Work has commenced on the first shot of the ‘hanger shootout’ scene. Okay, that’s not strictly true, work commenced on it many years ago as it’s a scene that’s been in the movie right from the start and the bluescreen plates were shot very early on during principal photography. In fact several shots from this scene have been worked on in the past but that was only so we could add them to the trailers that have been produced over the years.
The idea behind the scene is that when our three main characters find themselves on board an alien Lander/Tug vessel, one of them becomes displaced from the other two, who then try and find him. During the search, they come across a large hanger where they are attacked by a group of aliens; hence ‘Hanger ShootOut’ scene. During the producton of the movie we have shot in several aircraft hangers around the world, but none unfortunately were suitable for that of a hanger on board a UFO, so we bit the bullet and decided to shoot the whole thing against blue screen, in a garage, with the CG set to be added later.
This first shot is actually a reverse angle of the hanger and shows the two characters as they step through a blast door and take position at a control station about two stories up from the hanger floor. As the doors open we reveal an empty corridor which you can see here. It was modelled, textured, lit and rendered in 3D Studio Max, it still needs some detailing adding to it and some extra elements will be added in photoshop as a matte painting.
The whole sequence could well be 100+ shots in total, mostly because it’s an action scene and has a lot of fast cutting. The rest of the hanger has been modeled but is still to be textured and there is a lot of FX related CGI like rigid body dynamics, particle effects and fluid simulations using FumeFX to be considered in the scene. With all this going on it will be necessary to keep both eyes on the ball to make sure that the drama of the scene isn’t lost so an explosion can look pretty.
