In the January/February 2016 issue of Computer Graphics World, we look at the demanding work by environmental and visual effects artists whose work on In the Heart of the Sea and The Walk had to transport audiences to a different era, a specific time and place in history, so the story line of the film could unfold in exhausting detail.
In the last quarter of 2015, three other films required similar attention to detail. Bridge of Spies required an accurate re-creation of a real-life period locale during the Cold War . The frigid landscape of Mount Everest during the ill-fated March 1996 trek had to be replicated. The Martian, meanwhile, provided a barren backdrop of desolation based on scientific data mixed with artistry.
The Martian
Imagine finding yourself accidentally left behind on a desolate planet Mars. That is the predicament Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) finds himself in when the crew is ordered to leave the Red Planet as a storm wreaks havoc during their expedition. Believing their colleague dead after being hit with debris, they follow those instructions. But Watney is alive and must struggle to survive.
A number of studios - among them, MPC (450 shots) and Framestore (380 shots) - contributed to the film's 1,000-plus visual effects, which spanned Mars, Earth, and space. In particular, MPC handled the Mars surface work, and Framestore the space environments. The Senate VFX worked on earthbound shots (NASA, window views, and so forth).
The script has a lot of resemblance to the book [by author Andy Weir] - obviously a great deal of the story takes place on the surface of Mars, says MPC's Richard Stammers, VFX supervisor on The Martian. So we knew that whatever happened, we'd be creating Martian landscapes, and the Ridley [Scott] take on it is that there must always be something beautiful about it. It's not only a terrifying planet, but subtlety beautiful, too.
Mars on Earth
According to Stammers, finding a location on Earth to stand in for Mars was not easy. After exhaustive scouting, they settled on Jordan, which has some stunning landscapes. Most of the Mars sequences, though, took place in a studio in Budapest.
We had a huge, 360-degree greenscreen, one of the largest greenscreen stages in the world, actually, where we re-created a section of the surface of Mars and the HAB where Mark Watney has to survive for a long period of time, says Stammers. We could shoot in any direction. It was important that we got the look of that right and matched it with our preferred location in Jordan.
As Stammers explains, the crew replicated the terrain in Jordan on a limited scale, with the goal of shooting most of the movie on stage and then later doing wide shots in Jordan. We had to make sure our studio shoots matched identically with our location shoots that we were going to do later, he adds.
While Jordan was an ideal location, it still needed digital tweaks to substitute for the Red Planet. Jordan is a beautiful setting and had really nice colors for Mars, ranges of reds and yellows for sand, and beautiful mountains. Unfortunately, everything is covered in tuffs of grass. There are these bushes that, no matter where you go in the entire landscape, you can't find five square meters of desert that doesn't have some tumbleweed grass growing somewhere, says Stammers. So, [erasing] that was one of our biggest tasks.
While the crew was able to shoot beautiful landscapes, the artists had to replace a good deal of the ground with a cleaned-up version. In addition, they added rocks, craters, and similar features to make it look more Martian in terms of what audiences would expect to see. To this end, the artists consulted reference photos from NASA missions to Mars.
Stargazing
While Framestore's work included the build of the Hermes spaceship and the climactic end sequence, the studio also was responsible for the overall look of Mars throughout the film. With a key opening shot and various space establishers, it was important to strike the balance between accuracy and cinematic beauty.
Framestore knew it would use the same technology as for the Earth in Gravity, consisting of a volumetric render of extremely high-resolution texture information combined with dust and atmospheric clouds. The challenge lay in finding adequate reference material for Mars.
There's not much color photography out there, says Framestore's Chris Lawrence, VFX supervisor. We used a combination of photography and satellite data, in a fairly novel way, to get everything we needed.
Unlike the Earth, with its surface of blues, greens, and browns, Mars is a dusty, reddish planet, says Lawrence. Our first attempts were very realistic but lacked the interesting variation of color and contrast found on Earth. The movie demanded something more vivid, so we spent some time on a creative journey to show the variation in features, surfaces, and textures - all of which also had to fit with the live-action footage shot in Jordan, plus the scenes at launch stage in the lower atmosphere.
The colors were in constant debate, as were the volume and style of clouds used within the atmosphere. Says CG Supervisor Neil Weatherley, We added light clouds to the surface, to echo the dust clouds; above that, we worked to create something that would add the depth we wanted, without importing the fluffy white variety we're accustomed to on Earth.
According to Stammers, the team took a little artistic license from Ridley's direction to create some of these clouds. We made them sort of brown and red, as if there are streams of dust caught in high-altitude winds blowing across the surface of Mars, which is not completely out of the ordinary, he says. But I think the way we treated it was probably a little more romantic than [real].
Scott's dire
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In the January/February 2016 issue of Computer Graphics World, we look at the demanding work by environmental and visual effects artists whose work on In the Heart of the Sea and The Walk had to transport audiences to a different era, a specific time and place in history, so the story line of the film could unfold in exhausting detail. 
