Noah: Controlling an Epic Rain-Making System with a Single App
Released on 03/28/2014
(dramatic orchestral music)
It begins.
Hi, I'm Mike Seymore, an Effects Guide for Wired.
This week we will look at cataclysmic annihilation via ipads.
As you might expect from the title in the new biblical epic
Noah, filmmakers needed quite a lot of rain and water.
In fact, as it turns out, in terms of manhandling
water and rain over a crowd of people,
it's one of the largest of it's type ever done.
As Oscar-winning special effects Bird Dalton told us
the old adage for filming special effects
is front light snow, and back light rain.
This is because unless rain is back lit,
it's very hard to read on camera.
The team had to produce rain effects
to cover an outdoor set about the size of two football
fields and they quickly realized they needed to do this
by shooting night for day.
Since if they were to shoot during the day,
they would have the sun constantly moving
and they'd never consistently be able to back light
the rain, but lighting up a couple of football fields
with a torrential deluge isn't that simple.
Their solution was to build a huge light and rain rig
on three 300 ton cranes.
Hanging from each of the cranes was a vast set
of rain bars, each of which were about 100 feet
by 40 feet wide, and on top of those were placed
massive balloon space lights.
You know those really big nozzles that firemen
have on the end of their firehoses?
Well, they had about 100 of them up in the air.
The system rained down about 5,000 gallons a minute
from these huge arrays using two different types
of rain sprinklers.
One called a goose drowner which is the big one
that produces big droplets
and much smaller mist sprinklers
that were set up in between.
There were 3,050 of 12 inch pipe that was run
from 100,000 gallon tanks through giant manifolds
backed up by two huge 12 inch pumps
that managed to provide 150 per side over the hundreds
of feet of pipe hanging up in the air over the heads
of about 500 screaming extras.
And all of this was controlled by the ipads.
The ipads allowed the team
to always correctly light the rain.
Each individual rain head has it's own solenoid
so if the team wants to white out the background,
they can turn on and run just the mist heads at the back.
If they want pouring rain, they can run those really big
goose drowners and of course it's easy to turn everything on
but it's just as easy to isolate one area and keep it dry
or from the power of this custom ipads app.
Each night the team raised the rig up,
they used about 100,000 to 200,000 gallons of water,
which is well over a million gallons, or the equivalent
of about two Olympic-sized swimming pools
dumped on the side over the 15 nights of shooting.
In the end, the whole scene had a massive water simulation
digitally added by ILN to complete the sequence.
Well, don't forget to subscribe
for more behind the scenes action.
I'm Mike Seymore for Wired.
(pulsing orchestral music)
Starring: Mike Seymour
Walking With Dinosaurs: Muscle Simulation and Feathered Effects Exclusive
RoboCop: Breaking Down the Special Effects of the RoboCop Suit
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Creating a Waterlogged Action Sequence
Noah: Controlling an Epic Rain-Making System with a Single App
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Staging the Helicarrier Crash
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Transforming Jamie Foxx into the Villainous Electro
Godzilla: Creating the Animalistic and Masculine Kaiju Monster
Maleficent: Re-creating Fully Digital Characters
X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Sentinels’ Complicated Follicle Animation
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Transforming Human Motion-Capture Performances Into Realistic-Looking Apes
Game of Thrones: Combining CGI and Live Action to Create the Dragons & Fights Scenes in Season 4
Hercules: Creating Mythical Creatures with Advanced Special Effects
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Facial Animation FX
The Maze Runner Exclusive: Building the Mechanical Grievers & Complex Maze Set
Once Upon A Time: Inside the Fairytale Sets and Character Animations