Making of Volcano -1997

wilshire boulevard and fairfax avenue in los angeles with a constant bustle of museums shopping business and traffic it's safe to say that it's one of the busiest spots in all of america and thanks to mother nature and some really fabulous filmmakers getting together it's soon gonna be one of the hottest spots now no one has ever seen a lava spewing fire throwing force ripped through one of america's largest urban centers but you're about to if you stick with me and h as i take you behind the scenes of volcano [Music] what force could make los angeles a place teeming with life and activity come to a complete and utter standstill how about a volcano all right i know what you're thinking in southern california that's the last thing we need but that's exactly what we got and it all began with something you're all very familiar with a little earthquake it's a natural disaster it's a big shark it's a dragon it's a big bad volcano it's so uncontrollable you know we don't create it and i think we're fascinated by the things we don't create we want to control a power greater than ourselves there's so many branches of disaster and trouble that it you know that can come from it it's the perfect natural disaster for a movie it's coming after you you know it's unstoppable it's that hot burning molten lava you better get out of its way [Music] the genesis of the movie was uh writer jerome armstrong came to me and we were throwing out ideas and he he threw out an idea to me about doing a movie about a volcano and we came up with the extra added spin of taking a volcano and putting it in a city we thought why not set it in our hometown los angeles and it just seemed like it was the perfect place mitch i don't describe this but the tarpons themselves are on fire and they're right now spilling out onto wilshire boulevard as lava starts to spread throughout the city and to complicate matters gets into the subway tunnels and starts spreading laterally under the surface of the city and it's going to come up somewhere i don't think we've ever seen a movie like this that takes place in a huge urban environment and la i think is a place that everybody loves to hate and it's a great opportunity to see los angeles get trashed [Music] what are you looking at fire heavy underground and structural and there's an immense column of smoke coming up out of the tar pits and something like media you're staying up all the smoke sounds like you said something like a meteor my character works for the office of emergency management rourke's from um somewhere in missouri where he's been used to uh trying to manage the mississippi river there's no experience of volcanoes you want me to call older and tell him the demonstrable risk he's looking for is lava no i want you to give me time to do my work all right cause the lake went up a few degrees no because seven men baked a death down there nobody knows why i play dr amy barnes seismologist slash volcanologist the tunnel's insulating it it's like a lava tube you gotta go through the tunnels seller had to block when it hit the block it's going to punch through you mean it wrapped yes they do their jobs very well one of them is a scientist that's my character so she has a more of a scientific background and actually has done research on this whereas rorkmind works to make the city work under disaster so as the two of them come together with their absolutely equal passions they gel together one having the information that the other one needs to solve the problem i need a demolitions team lapd national guard put as many people in front of it as it takes we're gonna take this thing to the ocean when they think it's just an earthquake you know like californians do oh well you know i've seen worse so you know everything's fine but then when it gets really bad uh people begin to pay the price on a thematic level the movie is really about a city that's sort of divided on a lot of levels in terms of race in terms of class people in the city sort of have to put all that aside in order to battle a much greater common enemy get out my face hey if i'm in your face you're gonna know it all right bro once upon a time there was a city whose inhabitants bickered among themselves and the noise of their quarreling woke the dragon that laid beneath the streets and it came out of its cave with fire and brimstone and and threatened them and they all manned the walls together shoulder to shoulder and they fought it off this is a film about people fighting an enemy i think that's the most important thing i think that's what makes this movie engaging and interesting it's the people that get involved in how they work together to fight the enemy and it just happens that we have a giant hot enemy so how do you coordinate all this hundreds of actors working at time in the elements building a set that's five city blocks long and then setting it on fire every night it takes vision and that was the job of the volcano filmmakers action i first got the script i looked and i thought this is great this is a wonderful ride i can see this vividly in my head the only problem is getting what's in my head actually onto a piece of film you know the logistical problem's just enormous in dealing with that amount of fire that number of extras that amount of destruction buildings uh ablaze whatever what mick is trying to go after is several layers of natural phenomenon that's happening that really impact the people around it this was just a movie that was of such a huge magnitude i don't think there have been many movies that have ever been made that took this kind of logistic coordination whether it's the amount of extras whether it's amount of special effects the fire the wind the ash everything is bigger than life everything is enormous i would say 60 of this movie is created and so it was how do we make a geyser how do we make a big ash cloud how do we build a mountain how do we make lava those were the hardest problems that we had to figure out technically this is a huge movie they say you know movies like a ship well this is not an ordinary ship this is an aircraft carrier five city blocks a full quarter mile of buildings wiring and concrete that's the wilshire fairfax corridor and it was all recreated right here on an empty parking lot if you can believe it so why don't we just take a look what it took to build the biggest set in filmmaking [Music] history [Music] we are responsible for