At around 4:30 pm our satellites detected a storm

approaching the Ares 3 mission site on Mars.

The storm had escalated to severe

and we had no choice but to abort the mission

but during the evacuation

astronaut Mark Watney was killed.

(crowd calling out)

Hi I'm Mike Seymour from fxguide.com for Wired.

In a brilliant return to form,

Ridley Scott shows us in The Martian

what it would be like to actually survive alone on Mars.

MPC and Framestore provided most of the visual effects

for the film

with Framestore handling most of the Hermes ship

and the weightlessness sequences,

while MPC showed us what was happening down on Mars

with the Martian landscape.

Now much like being stranded on Mars,

to make this film,

while the results are seamless and magnificent,

even the smallest task proved difficult.

For a start, it was meant to be a 13 month project

but as the release date got moved up,

in fact, they lost four weeks

and they ended up with only 24 weeks

for post-production.

Compare that to Ridley Scott's Prometheus

that had 34 weeks in post.

The film was shot natively in stereo

with red camera rigs

and they shot off speed to kind of help simulate

some of the difference of gravity down on the surface.

And this proved to be much harder than it sounds

as the desired frame rate

wouldn't allow the red cameras to run in sync.

So they had to shoot at 48 frames a second

when they shot Matt Damon in the Jordan

or on the soundstage

and then speed it up in post.

Now speed ups don't sound hard

but in stereo even the smallest optical flow problem

becomes a disaster for stereo.

Of course, with the air being 96 percent carbon dioxide,

all the astronauts wear space suits

and are meant to have glass visors

but of course glass visors would reflect the crew

and the lights and the soundstage

so all the helmet visors you see in the film

are actually added in digitally

which meant that for some shots

not only did they have to put the visors in

but do an entire CG build of the live action

just for the correct reflections.

Oh and shooting in Jordan provided a great real environment

but again a little more complicated than it need be

because unlike Mars,

Matt Damon was working under a rich blue sky,

sometimes with puffy clouds

which meant every sky needed to either be replaced

or somehow adjusted.

Luckily the MPC team invented a nuke compositing gizmo

called Earth to Mars

which is a sort of a cross I guess

between a color corrector

and an advanced hue-shifting keyer.

Which meant the MPC team did not have to roto

every single shot.

Oh and while they had one of the largest

green screens in history

in one of the world's largest sound stages,

when they were shooting the epic storm sequence

at the beginning of the film

they had to actually turn the green screen off.

Finally the footage from onset was beautiful

from those twin red epic dragon cameras

shot in 5K natively stereo.

Unfortunately, Ridley and the editors

decided to cut in a lot of go pro footage

from the astronaut's go pro cameras,

the ones you see on their shoulders

and so again, in a long line of technical aspects

that I guess should have been easier,

the footage had to be up-converted

from mono H264 from the tiny go pros

to match in with the native, large opening XR stereo plates

that the main unit shot.

Well thankfully the team at MPC

know how to science the shit out of the effects.

For more behind the scenes action please subscribe.

I'm Mike Seymour for Wired.

[Narrator] It's space, it doesn't cooperate.

I guarantee you that at some point

everything's gonna go south on you

and you're gonna say this is it.

This is how I end.