Find Out How FX Experts Created Mars in "The Martian"
Released on 10/14/2015
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.
Starring: Mike Seymour
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