a ballroom full of people having dinner and rolled it over. That was a fun day." Once captured, many of the stains were recreated in acrylic paint to prevent fading underwater and to keep them looking wet.

Phillips' team photographed, tagged and catalogued the multiple garments in various stages of deterioration daily. A studio parking lot was converted into a wardrobe holding area with two 60-by-40-foot tents. With round-the-clock filming, it was a constant stream of items being checked in and out, cleaned, touched up or replaced.

Supervising makeup, two-time Oscar nominee Edouard Henriques (The Cell, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World), faced similar creative and continuity challenges.

After making hundreds of extras and stunt performers look like they had just been pummeled, burnt, drowned or electrocuted, Henriques' team scrupulously kept track of every cut, bruise and smudge picked up by the principals along the way. When they pass through high water, what washes off? What fades, what dries, what spreads or changes color? Dirt might be partially cleansed during a quick plunge underwater and wounds that have partially scabbed over might begin to ooze again, all of which fell into Henriques' purview.

Bodies, Bodies Everywhere - But Not All of Them are Real

In addition to the cast, stunt performers and hundreds of extras on board, the production engaged VFX scanning company Itronics to create approximately 150 visual clones to step in for flesh-and-blood actors at crucial moments where even the most rigorous safety precautions might fail, like the ballroom implosion.

Poseidon's passengers also included 65 state-of-the-art dummies crafted by industry mainstay KNB Efx Group, fresh from their work on The Chronicles of Narnia. Made up and costumed, their close-up-quality fiberglass bodies could be weighted for underwater scenes or fitted with floats to bob near the surface. Others, loosely jointed, could be tossed around the tilting sets like flotsam or charred by flash fires. Internal wire armature allowed their limbs to bend into credible simulations of broken bones while extra pairs of artificial arms and legs alone were used to supplement images of people trapped under wreckage or fallen atop one another.

Throughout, Petersen sought restraint, using images of the dead and injured to help set the tone for his story rather than to shock.

So realistic as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, the KNB players drew a fair amount of respect from the actors. "It was funny how we would walk around the dummies," recalls Kurt Russell with a laugh. "We wouldn't step on their legs or arms, just as if they were real people - and in some cases it was so hard to tell it was better to be on the safe side." Adds Mike Vogel, "One day I saw what I assumed was a dummy lying on the set and a few minutes later I noticed it was breathing. I literally bolted from the spot."