recreating a set that represents a section of wilshire boulevard from kurzen avenue down to fairfax the major buildings are the crafted folk art museum the los angeles county museum of art peterson auto museum the may company johnny's which is a famous googie style coffee shop and we also have the la brea tar pits you're not just designing architecture you're in designing an environment where things happen you're designing a kinetic sculpture that in this case destroys itself before your eyes i don't think we could have made the movie if we had to shoot on the real worship over literally every building on the street burns because as the lava goes you know down the street there's the radiant heat that catches the buildings on fire we needed to find a giant open space preferably paved that we could build this huge set that's 1700 feet long there were very few open spaces that weren't being used for something else that we could actually build a set on so ultimately we decided to go up a helicopter we actually found this from helicopter scout we came here we laid it out and we matched wilshire boulevard it incorporates around 17 and a half acres it's a quarter mile long it's the largest set uh in the world at this point it's around 90 realistic to what really does exist all the major landmarks are all exact replicas of what actually exists on a wilshire boulevard there are hundreds literally hundreds of trees there are thousands of bushes there are acres of the concrete all the sidewalks and curbs were poured all the streets all the lampposts all the lights we put in everything takes an awful lot of preparation by the production staff the director the special effects supervisors the visual effects people because what we build is very expensive and so we shoot for building exactly what we need that's why in a set like this you'll walk around behind it and you'll see that the the inside of the building in the back of the buildings are not there to our best knowledge we build only what is necessary for us to see we are putting this together so fast with so much complexity and so so many needs from so many different departments that actually all we can accomplish is what we absolutely need and no more if you wanted to find a ready-made deep fissure down into the earth's crust then the labreya tarpitz which everybody who lives in los angeles at least is familiar with is there as a ready-made way for the lava to come up into the city oh my god we had to simulate the labret our bits the tar actually is supposed to start bubbling from the heat so we dug a hole in the parking lot we painted the tar pit black it was asphalt and painted black we've only got water in there we can't use real tar and what have you because we have to dispose of it we've got an air compressor behind there we built special canisters and bubbling devices so that we could bubble the tar pit itself we scheduled to complete this work in 16 weeks we actually completed it in 12. we're shooting on it in 12 weeks from ground breaking which is a magnificent accomplishment by the prop makers and crafts people the painters and so forth who put this together it's enormous it's huge and it's a photographically uh a dead ringer for uh this particular section of welsh boulevard we've been shooting there for three weeks and i still i'm amazed that wiltshire boulevard is right in front of me and that it's blowing up all over the place and it's just all so grand it's an odd sensation uh standing on that set and then going back to the real wilshire boulevard after having shot this movie and with in my head everything that we did to our uh pretend worship boulevard trying to transpose that in your head to the real place is is kind of weird a little scary even though it's only a movie every night for six weeks straight these guys had to figure out a way to safely set the volcano set ablaze right it's a good thing they knew what they were doing where do you park my car we have fires all the way down the street and one bomb going off [Music] [Music] we have our three geysers going up we have the fire truck on fire and all of our stunt action in the street in the nature of a volcano is a big mess recreating this volcano requires a lot of pyrotechnics a lot of bombs all these buildings have been built to burn over and over again we have a lot of paper ash on the ground we are producing uh an awful lot of spectacular effects [Music] we're overseeing all of the physical effects on this set as well as others all the fire ash smoke this normal stuff in la you encounter every day what do you have a ground level do you have you rigged the fence we have no but we can okay because like the fence has come up in the story on the ground yeah the fire should be coming out from the ground that's where the larvae hit the building so it's important we had the largest uh permit to burn larger than any other permit that has been uh sought after in los angeles larger than backdraft larger than everything the concept of hot set took on a new meeting there you actually could feel the thermal blast that picked up the helicopter as we flew uh flew along the street we're going through some 20 000 gallons of propane hundreds of pounds of black powder uh just uh all kinds of explosive devices on the street it's literally a 1700 foot long burn with palm trees that ignite like birthday candles the propane flames were so hot that we had to go back and actually retrofit the buildings with more layers of fireproofing materials we've gone through over a hundred thousand feet of piping just to get from where the manifolds are which is the device that we use to separate the propane into each window to the windows then we had to come up with an ignition system for lighting each of these windows and then we had to build each of these windows so that we could burn them over and over and over we had pipes buried under the set that were built into the set when the set was constructed going to all the buildings so that at will we could dial up flames on on each of the buildings and set the heights [Music] there's a lot of possibilities of things going wrong hopefully between myself and this incredible crew i've got working for me we've worked all these possibilities out and we've taken the preventative measures so nothing will happen we'll get with props we'll get our buckets built and all stuff i'll give a special effect to make sure we get a water source this thing's totally lit up