How Ad Astra Created the Moon

Alpha, we have what looks like unidentified rovers

approaching our position.

Possible pirate activity.

[explosion] [low frequency chatter]

My name's Jed Smith, I am a visual effects supervisor

at Method Studios Montreal.

[explosions] [haunting violin]

We had Ad Astra directed by James Gray,

Roy McBride played by Brad Pitt.

He is sent on a mission to discover the source

of this power surge on Neptune.

Now, we're talking about a potentially

unstoppable chain reaction here.

The uncontrolled release of anti-matter could ultimately

threaten the stability of our entire solar system.

A main sequence that we worked on in the film

was the lunar rover battle.

In this future, the moon is kind of this lawless

no man's land and to get to the spaceship,

they have to travel by rover

from Moon Base 1 to Moon Base 2.

Initially, the sequence is kind of this peaceful moment,

they see earth rise from the moon and they pass through

this cloud of lunar dust that's hanging in the air

and then they get attacked by these crazy space pirates.

One of the biggest challenges on this sequence

I think was actually layout.

The whole sequence is driving, right?

Every shot is a different background.

To create all of this environment,

we had to basically create an environment

and then place our CG assets into that

and create a believable world that would exist

through the shots in continuity.

James Gray was really interested in making the, say,

physically plausible, scientifically accurate representation

of what it would be like to be on the moon.

We spent a huge amount of time looking

at all of the reference that we could find of the moon.

The NASA Apollo Archives were vastly helpful.

We spent hours and hours just sort of looking

at those photographs and trying to figure out

why do things look this way?

Why does the lighting work like this?

Why is there no bounce light?

What makes this look the way that it does?

The photographs from the Apollo Archives

were shot with a Hasselblad camera,

a film camera that they actually took on the moon

and had in this sort of infrared-proof housing.

They had this sort of washed out quality.

A lot of lens flares and lot of flash blacks

and a lot of sort of high contrast.

We discovered a few things like on the earth,

there's atmosphere, there's clouds,

there's things that scatter light through the air

and if you look at a mountain that's really far away,

you're gonna see sort of a lifting and a blending

of all the colors and that indicates that it's far away.

On the moon, that doesn't make sense 'cause there's no air,

there's no atmosphere, there's no sky,

it's just black, direct sunlight.

So, the cinematographer on the film had a great idea

to shoot in an infrared film sort of dual camera setup,

so they modified an Arri Alexa XT to shoot in infrared.

They took that idea and brought it out into the Dumont Dunes

in southern California and shot a bunch of really great

plates in the desert.

They actually built these fully functional

pirate rovers and lunar rovers and were actually driving

them around with stunt performers in spacesuits

in the middle of the summer heat out there.

It's pretty awesome.

Basically, the process was to take the luminance information

from the infrared camera and the color information

from the film camera and sort of align those two plates

and stitch them together to create footage

that looked kind of reminiscent of the moon.

A plate is footage that was shot on-set

of the performances of the actors,

the set that was built, stunts that might've been filmed,

all of those things that were physically captured.

This shot is a good example to demonstrate

combining the infrared and the film footage from color.

If we look at only the infrared portion,

we see sort of a black and white image,

which has dark sky and bright ground.

If we look at the film portion,

we see a color image and what we do is we align

the film footage to the infrared footage

and we take luminance from one and color from the other

and sort of stitch them together into one seamless result.

The importance of the infrared is that it sort of captures

the essence of what the moon looks like,

so the sky gets really dark and dim

and the dunes got sort of really bright

and luminescent and ethereal looking.

Many of the plates have plants.

Mind the rovers that were moving and you could see

just by looking at the terrain that it was on earth.

We knew early on that we had to create a fully believable

photo-realistic moon in CG in order to sort of extend

the backgrounds and to create a believable environment

for our heroes to be traveling through.

We scavenged all of the sources we could find

of the actual rovers driving on the moon surface

from the Apollo missions and we found this one clip

of a very excited astronaut spinning a donut

on the moon surface and and it was kicking up

these sort of C-shapes of moon dust from the back tires

and they looked really interesting and sort of bizarre.

The dust would sort of be kicked up and fly much higher

than you would expect and then would sort of trickle down

and dissipate and since we had to add dust trails

to the rovers in quite a few shots,

we built an effect simulation in Houdini

to try to recreate this effect.

You can take gravity and you can change how intense it is

and then you can take things like air resistance

and turbulence and sort of control them as you wish.

Some of the wider shots were shot

in sort of a slower frame rate to help communicate

the idea of it being lower gravity.

It's been used as a cheat since 2001 in Space Odyssey.

If you shoot slow-mo, it feels sort of slow and low gravity

and as a audience member, we're kind of used to seeing that

and I think we believe it.

We had to extend the world that they're in.

So, to do this, we rotoscoped all of the astronaut suits,

all of the pieces of the rover that we saw,

we had to create mattes for 'cause they didn't shoot

with green-screen or blue-screen,

which actually makes sense.

The lighting that they were able

to come up with on the stage worked really well

to convincingly sell the idea of it being the moon.

They had sort of one distant light source

on the stage and no fill light

so it was really harsh directional lighting.

Lighting direction was something

that we played with a lot to get pretty looking lighting

because if you look at the lighting setup here,

we have diffusion on the light that's making it soft, right?

The shadows are diffused

and that's what looks pleasing to our eye.

If you take away the atmosphere, it's just direct sunlight,

which is not the most pleasant thing to look at.

So, we really played with the lighting direction

in a lot of the shots to try to shape the surface

and bring out textural detail on the moon.

[Movie Character] Look at this.

The visors are basically these reflective surfaces

that see the whole world, so we had to basically create

that world in CG and add the reflections onto their visors.

