In the World of 'Tomorrow,' Creating New Recipes for Disaster

Always full of mischief and mayhem, Roland Emmerich dreamed up the weather-gone-amok disaster epic "The Day After Tomorrow" after scarfing up the best-selling fantasy thriller "The Coming Global Superstorm."

When the 48-year-old German director gave the script to his favorite visual effects supervisor, Karen Goulekas ("Spider-Man"), she nearly fainted. "I usually try to read a script through for story," she recalls, "but I was so shocked, I thought, 'Man, he has gone mad.' The freight ship coming down Fifth Avenue sent me over the edge."

Even at a time when visual effects are a routine component of your average summer tent-pole movie, all Goulekas could think about was how difficult it was going to be to pull off "The Day After Tomorrow," which opened Friday.

"Miniatures or C-G?" she asked herself. "Oh, my God, it can't be done."

Clearly, computer graphics were the way to go. Goulekas immediately understood that this movie wasn't about blowing up bitty miniature sets, such as Emmerich's old-style effects adventure "Independence Day" from 1996. For this movie, the director not only wanted multiple twisters mowing down the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, he wanted a tsunami surging over the Statue of Liberty to flood downtown Manhattan, culminating in an enormous wave heading straight for the steps of the 42nd Street library, tossing aside the buses and taxis in its path like beach balls.

"When I first started writing the script, I never thought about the visual effects," admits Emmerich. "I described what I thought looked cool. If you think too much about what's doable, you'll have scissors in your head."

Emmerich wanted something more than computer graphics: He wanted photo realism. Buildings, water, fur and human skin are the toughest things to replicate in the computer. This movie had all of them, in spades, 416 effects shots in total. " 'Spider-Man' has buildings," Goulekas says. "But it's a comic book. The moviegoer sees a red and blue man flying around on a web. It's not going to matter if it doesn't look real."

But the audience had to believe that the buildings and water in "The Day After Tomorrow" are real. This takes time. And money: The storm surge sequence alone cost $200,000. Having rushed "Godzilla" to meet its 1998 release date, Emmerich insisted on more than a year of post-production to make sure the effects were done right. The filmmakers created pre-visualizations, or animated storyboards, for every effects sequence.

To handle these monumental effects, Goulekas first turned to her old FX shop, Digital Domain ("Titanic"). But although the Santa Monica effects house designed many stunning "Day After Tomorrow" sequences, including the destructive twisters, it was painfully slow. In October, six months before the movie's delivery date, Goulekas and Emmerich pulled the project from Digital Domain, terrified that the work wouldn't be finished in time. They parceled out the remaining effects to more than 500 people working at 12 different effects houses.

In fact, the crew built only one miniature set for the New York sequence -- for an underwater shot of the freighter hull nuzzling a sunken bus.

"On this one there was no way we could use miniatures," Emmerich says. "Water on miniatures is not doable; it doesn't look the same." To flood and then freeze Manhattan, Goulekas's effects team used the laser technology Lidar to scan 13 square city blocks, including 130 buildings in high detail. Starting at the end of 2002, they created an accurate high-resolution 3-D model of Manhattan in their computers, using 50,000 detailed photographs.

"It took thousands of man hours," says visual effects producer Mike Chambers.

They sent the final model to the effects houses, which then added digital water, snow and ice. Emmerich was willing to topple a frozen Empire State Building, but his post-9/11 sensitivity spared New York one dignity: "If so much water hit the Statue of Liberty, it would tumble over," he says. "In our movie it kept standing."

The effects wizards combined the digital wave plowing straight toward the film's young hero (Jake Gyllenhaal) on the library steps with live-action footage shot a year before on a stage set in Montreal. Gyllenhaal celebrated his 22nd birthday in a huge tank, sloshing hip-deep in 250,000 gallons of heated water along with 700 extras and 50 stuntmen who "didn't have a lot of opportunity to go to the bathroom," he says.