WAR EFFORT.(Technology Information)

DIGITAL PLANES, SHIPS, SMOKE, AND SAILORS CRAFTED AT ILM HELP CREATE REALISTIC WWII BATTLE SCENES IN THE MOVIE PEARL HARBOR

The movie has all the makings of a classic Hollywood epic: Set against the backdrop of America's entrance into World War II in 1941, Touchstone Pictures' Pearl Harbor is the story of two pilots and best friends (actors Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) and a Navy nurse (actress Kate Beckinsale) who loves them both. Scheduled to open on Memorial Day, the high-profile film was produced and directed by Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, who worked together on the sci-fi thriller Armageddon, and was written by Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart. Some critics describe the film as a cross between Bay's Armageddon and James Cameron's Titanic; others liken it to Steven Spielberg's WWII epic, Saving Private Ryan. Like Titanic, this love story puts a human face on devastating historical events and gives the plot the necessary creative tension. Like Saving Private Ryan, it places the audience in the midst of realistic battle scenes, although in Pearl Harbor, the war is fought with air strikes rather than ground battles. Pearl Harbor's story moves through three air battles: the Battle of Britain, which took place in the summer and fall of 1941; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following December; and Lt. Colonel James H. Doolittle's (actor Alec Baldwin) raid on Tokyo in the spring of 1942. The heart of this movie, though, is the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese airplanes bombed the military base in Hawaii (then a US territory) for one hour and 45 minutes. Approximately 100 US Navy ships were in the harbor that morning--battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and various support vessels. At the end of the massive attack, 2341 American military personnel and 54 civilians were dead, 29 Japanese planes were shot down, 12 Navy ships were sunk or beached, and 164 American aircraft were destroyed.

In the film, 290 planes fly from Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and the attack continues for 40 minutes. To help simulate this attack and the other air battle scenes in the movie, director Bay worked with effects studio Industrial light & Magic, which had helped create some of the battle scenes for Saving Private Ryan. For Pearl Harbor, ILM's effects team, led by supervisor Eric Brevig, concocted a mixture of practical and digital effects that were seamlessly blended into live-action plates to create the "invisible" effects.

At ILM one morning toward the end of production, Ben Snow, associate visual effects supervisor, brings up several shots on a "viewing station" to show the range of digital effects created for Pearl Harbor. In one, the screen is filled with digital ships; only a small area in the foreground remains from the original live-action plate shot in Hawaii. Sailors, many of whom are digital, can be seen moving around the decks and waving to people onshore. In another shot, digital sailors and stuntmen cling to the side of the capsized battleship Oklahoma. Depending on the shot, Snow explains, a ship might be a miniature, a real battleship, a 150-foot set created for the movie that was extended digitally, or all digital. Most of the airplanes are digital, but not all. In a shot from a Battle of Britain dogfight between a real plane and a digital plane, the real plane becomes digital in mid-flight. All the planes, real or not, fire CG bullets. Some of the explosions are real; more are created with a mixture of live-action shots of real fire (so-called practical elements) and CG smoke. The plane crashes are digital. Tracers hitting the water are CG. The water is both digital and real.

Some of the most spectacular effects that Snow displays take place during the Pearl Harbor attack: the camera follows the attacking Japanese planes as they fly low to the water, skirting between battleships. The air is dense with planes, all firing down on the ships. You see explosions everywhere; huge fiery smoke clouds fill the air. Sailors jump off the ships, are blown off the ships. Tracers ping the water between the ships. It seems terrifyingly real. But of course it isn't.

Plane Truth