So, it was a huge amount of work.

In addition to the camera track,

we created an object track for the visor surface,

so we had a representation of that in CG,

and then we were able to take that group

of our digi-double astronauts, the CG rover,

the match-moved visor, the camera,

and we would take all of that as a group

and put it into our CG moon world that we built

and we would basically have that group

driving along the moon surface

and then we would render the reflections of that movement.

Adjust compositing the visor reflections

was crazy challenging and that's really tricky

because those reflections were often times

over their faces as they were performing.

So, it was like recreating the faces underneath those visors

underneath the reflections on those visors

and then actually creating digital double versions

of the actors as they were performing on the rovers in CG.

It was a massively complex thing

but it came together really well in the end.

We tried all of the easy options

and none of them worked, so we really had to do it for real

and do it right to make it look good.

If one shot starts to look off,

it takes you out of the moment, right?

So, it's super, super important

for everything to be real and to look real.

[character breathing heavily]

In this part of the sequence,

they're wielding these guns called Stilettos.

Me and my team sort of imagined them

to be these sort of rail guns

that would be electromagnetically accelerating

these really heavy metal particles.

[explosions]

[Movie Character] Alpha, we need backup ASAP,

we're being ambushed!

For cinematic effect and to make the sequence

feel dangerous, we added these tracer elements

to the Stiletto bullets as they came through,

sort of like a really bright motion blurred streak

as they flew from the gun and impacted

the terrain around our heroes.

The effects is all about cheating.

If you cheat in the right way

at the right time for the right effect,

it's something that makes the movie better.

One of the things we cheated was the brightness

of the Stiletto fire.

In direct sunlight, there's no way those things

would be that bright but that's one example

of when cheated, it achieves a creative effect

and helps held the narrative.

[rover engine rumbles] [loud bang]

There's this one moment that sort of shows the aftermath

of the pirate rover's crash.

On set, they shot a stunt of that rover crashing for real.

They actually smash it into the power station

and there was this great shot of the camera

sort of sweeping past the rover as all of these

pieces are sort of exploding and we added the CG

power station in the background with all of the solar panels

and all of the pillars and added a bunch of different

layers of sort of dust and debris.

And then on top of it all,

we put our POV treatment of the visor

and it's a really cool dramatic moment.

[loud whirring] [haunting violin]

In the sequence, one of the pirate rovers

sort of collides with the hero rover and sets it into a spin

and since the moon gravity is quite low,

there is very little resistance to the spin

and very little traction.

So, there's all of these shots of the hero rover

sort of spinning and it spins out onto the crater

and then there's point-of-view shots of the spin.

The crater design was something

that we went back and forth on awhile.

We referenced several real moon craters

because there's all of these great digital elevation data

from NASA and the other open domain sources

but we ended up sort of cheating

certain things for creative effect,

like to create a really steep wall

that they could sort of spin off of.

After they spin off the crater,

they sort of escape because the pirates aren't brave enough

to follow them and they drive up the crater

onto the dark side of the moon,

so it's sort of like where the Terminator line

between day time and night time is on the moon.

At this point, they've managed to call in air support

and so there's this great shot of the missiles

that are launched from this other base

and they're sort of coming up over us

and the missiles come down.

And for the shot, Allen Maris, the client VFX supervisor,

had this really specific and great idea for the camera move.

And we are trying and trying and trying

and just couldn't get it right and ended up actually

putting tracking markers on his bedroom ceiling

and shooting it with his phone,

he shot this great reference of the camera coming down

exactly like he wanted it and we were able

to use that and sort of match it really closely.

We wanted to create something special

for the impact moment of the missiles

sort of impacting the moon surface

and sending up this debris cloud.

The effects artist who was working on this shot

found this really great reference of this science

experiment where they were trying to simulate

what a meteor impact would look like in a vacuum

and it had this really interesting behavior.

The meteor impacted and then this debris

sort of came up in this cone shape

with this core in the center and it looked really,

really interesting and fascinating

and we were able to sort of take that idea

and create a very large scale version of it.

So, we added dust and debris and rocks

and of course, this is a shot that happens

in the night time, right, so there's no light.

And so, we had this really cool idea

of sort of using the light from the explosion

to illuminate the terrain around the explosion

and sort of show the crater

and all of the tiny textures on the moon and stuff,

it's a really interesting moment in the film.

There's another scene in the film

that we worked on that occurs right after the moon battle.

So, in the sequence, no one wants to go along

on the spacewalk to the other spacecraft,

and so, Brad Pitt's character Roy McBride volunteers

to come along with the captain.

Those plates were shot on a stage using wire work,

so there were stunt performers in spacesuits.

So, for those shots, we painted out the wires.

We also built the Vesta in CG

because it was only filmed with a set piece

of the entry hatch, so that was filmed for real,

which was great because it was the set piece

that they were interacting with.

The idea in the film was that it was a scientific

research craft, we spent a lot of time looking at references

of the International Space Station,

sort of creating this modular design

of different space station pieces

that was sort of hooked together.

I think there's a common perception

about visual effects that it's glamorous

and you have tons of fun and you spend your time

creating these beautiful worlds and it's really easy.

It's not easy, it's a lot of really, really hard work.

There's so much love and care that are put into those shots.

A lot of people just don't know how much

attention to detail you have to add

in order to achieve that kind of realism.

It's a lot of very, very difficult work,

but it's fun, I like it.

I...

I think a lot of people in VFX really like what they do.

And there's so much sacrifice that you have to put

into that kind of work, you have to be a little crazy,

and you have to love it to stick with it.

I remember looking up at the sky

when I was a little kid and trying to imagine

what it would be like up there.

So, it was really fun spending a year trying to recreate

that and make it look as real as possible.