it's going to be so hot and that's why we've gone through all the safety precautions of having like 30 and 40 nomax suits and hoods and goggles for all the crew guys the camera department so that they can do their job and have to worry about getting hot or singed or anything [Music] [Music] wow it's incredible isn't it molten lava in the middle of los angeles all right so how did they do it well it was a combination of computer graphics some miniaturized sets and some plain old-fashioned ingenuity you know you can stick around and watch this but i'm gonna split [Music] it's gonna blow up [Music] and whenever an event like this occurs you just have so many forces of nature released at once your lava is around 2300 degrees the steam vents that come out of it create a lot of the ash as well as the smoke that just drifts everywhere so we're trying to create the almost that claustrophobic feel that it's everywhere what you can't do when you're doing a movie is send out for a truckload of lava have it delivered to the set and then film it you've actually got to create that from nothing the real stuff is just too impossible to handle the overall plan for volcano started out with a research phase where we were working on elements that we knew we needed to produce such as flame doing flame research computer graphics research particle systems that can generate flame and smoke at the same time the miniature unit was experimenting with different types of materials to create a convincing looking lava this is basically what we call the lava kitchen and this is where we brew our lava it starts out as methicill crystals we mix it with water and we come up with a specific viscosity it's goop it's the same kind of stuff that you might find in a milkshake at a burger joint it's it's edible it's uh it's just like a really good thickener and we put all kinds of dyes and pigments and hit it with special light so that it glows and it looks like a hot substance someone came up with ultraviolet lighting and fluorescent tints in the lava which give it a just a beautiful glow methi still being a water-based substance is sort of like a mirror reflects everything around it but using ultraviolet which is a an invisible light source it doesn't reflect its its source so it just looks like a smooth iridescent substance the advantage to it is that it's a fluid and it really flows so if there's a tree or a car in the way we put something in there it flows around and you get these eddy currents you get a crust it kind of behaves in a really complex interesting way that takes a lot more trouble to synthesize inside a computer if you synthesize something inside a computer you have to take responsibility for every little particle in it programming the way it moves if you just get a bunch of goop that flows like lava then it does that for you automatically this is more than just sitting there this is flowing and moving and interacting with the environment so one of the biggest challenges is that it has to look when you put it in the scene like it's really there and the things and people around it are being affected by it once we've established the data from the uh the plate that the lab is to be composited into we we scale everything down to a one-eighth version of of what it was and we build shapes out of a clear plastic uh to put in place where there are actually objects in the frame the lava interacts with these shapes as it's traveling down the surface and it actually gives a very realistic look as it's deflected and and bent around these shapes we have six tables each of them is a gimbal and depending on how we tilt the gimbals we can have the lava go in a certain direction they put it on a fiberglass board tilt the board and the lava so that the lava rolls right down towards the camera then we take it inside the computer and manipulate it so that it becomes even more hotter looking and scarier specifically for volcano there's quite a few different areas separated mainly in the two areas one is the addition of elements that we create synthetically on the computer stuff coming out of the volcanoes flying out with these particle systems that's a technical word for a way of animating the splashy lava metal material we also create lava flow itself for a couple down uh angle shots from the helicopter in the end that lava's being tracked into some live-action fights that was shot from the helicopter and that lava flow is completely synthetic we'd actually build a wireframe of the lava inside our computers track it to the camera move and shade it and color it give it a little bit of glow and then put some heat distortion and fire on it to make it look like actual lava on the other side we're using the computer in in a fundamental fashion which is the merging of imagery we call that compositing it's how you make everything look real and seamless in its most basic form compositing is taking two layers and integrating them into one finished layer a pretty typical shot in volcano for us has been using 20 layers or 30 layers to generate a finished shot it appears to be absolutely unstoppable and it doesn't move particularly fast but it gets where it's going and everything in its path just gets pulverized it's just so damned hot it's 2 000 degrees centigrade it's relentless thing just keeps on coming it has all those characteristics of the the best movie villain you can't kill it you can fire bullets at it but uh it won't stop it just keeps coming at you it's a thrill it's a ride you know it's uh it's intense and uh the monster's coming and our heroes have to get away from the monster and somehow learn to defeat it some help yeah i can see that [Music] please stay calm so there you have it an explosive behind-the-scenes look at the making of volcano i can promise you one thing it's gonna be hot man i'm sick of this i'm going home [Music] you

Channel: That's Entertainment

Views: 67,668

Keywords: tommy lee jones, men in black, the fugitive, space cowboys, no country for old men, US Marshalls, the homesman, lincoln, JFK, Ad Astra, under siege, the hunted, the missing, the client, jason bourne, love story, hope springs, blown away, natural born killers, volcanco, criminal, rolling thunder, the company men, just getting started, heaven and earth, anne heche, six days seven nights, wag the dog, cedar rapids, spread, birth, rampart, donnie brasco, gracie's choice

Id: v1OAU-Ekkho

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020