Darren Aronofsky on Record-Breaking Visual Effects in NOAH
One of the reasons we have yet to see anything from Darren Aronofsky's Noah film is because of the insane amount of special effects that are being created to make the movie. In a recent profile on the director with DGA Quarterly he reveals that there were no real animals used in the movie at all. Every animal in it will be CG animated!
“We had to create an entire animal kingdom. All the animals in the movie are slightly tweaked; I didn’t want the clichéd polar bear, elephant, and lion walking onto the Ark; I didn’t want the shot of a giraffe’s head looking over the rail. I wanted to respect the storyline and think what would have been involved if it all really happened.”
Slightly tweaked versions of classic animals!? That sounds like it could be fun and interesting. The director is working with Industrial Light & Magic on the effects and explains the animals saying that they went "through the animal kingdom and pinpointed the body types we wanted: some pachyderms, some rodents, reptiles, and the bird kingdom. We chose the species and they were brought to life with different furs and colors. We didn’t want anything fully recognizable but not completely absurd either.”
He went on to say that with a mix of “fantastical creature [and] fantastical events, there’s a huge deluge. What you’re photographing is often not the thing that will appear on screen—that’s the underpinning. There will be a huge amount of visual architecture placed on top of that, and that sort of makes it a different job. Sometimes only the actor’s face will be in the final image.”
The director then reveals that the effects-heavy production has actually led to a record-setting job by ILM, saying “they had just done the most complicated rendering in the company’s history involving the animals on the Ark.”
That's pretty freakin' cool. ILM has done the effects for a ton of incredible movies over the years, and this is one of the biggest projects that they've undertaken. He then explains,
“I don’t think it’s the most incredible shot, but I think because of all the hair on the animals it was incredibly complicated for them. They said, ‘We can only render it two or three more times so make sure those are exactly right because they take so long and are so complex.’”
The first trailer for the movie should be released in the near future, so stay tuned for that. I can't wait to see what this latest Aronofsky masterpiece looks like!
The movie stars Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Kevin Durand, Emma Watson, Anthony Hopkins, and Ray Winstone, and opens on March 28th, 2014!